Radorth

Where am I? Mars Hill? Hmmm. Argument from "old reason" I guess we'll call it. Is there such a thing as new B.S. though? Well OK. I always thought Russell a bit pedantic anyway. The guy was obviously way ahead of his time but now we can safely presume to ignore him. He's dead you know.

Well OK. And an atheist who could not bring himself to reject the nascent Gospel, probably because he consciously or intuitively applied Occam's Razor. True, his disdain for religion is not much less than my own. He was a true skeptic IMO who made the most intellectually honest distinctions. He and Schonfield damn near unconverted me. (The "swoon" theory is impressive because it does not raise too many more questions than it answers)

Anyway, this Doherty guys argument is pretty good, not as gratuitous as most of the nonsense skeptics pretentiously call "evidence." There's a problem though, as I see it, in that he now has to explain this enormous and perfectly executed conspiracy.

Further he takes the most extraordinary liberties with the scripture. Here's a disgusting example. He asks

"And how could Paul, in Galatians 2:6, dismiss with such disdain those who had been the very followers of Jesus himself on earth?"

HUH? Pullease, go read Gal 2:6 and tell me he is not stretching the hell out of the English language, or any language, to decide Paul is disdaining anybody.

Nevertheless, 'tis a puzzle he has found. I'll study it more tomorrow, although I'm a little afraid to read the second half, after reading his free-wheeling and rather cynical scripture interpretations.

Radorth

[ September 05, 2002: Message edited by: Radorth ]</p>

Toto

On Will Durant - it's not just that he's old. He was a popularizer and a synthesizer, not an original researcher. He is only reflecting the consensus of other historians, who at the time he wrote, had decided that Jesus must have been historical. But history can progress. There has been some work done by historians since he wrote. It's getting rather old to hear people say, even an atheist like Will Durant thinks Jesus was historical, so he must have been, case closed.

In fact, there is a long tradition of Deists and non-Christians, like Thomas Jefferson, who revered the figure of Jesus as a historical person. They were the ones who created the story of the good Jesus whose movement was hijacked by the bad Paul. It's a nice story, but that doesn't mean it isn't a myth.

On Doherty, I'm not sure what you mean by a perfectly executed conspiracy. There was the early Christian church, which created its orthodoxy and persecuted dissenters, burned books of heretics, etc. Does that qualify as a conspiracy?

As for Galatians, 2:6 reads:

"Those who seemed to be important" who added nothing to Paul's message were the pillars of the church in Jerusalem. You don't think this sounds disdainful? These men had presumably known Jesus directly, and Paul has nothing to learn from them?

And when you go on, you read:

This is Saint Peter, the rock upon which Jesus built his church? And this upstart Paul is telling him to his face that he is wrong?

These passages create a lot for Christians to try to explain away.

Steven Carr

Galatians 2:6 'As for those who seemed to be important--whatever they were makes no difference to me; God does not judge by external appearance--those men added nothing to my message'

Radorth thinks he is important, but it is all the same to me. He adds nothing to this thread.

I hope he doesn't think I am disdaining his arguments!

Radorth

We don't have any idea who they are, so how can we follow Doherty's point?

(ED Oops I messed up. I meant to ask Steve Carr if he had a point somewhere)

You are doing just what Doherty does, taking a verse out of context and presuming it means this or that. In verse 7,8,9 Paul is suddenly admitting the apostles are all apostles after supposedly denigrating them in vs 6? And even saying God worked in Peter just as he did Paul? Vs 11 only refers to a specific incident of Peter's hypocrisy- when we don't know.

And BTW, verse 9 helps put the lie to the theory that James rejected Paul, no?

But I have some other objections, which I will post later.

Radorth

[ September 06, 2002: Message edited by: Radorth ]

[ September 06, 2002: Message edited by: Radorth ]</p>

Radorth

Doherty asserts:

"Consider another great silence: on the teachings of Jesus. The first century epistles regularly give moral maxims, sayings, admonitions, which in the Gospels are spoken by Jesus, without ever attributing them to him. The well-known "Love Your Neighbor," originally from Leviticus, is quoted in James, the Didache, and three times in Paul, yet none of them points out that Jesus had made this a centerpiece of his own teaching. Both Paul (1 Thessalonians 4:9) and the writer of 1 John even attribute such love commands to God, not Jesus!"

So what? First he says the command originates in Leviticus, then he complains that Paul is quoting God instead of Jesus!

1. God and Jesus were virtually interchangeable in their minds. They are in mine. One who does not consider Jesus to be the "express image of God" would think otherwise I suppose.

2. Jesus hardly speaks the commandemnt as though he invented it or as his own maxim. In fact he talks about them as coming from the law.

I think Dohety could have left this out and still had a case. But it tells me he worries he has not made a convincing case, and that he stretches too much.

(More)

Radorth

Doherty opines:

"Is it conceivable that Paul would not have wanted to run to the hill of Calvary, to prostrate himself on the sacred ground that bore the blood of his slain Lord? Surely he would have shared such an intense emotional experience with his readers."

Of course it's conceivable, particularly if he did not do it. Doherty clearly insinuates that the Gospel stories didn't happen because Paul didn't rush to go prostrate himself on the holy ground of their origin. Yet in the next breath he says Paul only spent a few days in Jerusalem. So when was he supposed to get this done? Maybe he would have liked to but considered it a selfish act.

Besides that, such places almost never get enshrined immediately, and particularly when enemies own the property, and were at the time looking for Christians to kill. Not to mention Paul was one busy fella, and spent a lot of time in jail. Personally I don't have the slightest wish to visit these places. People go on these pilgrimages for the emotional charge, not a spiritual one IMO.

No, Doherty's best argument is perhaps the lack of scripture quotations by Paul and the early fathers. But I read the other day we can reconstruct the entire New Testament from the writing's of the fathers except for about 20 verses. I will try to dig out the source this eve.

But I will concede for the moment I have not solved the puzzle.

Radorth

[ September 06, 2002: Message edited by: Radorth ]</p>

Radorth

Accusing Will Durant of just going with the flow is absurd. The flow has been all one direction for 110 years. Besides you haven't even bothered to argue his facts and points Toto. Should we all just take your word for it that he, a skeptic, was being anything less than intellectually honest or leaning on anything but facts?

My own approach is to use the assertions of skeptics, both for and against the historicity of the Gospels, to show that skeptics themselves disagree on the facts, or that the more honest ones are forced to concede the Gospels are as the Jewish historian Klausner jealously called Mark, "genuine history."

A skeptical historian is far more trustworthy than a liberal scholar any day, particularly one who resorts to the hyperbole Richard Carrier points out.

Radorth

Toto

You are speaking as a committed Christian who believes on faith that Jesus and God are two thirds of the same trinity. But the question here is whether there is enough historical evidence to convince a secular open minded agnostic that there was a historical person named Jesus (or something like that) who was the origin of the Christian religion.

If you look at the question from that point of view, it makes sense to interpret the evidence as showing that the "Jesus" at the center of the Christian religion" had no recent existence for Paul, but was more of a spiritual entity who was known through reading the Hebrew scriptures.

Toto

I don't charge Durant with being dishonest. As you say, the flow has gone that way for most of the last 110 years (which is not evidence of the truth of that flow, or any evidence that the tide will not turn.) Durant worked with what he had. I don't think that the historicity of Jesus was a serious question for him. But that means that his arguments were not honed by a thorough debate.

And as for the evidence - the problem is that there is very little hard evidence. The question is what inferences you can validly draw from the scraps that are there.

The only argument that I recall Durant making for the historicity of Jesus is that such a complex figure as Jesus could not have been invented in the short period between the presumed death of Jesus around 30 CE and the presumed date of the gospel according to Mark around 70 CE.

This is similar to the Christian apologist argument that there wasn't enough time for legends to develop between the death of Jesus and the writings of the gospel. I think this argument has been thoroughly demolished many times. (I recall somewhere in <a href="http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/jeff_lowder/jury/chap5.html" target="_blank">The Jury is In</a> although I don't have time to locate it now.)

But in particular -

1. We don't know that Jesus really died in 30 CE. <a href="http://www.secweb.org/bookstore/bookdetail.asp?BookID=693" target="_blank">Alvar Ellegard</a> has hypothesized that the figure of Jesus was based on the Teacher of Righteousness who lived 100 BCE.

2. In our own time, we have seen legends develop almost instantaneously.

3. The personality of Jesus in Mark appears to draw a lot of elements from the suffering savior in Isaiah, and resembles the noble hero of the Greeks. You could check out <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0300080123/InternetInfidelsA/" target="_blank">The Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark</a> by Dennis McDonald. You might not buy his entire thesis, but he does show how the figure of Jesus in Mark contains all of the elements that Greek society of the time idealized.

So I don't think that Durant has made a serious argument for the historicity of Jesus that will stand up to the negative evidence that Dogherty discusses.

CX

Watch it. It's suffering "servant". Don't make their arguments for them. The suffering servant si nto a messianic figure in Isaiah.