godfry n. glad

I should like to hear Bede's response to this....

godfry

Doctor X

Jacob:

Well . . . how can you argue against such ironclad logic?

This is simply scholars burying their heads in the sands on the banks of the River DeNile. At the risk of a "hasty generalization," methinks many scholars entered NT studies because of some "belief" in the "message" or even "truth" of the texts--whatever that means. Implicit in this is the assumption that "someone" lies beneath it all and their beliefs and conclusions will find "him."

If "he" never existed . . . it becomes fairytale completely and a colossal waste of time for many.

So the game. Forgive my ignorance, but I have yet to encounter a bona fide text that dates prior to Mk for gospels and Paul for anything else. Q exists but it exists only in later works that used it. Scholars can--legitimately--argue for "proto-" this and that, but dating them becomes very questionable.

In a way, scholars are in the priveledge possition of the philosophers in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy--if someone could actually find Junior's diary--"Today, after getting really drunk, convinced friend to 'play dead.' Unfortunately someone buried him. Had to dig him out. Still, impressive."--it would end the mystery.

Since not enough material exists to answer "the question" conclusively, scholars can speculate to their hearts content.

--J.D.

Vorkosigan

Brian Trafford, whom some of you may remember as Nomad, just confessed on XTALK that historical-critical methods cannot get you the HJ, they can only tell you about what early Christians thought.

There's another one of these ongoing discussions on XTALK following the predictable pattern, in which sensible scholar claims there are no miracles, and some people check in to say they are possible....<sigh> They can't do any discussion there, so long as they have to maintain some kind of medieval point of view on the nature of reality.

Steve Davies, the GosThomas scholar, hit on a favorite theme of mine:

• "That's right. I speak from emotion. I am absolutely fed up with the idea that all of the deliberately false statements, stories,
  letters, and so forth are morally unquestionable fabrications
  because it was, supposedly, the custom of the time to fabricate.
  I've had it. Those people are lying and if it was more common to
  lie then than now, which I rather doubt, there we are. I'm not as
  sure that making up false stories, which in English are
  termed "lies" was as accepted back then as people like to think."

It's good to hear demands that a spade be called a spade. And he added this hilarious picture of the Jesus Seminar, which gets hacked on for being too liberal:

• "Just to continue off the main subject even further, I tell of a time when I got a list of questions for discussion by the Jesus Seminar. One question was whether it was or was not a fact that Jesus rose from the dead. Well, as you can surmise by now I figured this for a no-brainer. Ahh, "No" would be the answer there.
  
  But Omigod.
  How the members of the seminar sweated and strained and wept. How the blood flowed from their knitted brows as they struggled to think of what the answer might be. More than a few said something to the effect "As historians we cannot say. It is not a question that allows for an historiographical answer." And all I could think of in reply was, well then, ask a damn biologist, why don't you? Or a coroner. This isn't rocket science here: "do the dead stay dead?"
  Yep.

You know, sooner or later they are all going to become pessimists on the whole HJ question, and mythicism and agnosticism will rule the roost. It will just take time for them to talk themselves out of a couple thousand years of historical inertia.

Vorkosigan

Ted Hoffman

Heh, heh.
Doherty has mentioned in my private correspondence with him that he had an "infamous" debate with Nomad here. I have tried locating it in the archives without success. Could you be knowing which debate that was? I would appreciate a link.

He (Doherty) can't access this forum anymore. Was he banned? I raised this issue earlier but the mods did not respond.

godfry stated
As a matter of principle, Bede does not respond to my posts (if you were referring to my post).
So I wouldnt hold my breath about it.

Peter Kirby

I recommended to the admins that they contact Earl Doherty by e-mail to help him. They may not have done so. If there is a problem, it is technical, as Doherty certainly has not been banned.

best,
Peter Kirby

Toto

The Jesus Puzzle Debate between Nomad and Doherty

Unfortunately, both Nomad's and Doherty's identities have been erased, so both show up as "guest" - but I think you can tell who is who.

There were also some peanut gallery threads in BC&A, as it was called then.

Ted Hoffman

Thanks for clarifying that Peter. And Toto for the link.

pescifish

I can't speak for the other admins, but I am not willing to email an individual who may or may not even have an IIDB user account with a question that boils down to "I'm an admin at a board in which you may or may not have interest and I'm contacting you because someone else said you said your account here didn't work..."

If Doherty is a registered user and is having problems with his account, he is welcome to contact us at iidb@infidels.org to resolve any problems. My suggestion is for you to contact Doherty during your normal communications with him and suggest he email the admins at iidb@infidels.org. If he describes the difficulty and provides us with his username, we can look into it and try to fix whatever problem he is encountering.

pescifish, Administrator

Ted Hoffman

Thanks, Pescifish.

Vinnie

I agree but if you have multiple independent attestation with a first stratum source then the independently attested datum must predate both of the sources. This would put us into pretty much "eyewitness territory" where the methodological criteria for historicity is not as stringent. But since all our sources post-date the life of Jesus by definition they can only take us back to that time period. Its a question of trying to reach eyewitness reporting. I am not saying we have much material to discuss but there is a little.

To use an example, what if I said that broadly, it is certain that Jesus spoke about the kingdom of God. How would you respond? What would be more likely on the basis of the evidence? That Jesus spoke about the KoG or that someone(s) invented the idea of Jesus speaking about the kingdom of God?

Of course this is very vague and we are left wondering what Jesus specifically talked about.

I would maintain that it is so widespread and early that the most logical conclusion is that Jesus himself spoke about the kingdom of God.

I admit that we wouldn't have much to discuss about Jesus here but lately I've come to view that only the very broadest things about Jesus can be stated with certainty (e.g. Jesus had followers (probably a few can be named with certainty), Jesus taught or spoke about the KoG, Jesus spoke in parables etc.

Well, I see you've read Vork's mistaken critique of Crossan but we have evidence of parables, miracle and sayings list at an early date. I am not saying all these go back to the Hj but that in them there is no narrative. There is also tons of evidence of indepednetly floating traditions and the synoptic gospels themselves are composed of movable pericopes. Breaking the "narrative Gospels" into units hardly seems to be a controversial practice here unless I am missing something? And that is without even gettin into form criticism.

And who chops narratives into strata? What do you mean?

Brian has basiacally the same first stratum as Meier. The Pauline corpus and nothing more. His view of the sources does not allow him to go any further than just below the Pauline stratum.

Others like myself have Thomas and Q1 overlapps (two sources) and the Pauline corpus for the first stratum. Others might add more works to this (e.g. Crossan) but I at least have more first stratum material to work with than Meier or Brian Trafford. Ergo, I have a seemingly better chance of finding out a few certainties about the HJ.

And since we have no contemporary datums from Jesus' era, by definition we are limited to a period identified as post-Jesus. What we attempt to do is identify all the earliest material we can (which if we have MA with FS material we can safely call it "eyewitness"and try to make sense of it.

Don't expect to learn too much about the historical Jesus though. Aside from the broadest datums (Jesus taught or spoke about the KoG, Jesus spoke in parables) and a few more specific ones (had a brother named James, a follower named Peter, etc) I wouldn't expect to learn too much. We would still know consideraly more about Jesus than most other people of antiquity but there is too much polemic, variation and creativity to reconstruct a precise version of Jesus like most popular HJ writers do today.

Vinnie