No Robots

Again, I have to fill in the blanks here, and assume that you mean that there was an alliance between Church authority and temporal power. This is certainly true. This alliance, however, is an effect of which Christ is the cause.

As Christianity frees itself from the alliance of Church authority and temporal power, it starts to globalize its own true nature. It's opponent now is scientism/evolutionism, and in particular mythologism.

dog-on

but much more likely, some well placed Christians.

Christianity's main opponent is itself due to the fact that it is based on a fairy tale. Nothing more, nothing less.

Toto

Chaucer needs a new hobby AND a new hobby horse.

For those who seriously want to look into the historicity of Jesus, the Jesus Project was set up a few years ago to provide the first academic, critical examination of the question of the historicity of Jesus. (There are other threads to be found through the search function.)

R. Joseph Hoffman has written some good blog posts (linked in this thread) on the question of whether it matters if Jesus existed.

Richard Carrier is due to publish a book next year on methodologies in historical Jesus research.

The issue is not so cut and dried as Chaucer makes it out to be. There is a general consensus that there was a Galilean preacher behind the Jesus described in the gospels, but there is no consensus about who exactly he was, what his message was, or how Christianity really got started. Carrier's book will reorient the field IMHO.

No Robots

But how did Christians come to be well-placed? What drove them to create the medieval world? Why would a hard man like Constantine the Great entwine his empire with the Church? Why would an ecclesiastic like Gregory the Great make himself into the general administrator of Italy? What is the spirit that animates these men? Maybe there is lust for power, but what is the source of the power that they see in and express through Christianity?

Tom Sawyer

Of course I'm making shit up. That's necessary given that there isn't data available to make a decent case about his existence one way or the other.

The question is whether or not I'm justified in making that shit up. As is often said on these boards, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, but a corollary to that is that ordinary claims require ordinary evidence. The claim that some guy said some decent things and got some followers but what he was saying was viewed as rabble-rousing by imperial authorities, so they executed him for it is a pretty banal and ordinary claim. There's nothing particularly special about it that distinguishes it from a thousand other guys in a thousand other places. That being the case, when someone says "There was this relatively ordinary guy doing relatively ordinary things", there's no reason to not assume the guy actually exists.

Now, someone came up with the Biblical accounts somehow. It makes more sense to me that they took some relatively ordinary guy and added in some extraordinary aspects to spice up the story than that they just made the whole thing up out of thin air. I might be wrong, but the former explanation seems more viable.

spin

Shouldn't that tell you to that you are wasting your time arguing the matter? With insufficient evidence you could simply be pissing into the wind. Do you have to decide any issue like this with insufficient data?

You have removed nine tenths of the tradition you are attempting to analyze. All you are doing is shaping the data, by removing that which you don't like. Arbitrary procedures have arbitrary results.

It should make more sense to start from the evidence available, not your bowdlerized form of it. In telling tradition stories, those stories need glue for them to stick together.

You might take the story of Zeus and Leda, then extract the bits that you don't like and you have some fellow who seduces some woman, which is all ordinary, so will you conclude that there was historical kernel to the Zeus/Leda story? How about Jason and the Argonauts? We end up with a sea voyage by a group of sailors who had some strange experiences before they ended up at Colchis where they fought some weird dudes and Jason ended up whizzing off Medea? Hey, that sounds pretty reasonable. In fact you can get any story and do the same thing you have and get the same results. It is simply a meaningless act that doesn't help you in any way.


spin

Sea

Agreed. A historical Jesus plus legendary development is the most simple naturalistic explanation for Christian belief.

The burden of proof is on mythicists to convince mainstream historians the evidence better supports a fully mythical Jesus. Until then, it is perfectly reasonable for anyone to believe in a historical Jesus by default. Not every claim which might have merit requires a thorough personal examination before it's ok to think otherwise. Same skeptical principle that makes it reasonable to reject 'alternative' medical treatments out of hand.

spin

About the same way as Muslims got to be well-placed early on. Some groups by the luck of the draw will succeed.

Why did Aurelian try to foist his Sol Invictus on the army? Why was Julian attempting to foist his pagan religion on his empire? Why did Constantius II attempt to foist Arianism on his empire?

The same sort of spirit that saw Xerxes I try to impose his god of heaven upon his empire. All you need do is look at other successful religions to answer your questions.

there was an alliance between [religious] authority and temporal power. This is certainly true. This alliance, however, is an effect of which Allah is the cause.

there was an alliance between [religious] authority and temporal power. This is certainly true. This alliance, however, is an effect of which Yahweh is the cause.

there was an alliance between [religious] authority and temporal power. This is certainly true. This alliance, however, is an effect of which Ormazd is the cause.

spin

JoeWallack

JW:
We've had polls here Ad Nazorean on HJ/MJ and they consistently show a strong minority of Skeptics are HJ. I'm one of them. I do doubt the crucifixion though:

Was Paul the First to Assert that Jesus was Crucified?

I accept that Papias is evidence for HJ but note that he is interested in Jesus' life and not Jesus' death (same as Q). As far as I know he never mentions the crucifixion and neither do Peter and James based on Paul. If you think the crucifixion is a historical fact than your time would be better spent critiquing it than the lack of HJ here.



Joseph

http://www.errancywiki.com/index.php/Main_Page

Tom Sawyer

Yes, they do have these arbitrary results and the data is insufficient. However, it's not a great concern of mine whether or not Jesus was entirely fictional or somewhat based on a true story anymore than it's a concern of mine whether or not there was once a guy named Herakles who's deeds got blown out of proportion in the retelling of them. Similarly, some guy named Jason may have travelled around the Aegean Sea and the stories about him got embellished.

Roman and Greek societies had a habit of deifying people. Some, like Julius Caesar and Alexander, deserved it and have reams of documentation backing up their well-established claims to divinity (I mean, seriously, have you read about those guys' lives? That's what gods among men look like). Others who were relative nobodies outside of their immediate circle wouldn't have much in the way of documentation until after the fact.

Given that people tend to embellish the stories of people they admired or who's lives they want to exploit for political purposes and that the society this was taking place in had a history of deifying its important figures, it makes more sense to me that something of that sort happened and they built the extraordinary parts off of the ordinary things some guy was doing as opposed to someone just pulling the whole thing out of his ass.

Naturally, it's all just baseless supposition since there's no confirmatory or disconfirmatory data available. However, an embellished story about a real guy seems a simpler explanation to me than a wholely fictional story does, so I'm going to stick with that.