ApostateAbe

To give a specific example, there is somebody on Debate.org who is debating me right now on the historical significance of the imminent doomsday prophecies of Jesus in the synoptic gospels. He claims:

"I will prove that... The apocalypse may or may not occur. In fact, the apocalypse is nothing more than a metaphor used by Jesus to symbolize some sort of retribution that those who are not righteous, in order to set forth a sense of divine justice."

His arguments are struck down using good historiographical methodology, or even just a layperson's critical thinking, for that matter.

dogsgod

You accuse Earl Doherty of using a strategy and then offer up an unrelated argument from another poster on another forum to support your silly notion. You're embarrassing yourself and you don't even realize it.

I'm not defending Earl, he's quite capable, I am just pointing out your commitment to red herrings and straw man fallacies.

ApostateAbe

OK, maybe I should explain myself further? I think a lot of people don't realize just how common and easy it is to justify any historical theory, especially concerning religious texts, by proposing spiritual/metaphorical interpretations for all passages that would seem to contradict the theory in question. Earl Doherty does it, but it is not at all an unusual type of argument, and the popular debates about the Bible are full of them. Earl Doherty rightly pointed out that he dodges the fallacy of proposing interpolations for any evidence that would disagree with him, but it is at the severe cost of proposing bizarre but convenient interpretations of the textual evidence, including interpretations of spirituality/metaphors, which is always an option for any evidence that would otherwise speak of an inconvenient objective fact.

Almost nobody but Earl Doherty thinks, for example, that Jesus's "days of his flesh" (Hebrews 5:7) has any plausible interpretation except for a reference to the human existence of Jesus, because that is the obvious prima facie way to go about making sense of it. And there is good reason for that--it very much fits the known context of theological beliefs, because the proto-orthodox Christian myth that we know about has Jesus as both a human on Earth and a divine figure in heaven. Earl Doherty, on the other hand, proposes that there was a sublunar realm of heaven that was very much like the surface of the Earth except that it is pretty much invisible in the sky and people could be born from women and have flesh.

Examples help to illustrate the fallacies of such arguments, though of course it is easy to take such comparisons as offensive or just the wrong way.

Toto

The idea that there are interpolations in Christian texts is a fact, not fallacy.
There is nothing bizarre about the idea that Christians and other religious writers of the era thought in terms of metaphors and allegorical interpretations. Have you read Philo?

And you are not willing to look beyond the thinking of those who won the war between Christian factions?

Where exactly did you demonstrate the fallacy of this argument? You came up with a rule that the simplest obvious interpretation is to be accepted, but the only people who seem to believe in this rule are Christians who don't want their Sunday school beliefs to be challenged.

ApostateAbe

"Where exactly did you demonstrate the fallacy of this argument? You came up with a rule that the simplest obvious interpretation is to be accepted, but the only people who seem to believe in this rule are Christians who don't want their Sunday school beliefs to be challenged."

Yeah, there is a "golden rule of interpretation" that I have brought up before a few times, and it really was developed by the Biblicist camp. Paraphrased: If plain sense makes good sense, then seek no other sense or it will result in nonsense. I think the rule is generally accepted even more so by critical scholars than for Biblicists. For example, when reading that "this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened," the critical scholars will take "this generation" as a literal statement--the author of the gospel of Mark meant Jesus's own generation, the same as almost every other Greek-writer of the time who used the word. It wasn't metaphorical--it was the plain use of the word, "generation," to describe the people living at the same time. Biblicist Christians, on the other hand, who may claim the same golden rule--they actually don't accept it in practice, and they will interpret their scriptures literally only as far as it doesn't make the acceptance of beliefs seem too ridiculous or contradictory.

The camp that tends to not accept the rule would be the liberal Christian thinkers, who will shamelessly accept any given passage as merely metaphorical, because of course their general outlook is very much at odds with the literal interpretation of the Bible.

I don't think we should judge a sensible rule of interpretation as not-so-sensible just because there are people we don't like who also share it. It is a rule that we implicitly accept when reading just about anything.

Toto

Except that we don't, once we get beyond Sunday school.

Unless you think that literary critics are all wasting their time analyzing literature.

ApostateAbe

If literary critics don't accept it, then, yeah, I really do think they would be wasting their time, or at least they would be wasting the reader's time. There are a huge multiplicity of bizarre interpretations that come out of imaginatively interpreting literary fictional texts, and you know that only a narrow subset of them has any probabilistic advantage. They can find the probable interpretation, at least in part, by applying that rule.

aa5874

HJ Scholars are arguing against the written evidence for the Jesus of Faith found in the Existing NT Codices.

It is the written evidence in the NT Canon that Scholars do not agree with.

The existing Codices of the NT claim Jesus was the Child of a Ghost, the Word that was God and the Creator of heaven and earth, that walked on water, transfigured, resurrected and ascended.

These descriptions of Jesus and events did NOT originate with MJers they are found in Matthew 1.18, Luke 1.35, John 1, Mark 6.49, Mark 9.2, Mark 16.6, Acts 1.9, Galatians 1 and 1 Corinthians 15 of most or all existing Codices of the NT Canon.

Even if there was NOT a single MJer in existence, HJ Scholars must still argue against the description of Jesus and events found in the existing Codices.

But HJ Scholars have a rather serious problem, they claim the existing Codices of the NT do NOT contain reliable historical information about Jesus but still use the very UNRELIABLE source for history.

It logically follows that their HJ is also NOT historically reliable or unsubstantiated.

sweetpea7

Has anyone ever invited Bart Ehrman to join the discussions here re: HJ or MJ?

ApostateAbe

He is employed as a full-time university instructor, and he fills his spare time with books, tours, media appearances, articles, lectures and live debates. If he has time left after that, then I am sure he would be happy to spend it debating the historical Jesus on an Internet forum. I figure he already told his two children to go fuck themselves a long time ago.