Vinnie

I thought Wells changed his stance?


Vinnie

Radcliffe Emerson

Quite correct. And when the Jesus Seminar did an independent study of the NT with no Christian bias and came to the conclusion the miracle stories, resurrection and virgin birth are myth, but the human Jesus probably existed (with fairly good evidence in their books to back it up, in my opinion), everyone else in the biblical/critical world blasted them as not being good scholars.

[ July 12, 2002: Message edited by: Radcliffe Emerson ]</p>

Toto

RyanS2: I didn't mean to derail this thread to talk about the Atkins diet. I only wanted to refer to the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/07/magazine/07FAT.html" target="_blank">NYTimes</a> account of mainstream scientists who dismissed the diet and refused to even investigate it, who now must admit that there is no science supporting a low fat diet and that there may be some basis for the Atkins diet.

Vinnie: Wells, I believe, now takes the position that there was a basis for Jesus in someone who lived around 100 BC, but that this person had no connection to Paul's dying and rising savior. You can read Peter Kirby's summary <a href="http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/theories.html#wells" target="_blank">here</a>.

Radcliffe: I do not recall that the Jesus Seminar investigated the issue of whether there was a historical Jesus. I think they confined themselves to a textual analysis of the Gospels, assuming that there was a person behind the Gospels, and sorted out which statements were most probably from this person.

Vinnie

100 bc? Kirby says that "in his latest books, Wells allows that such a complex of tradition as we have in the synoptic gospels could not have developed so quickly (by the end of the first century) without some historical basis; and so some elements ascribed there to the life of Jesus presumably derive ultimately from the life of a first century Galilean preacher.

Vinnie

Peter Kirby

Please note the two paragraphs now written on Wells were supplied by Wells himself by letter.

IntenSity writes: So we are all born knowing that there is a God and he loves us? What happened to the "tabla rassa?" that Kant, Hegel and Descartes talked about?. I thought theism is conditioned, NOT inborn. Care to elaborate Kirby?

Just so there is no confusion, I said that some say that we are all born atheist. And this could be true with the right definition of atheist. If 'atheist' is 'one who lacks belief in a god or gods', then the newborn child who has not yet been indoctrinated is indeed an atheist.

Unless, of course, you are Plato...

best,
Peter Kirby

Toto

I have not read Wells, but I have read Ellegård, who does hold that Jesus derived from a Teacher of Righteousness who lived about 100 BC.

This is from a 1999 essay by Wells that is online:

{emphasis added}

RyanS2

Thanks Toto. I can understand you didn't want to derail the thread, but there has been some discussion of it amongst dieticians. You are correct in that most just say, "It's garbage" and that's about as far as it goes. Dr. Sears and his "Zone" diet are also high-fat/low carb diets, but not as low as the Atkins diet is, which is on the more extreme side. Dr. Sears even won a Nobel Prize for it if I'm not mistaken. On the same token, there's also little evidence that dietary cholestorol affects blood level cholesterol, yet dieticians, historians, scientists, etc., tend to be conservative because if you go against popular wisdom, you have to be prepared to be labeled a loon.

Now I'm lost in the thread, but another person mentioned that the level of scholarship is to be done by the works, and not by the degree. I agree completely. It helps though to have an accredited historian or whomever, such as Richard Carrier. In fact, when I read through Holding's website, he mentions Carrier as a "professional historian" who doesn't believe in the Christ-myth. In his latest article, Carrier's conclusion is highly sympathetic to the Christ-myth.

Tercel

Intensity,
Your original question hangs largely on what constitutes a Scholar. If you simply mean a person who has a PHD, or who writes articles on the subject, then I would imagine there are many refutations out there. Do even Apologists count as Scholars?

But when you say "serious Scholars", I am inclined to think of someone with many years of experience, who teaches on the subject at a recognised instituation, who has published countless papers and articles in the field, who has a list of credentials as long as your arm, and who is one of the recognised leaders of the field by other writers.
Now however good people like Carrier, Kirby, Doherty, Wells, Archaya, McDowell, Holding etc might be at presenting arguments or discussing this sort of thing, they are not this kind of level of scholar.

Berean summed up the situation well: You won't find many arguments against the Christ-myth idea from "serious scholars", largely because mainstream NT scholars consider the idea of no real merit and ignore it.
Or CX's: Almost unianimously the academic community does not take christ mythicism seriously enough to merit a repsonse.

And frankly, that is the state of affairs. As has been pointed out, many such good scholars are atheists, it is not Christian bias that is causing this.

Anyway, perhaps the best you might find is Meier's treatment in A Marginal Jew volume 1. If I recall correctly he actually mentions the Jesus myth hypothesis (before shortly dismissing it).

Michael Ledo

The best book I found on the Jesus myth is "The Jesus Mysteries" by Freke and Gandy.

rodahi

I think the debate over the historicity of the NT Jesus is serious enough to warrant my offering of the following commentary by an agnostic, secular historian. He makes several pertinent observations and raises numerous serious issues:

“When we consider the mythological theories as a whole, problems start up on all sides. If Jesus was a god, how was it that the Christians, even Paul himself, did not regard him as one, and why this parody of humanity with which they unanimously clothe their myth?...Moreover, the Christianity of the gospel is not an independent religion; it worships the god of Israel. Why, then, should it have created for itself another divinity, and then proceeded to conceal him, for he never appears as such? If the god Jesus is an aspect of Jahweh, why is this great truth never even hinted at? It is suggested that we are in the presence of a Mystery, in which secrecy is the rule. But the God of the Christian cult dies openly, at the hands of the Roman authorities, after a public trial; this has nothing in common with a Mystery, or anything like it. If the legend of the god is purely imaginary, divorced from all foundation in fact, it is strange that it should have been left so full of gaps and inconsistencies, that is should have been encumbered with the details of a common human existence, which serves no useful purpose, and are even shocking. Why take the trouble to speak of the brothers and sisters of the god, and even give their names? Why represent the family as believing him ‘beside himself’? Why show him exhibiting anger and grief, and weeping over himself and others? Why cause him to reject the designation of himself and good and proclaim that God alone is good? Why should he, who has come down to proclaim and to bring about salvation, declare that he does not know when the great day, his own day, from the Pauline point of view, will come? And why is his last cry, at the very moment of his consummation of the divine mystery, one of despair (‘My God, why hast thou forsaken me?’) To explain all this as an attempt at verisimilitude, is surely to attribute an incredible amount of method and consistency to men who are, in other respects, so conspicuously lacing in either. How are we to reconcile this with so much vagueness and ambiguity in the teaching, so that even today the exact meaning is sometimes doubtful? Above all, why did those who created the myth , place their hero of it in their own time, instead of, in accordance with the universal practice of religions, seeking to avail themselves of the enormous prestige of antiquity?” Charles Guignebert, The Life of Jesus, pp. 72-73.

I have no idea whether the NT narratives depict an historical person, but I do think the anonymous narrative attributed to Mark tells the story of a HUMAN Jesus. Mark's Jesus is not a pleasant fellow to be around. Would someone CREATE a story about an imaginary Jewish peasant and attribute to him such negative characteristics? If so, why?