Jerry Smith

First, to the moderators: Muad'Dib shut down the thread that I am referring to (<a href="http://iidb.org/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=51&t=000053" target="_blank">Turning the Christian hermeneutic on its head</a>) because of an excess of vitriol there. I do not wish to start another round of it here. Much of the flaming there centered on the relative credentials of the two principles, M & A -- here I would like to start off by letting everybody in on the fact that I have NO credentials, nor any claim to priority: Perhaps M & A can vent their wrath on me. I won't mind.

Let me first note that there were some very interesting ideas presented on the original thread, and some very good arguments.

As a disclaimer (and for my own self-protection), I must state that I was 'rooting for' Apikorus in this thread, because his position supports mine - atheist. Now, why did I disclaim this?

Because I understand the frustration that Metacrock experienced there! From what I read, he had one main contention, that the Christian hermeneutic was more valid than the quasi-model offered by Apikorus as an anologous counter-argument. His contention was based on the fact that the Christian claims of specific messianic references in the OT/Hebrew Bible was not original to Christians or created for the purpose of validating Jesus' messianic claim. I think that Metacrock saw Apikorus' analogy as a suggestion that the claims of specific messianic references of the OT/HB were in fact ad hoc and contrived to suit the Christian program. I don't actually think that this was the message of that analogy, but I will get to that later.

As soon as Metacrock began making his argument (which has some validity for his purpose), Apikorus and others began attacking his credentials, rather than his arguments. The peeing war had begun. This is unfortunate.

I would have liked for Apikorus to respond by clarifying the purpose of his analogy (which I believe to be a legitimate attack on the method of choosing certain messianic passages and looking for similarities with Jesus).

He might have argued that before he began writing his satire, some (not all) of his citations from the HB were construed as archetypical (or typological) of the prideful aspirant that is condemned by god, and should be considered an enemy of god's people. By this argument, Apikorus could maintain that his analogy is as legitimate as the Christian hermeneutic.

Metacrock may then have countered, and Apikorus may then have re-countered. The outcome might have been interesting.

Instead the topic degenerated into a flame war (thanks to several persons present, not to single out the principals on the thread). Its my belief that scholarly credentials should not be considered in an internet discussion for a number of reasons:

1) an argument and the strength of the evidence for it can speak for themselves.

2) Whether we use our real names or not, divulge real personal information or not, we are all for practical purposes, posting anynomously on these boards. As such, we all start with ZERO credibility, and only gain some amount by the strength of our arguments.

3) A peeing contest about who is smart and who is a moron, who is educated and who is a couch potato, is at best a distraction.

I would like to see Meta & Apikorus go head on in the formal debates forum --- and leave behind the issue of credentials.

bgponder

Hooray for Jerry Smith!!

I second the motion for the quite learned and educational discussion to continue!!

To any and All:
I was just about to ask an open question--it seems as if BC&A is more volatile than EoG!! Why? The past few days have been the first times I have even lurked since I found Infidels. Is it always this way? Seems strange for some of the sharpest people in the forums to blow up in here, rather than say, MF&P--that would seem to me to be more likely to provoke personal stuff. Have I just not been here long enough?

<img src="graemlins/notworthy.gif" border="0" alt="[Not Worthy]" /> Paul Atreides, I don't envy you and your mod buds--

Peace, cbd Barry

-DM-

If you read back through the various threads that Metacrock was involved in, you will soon realize that he was often the one who first engaged in vitriol. He seems to feel that no one here is as well qualified as he is to comment on the subject matter which he comments on. He could be correct about the qualifications, at least in a technical sense, but that doesn't make him correct in what he says.

Muad'Dib

Actually, you have by a stroke of luck hit upon this forum's most volatile period in recent history. I have taken more nontrivial action (i.e., other than moving threads into different forums) in the past five days than I had taken in the past five months combined.

Usually things are pretty mild around here, at least relative to Political Discussions and Evo/Cre.

Nomad

As the original thread has been closed, and Apikorus and James Still chose to reply to my posts, I will do so here.


Hmm… I see you did not really respond to anything I wrote. On the other hand, the numbers 100 BC and 100 AD do offer a two hundred year spread. Given the working assumption that Messiahs were a “dime a dozen” back in those days, it should provide us with plenty of examples to choose from. Sadly, it would seem, for those that can’t seem to tell their Messiah’s without a program, there was a grand total of one during this 200 year time frame, and I am open to whatever evidence one wishes to put forward for his or her claim to the contrary.

One final point, but I did not choose the range because of a fondness for multiples of ten Apikorus, and as you participated in the thread offered by both of us, you should know that. I guess you just could not resist trying to take yet another cheap shot eh?

Alright, you have moved the date range to 63 BC to 135 AD (and in so doing I assume you accept that there were no early 1st Century BC messiahs). The latter date is required, of course, if you wish to include Kokhba, but as his movement died with him, then it should not be hard to tell the difference between his claim and that of Jesus. Further, you also know that of all the names on your list below, only Jesus of Nazareth and Kokhba actually had followers that said their man was THE Messiah. As for Simon Magus, the only reliable text we have for him is Acts 8:9-24 (and even then we don’t really know all that much, and he certainly never claimed to be more than a magician, assuming, of course, that we use a plain reading of the text, right Apikorus? ). In any case, as I said previously, if people are willing to grant sufficient historicity to Acts regarding Simon, then I hope that they will do the same when considering the much more detailed claims offered for Jesus of Nazareth in the entire Luke/Acts work.

I think I will have to agree to refer those interested to the old thread. You have managed to dig up every name you could think of (except for Eddie Murphy and Richard Nixon I suppose ), of course, and such is your right, but for those that cannot tell the difference between the claims (as well as the supporting evidence for those claims) for Jesus of Nazareth, and the rest on the list, there is very little to discuss. Quite simply, one must be very willing to engage in anachronistic readings into history, and to use Christian terminology to support their arguments for most of these characters. One must also take a very liberal interpretation of the scraps of textual evidence available to us (see the example of Simon Magus above) in order to draw any kind of conclusion at all about these individuals. Perhaps a better question to ask would be: Did any of these men, or their followers think of their hero as the Messiah (as opposed, say, to “a” messiah, or anointed one of God, which could be just about anyone) most would not have agreed to such a designation (though some may have hoped that one day... )? What we have in the case of Jesus is no ambiguity at all as to the claims of His followers, and the amount of evidence that survives to this day in support of their beliefs (the truth of those beliefs is another matter, of course). The point is to insure that one does not delude him or herself into believing that any of the named individuals have even remotely similar levels of evidentiary support for any messianic claims made by, or on behalf of, them. Of these, only Kohkba has significant supporting evidence that he was considered to be the Messiah for a time.

As to the remainder of my original post, Apikorus chose not to address it, so I will let it stand as the last word.

Nomad

Nomad

All I am going to say here is that for your hypothesis to work, you must limit yourself to a specific group of scholars, the vast majority of whom will reject Christianity in toto, or at the very least, reject Christian teachings as to proper Biblical interpretation. Have thus stacked the deck it should be no surprise that your statement appears to be true. On the other hand, if I gathered a group of Mormon scholars, I would not be surprised to see that they agree that the LDS Church has the best understanding of Scripture. Your argument is circular James, and it is unfortunate that you do not see that.

Perhaps it would be better to understand who you think is a scholar. After all, if your definition includes only those that reject Christian hermeneutics (as appears to be the case here), then I will grant that the consensus amongst such individuals is that Christians do not really know what they are talking about when they read their own sacred documents. As I said previously, however, this is not really a surprise, and had they decided that Christians did know what they were talking about in Biblical exegesis, then that really would be news.

Very quickly, is an impartial observer, by definition either a Christian, or at least one who rejects Christian hermeneutics? If the answer is yes, then I fail to see why you think that this circular reasoning is somehow useful.

No problem. Though this is why I linked to my debate with Ron Price and Mark Goodacre on Xtalk, as that offered the full extent of my argument. I did not think it worthwhile to reproduce such an extended discussion here.

But the Septuagint was written by Jews, so it was Jews who used PARTHENOS in Isaiah 7:14, long before Christians got ahold of this text. To fault Christians for a reading that was originally created by Jewish interpretation of their own older Hebrew texts is hardly reasonable. At the same time, the fact that after Christians like Matthew offered this exegesis of Isaiah 7:14, the rabbis changed the Greek translation. The fact that they did this, and no sceptic I am familiar with has ever called this fact to attention has always puzzled me. After all, the polemical and theological motivation to change the actual wording of Isaiah is obvious. Yet sceptics continue to parrot the post-Christian Jewish line as if it were the only honest reading of the text.

Well, I think even the Hebrew is debatable, but will set that aside. In the 1st Century AD the LXX was accepted as Scripture by most Jews living outside of Palestine, and a good number that lived inside Palestine. After Christians began using it as well, and Christianity grew, the rabbis turned around and rejected its authority, but then only after their failure to rewrite the parts that proved problematic in combating Christian theology.

In a later reply to me (January 25 at 12:05AM, found on page two of the original discussion), Apikorus told me that "(7) Absolutely none of the "evil Jesus" prophecies I cited came from Jews for Judaism or any other Jewish countermissionary source. Most came from some wacky apostate anti-Christian web pages - unfortunately I never saved the URL. And some material is original!". That is his right, but I would have preferred a source(s). Wacky apostate anti-Christian web pages hardly inspires confidence. Unfortunately, as Apikorus says, he has lost the links.

I linked to this discussion previously, but will offer it again.

The debate was with Ron Price, Mahlon Smith, Mark Goodacre and myself. It was pretty far ranging, but you can find it starting with <a href="http://groups.yahoo.com/group/crosstalk2/message/8796" target="_blank">The Infancy Narratives</a>, and later became Luke’s knowledge of Matthew.

I don’t know if this particular discussion has any further to go. I offered the above post, as well as that to Apikorus to make certain my points were clear. I suspect that we are now about ready to wrap up, and unless any new evidence or arguments is presented, I will let them have the last word in this discussion.

Nomad

[ January 30, 2002: Message edited by: Nomad ]</p>

Apikorus

Nomad, some thoughts regarding your recent post:

(1) You stated that you wanted to avoid rehashing the old argument regarding the uniqueness of Jesus' messianic claims, yet that is exactly what you are now doing.

(2) As Peter Kirby noted, we have Mark 13:6,21-22 explicitly stating that "false messiahs" will appear. It seems quite plausible that these false messiahs were known to the author of GMk, having appeared between the time of Jesus and the writing of GMk (ca. 70 CE).

(3) Regarding Simon Magus, both the Clementine Homilies as well as the Acts of Peter and Paul refer to this first century figure as a would-be messiah. While these texts certainly are later than the canonical gospels, their provenance is debated. The pseudo-Clementines, for example, may be as early as the early third century. The material they draw on may be older still.

(4) If you do advocate utterly rejecting the historicity of any third century text dealing with the first century, would you also deem what is written in Genesis about Abraham to be historically worthless? Is the story of the exodus to be taken seriously?

(5) One obvious difference between Jesus and Simon Magus is that the NT as well as extracanonical literature such as the pseudo-Clementines were written by followers of Jesus, and not followers of Simon Magus. Therefore, one has just cause to be more skeptical of their claims for Jesus than their claims for Simon. Even so, I would not accept Justin Martyr e.g. as literally factual when he writes that Simon did "mighty acts of magic, by virtue of the art of devils operating in him." Conversely, I do not summarily dismiss the NT as entirely nonhistorical.

(6) Again, I would encourage interested lurkers to read the original thread, <a href="http://iidb.org/ubb/ultimatebb.php?ubb=get_topic&f=6&t=000800&p=" target="_blank">You Can't Tell Your Messiahs Without A Program!</a> in its entirety.

(7) Regarding the LXX of Isa 7:14, I quoted at length from Raymond Brown in a post to Metacrock <a href="http://iidb.org/ubb/ultimatebb.php?ubb=get_topic&f=51&t=000053&p=1" target="_blank">on this page</a>. Brown states that Heb. almah is "young woman" and would normally be rendered Gr. neanis, as it is in the rabbinic recensions. Cross and others emphasize that the LXX of Isaiah is among the poorest translations of all the books of the Hebrew Bible. Brown also points out that the translator of the LXX Isaiah "may simply have been saying that `a woman who is now a virgin will (by natural means, once she is united with her husband) conceive the child Emmanuel.'"

(8) You harp incessantly about "conclusory statements". As I read a fair amount of history, I was concerned that this perhaps was an element of scholarly parlance which had eluded me, so I did a web search, only to find it appearing in thousands of legal briefs. Apparently you work in the legal profession. I'd suggest, Nomad, that historians make "conclusory statements" with great regularity. History is not Law, and good lawyering can be bad history. Oftentimes the best one can do is to present hypotheses which are informed by a severely limited material and documentary record. At any rate, these fora are not peer reviewed journals; few statements here will be meticulously referenced. Nevertheless, I have often provided references to major scholars and their works.

[ January 30, 2002: Message edited by: Apikorus ]</p>

James Still

<strong>Nomad wrote in reply: "All I am going to say here is that for your hypothesis to work, you must limit yourself to a specific group of scholars, the vast majority of whom will reject Christianity in toto, or at the very least, reject Christian teachings as to proper Biblical interpretation. Have thus stacked the deck it should be no surprise that your statement appears to be true. On the other hand, if I gathered a group of Mormon scholars, I would not be surprised to see that they agree that the LDS Church has the best understanding of Scripture. Your argument is circular James, and it is unfortunate that you do not see that.</strong>

I was not arbitrarily excluding (or including) a set of scholars as those who reject Christian teaching. Far from it the set of scholars I am thinking of is composed primarily of Christians with nonbelievers being distinctly in the minority, which is common in biblical scholarship. Whom do I consider to be a bible scholar? Any person who has formally studied the primary language(s) of the texts and has published his or her research in peer-reviewed journals. Among such scholars it is common knowledge that prefigurement is a post-Easter apologetic and not something that is literally true. I found a great web resource written by a professor that is both fair and balanced. He explains in simple terms what NT writers were doing:

This paragraph sums up the current consensus in NT studies. (Not that you do) but to believe that Jesus' ministry is literally prefigured or mentioned in the Hebrew Scriptures is to hold a fundamentalist minority view. That's the only point I'm making here.

Regarding Isaiah 7:14 I couldn't add anything better to what Apikorus wrote.

As for issues of borrowing, let me be clear and say that the only thing that really bothers me in forums is when someone steals someone else's words and intentionally passes them off as his own. That's not fair to the original author and it is lazy and dishonest on the part of the borrower. For the record, I have never seen anyone here do that.

Edited to fix broken markup tag.

[ January 30, 2002: Message edited by: James Still ]</p>

Nomad

So much for wrapping up this discussion...

Well, I wanted to make my final position clear enough for the readers, then was content to let them pursue the original Messiah thread as they wished. Obviously if they have questions, they can ask any of the participants either here or via emails.

Since GMark was more probably written in the 50's to early 60's (I know, another debate) I do not know why you have insisted on the later dating, but no matter. Plausibility does not equal most probable, and the statement from Mark 13 is too vague to indicate that specific known messiah figures were on Mark's mind when he wrote it. A simpler proposal is to say that he is simply recording a genuine saying of Jesus. I have argued this extensively elsewhere, so will not go further than that, unless you wish it.

Before we mix up too many issues at one time, let me pause you here. First, provenance of a document written 200+ years after the fact has little or no bearing on probable historicity (assuming that by provenance, you mean place of origin). Second, I do not know of any scholar that argues that the Clemtines or the Acts of Peter and Paul sheds any unique or new insights on the historical Jesus, let alone the historicity of Simon Magus or his actions. To appeal to them is laughable, and this is why I thought Peter was joking when he cited them, though he claimed he was not. I would challenge him to take such a hypothesis to a scholarly review.

They may also be as late as the 4th Century. No matter. They do not give us any new or unique information about Jesus or Simon that can be identified as coming from an earlier and hopefully more reliable source. This is why they are rejected.

Give me an example please. This way we will have more than assertions to work with in this discussion. What older sources do you see standing behind these texts, and how have you identified that these sources came from the 1st Century (excepting the Canonical Gospels, as these are certainly 1st Century).

I do not reject the historicity of late documents automatically. I compare them against what we have from known earlier sources, however, and see how well they stack up. I also look for independent attestation from other extra-Biblical sources, preferably from the 1st Century as well to decide the historicity of the claims being made. As for what I think about Abraham, that too is a separate discussion. One can reject or accept the historicity of Jesus of Nazareth without reference to Abraham.

Yes, though I would not push this point too hard, as the historical evidence for it is pretty weak. I hope you are not intending to trivialize the debate over the Exodus, BTW, and I do not think that you are. But in your hastiness, you do give that appearance.

Agreed, but in the case of Jesus we have independent sources from non-Christians, specifically Josephus and Tacitus. In the case of Simon, we have nothing beyond Acts that can be dated to within a 100 years of his death.

This is cool. J.P. Meier once commented rather dryly that the interest of 2nd Century and later writers in a character mentioned in the NT, as well as their willingness to speculate about this character, seemed to grow in inverse proportion to how much the Bible actually *said* about this person. Since Simon clearly falls into the catagory of "the Bible didn't say much" the Early Fathers and others did appear to have a field day speculating about him.

Agreed. These boards do appear to move around a lot, so the need to repost the links seems to be required as well.

In my own debate on XTalk I noted that Brown tells us:

"There was nothing in the OT (including the Hebrew and the Greek of Isa 7:14) that would have suggested the obstacle of a virgin who was not to have marital relations with her husband… Here I would stress that it (the idea of the virgin conception) was not the creation of either Matthew or Luke, but seems to have come to them both from a pre-Gospel tradition."
(R. Brown, Birth of the Messiah, pg. 161).

I rarely argue the Hebrew text of Isaiah 7:14, and though I disagree with Brown's categorical statement regarding the LXX, I do take it as a caution against pressing the issue. In my opinion, what I find most interesting is the uncritical nature most sceptics take of this argument, simply saying "almah" does not mean "virgin" (though it sometimes does), and ignoring the fact that Matt and Luke both use the same word as did the LXX, PARTHENOS, and this word certainly does mean virgin at least as often as not.

Given Mahlon Smith's comment that Matthew's understanding of the text could have been well enough known to even be "assumed" by another writer (like Luke) tells me that the Jewish understanding of this Greek text c. 1st Century AD may well have been far more nuanced than is that of later rabbinical literature. One need not agree with Smith to appreciate the implications of his hypothesis.

Time to stop again. I do not work in the legal profession. What I find troubling is the willingness of historians to simply make a claim, then refuse to support it in any great depth. You have done that in this, and the previous thread, even going so far as to equate Christian exegesis and hermeneutics with the most ludicrous and wing nut belief systems out there. It is your right to do this, but it is still weak argumentation, and simply because it plays well to the crowd here, one should not take that as evidence that a strong presentation has, in fact, been made.

Sadly, yes they do, and sometimes it helps us break through to a new idea that never occured to anyone previously. More often than not, however, it simply takes us down yet another blind alley as one weak suppostion is built upon another until at the end of the day we have an elaborately constructed house of cards, wonderous to behold, but really telling us nothing interesting.

I agree with what you have said here Apikorus. The problem remains when the person making the assertions presents their case in such a manner that it appears to be far more certain than it actually is. A more nuanced approach is typically more appropriate than the radical assertion, and though it may not be sexy, nor sell many books, it is likely to bring us closer to those truths that can be discovered through historical inquiry.

In the case of your thread, what I saw was propagandizing, not argumentation. The quotations were either weak, or non-existent. And statements were made that left a clear impression that your ideas are, effectively, an open and shut case. I have pointed out the reasons to be sceptical of your claims, and content to leave it at that. At the same time, if you are interested in a more in depth examination of hermeneutical models, I would be more than happy to do so. All that I would ask is that you extend some curtousy and respect to one of those models that has endured for a very long time, and is still seen as useful by a great many people, laity and scholarly alike.

I am well aware of the limits of these forum. That said, I come here to debate and discuss ideas with those who disagree with me very strongly. At the end of those discussions I hope to learn something new, and with luck, to have caused others to think about the topic more carefully as well. I have no interest in rebutting propaganda, as that is a waste of time. But your thesis, for all its hyperbole, seemed interesting to me, and I thought it might produce an interesting exchange.

Thanks for your thoughts Apikorus. Perhaps I misunderstood your intent in your thread. If I did, then I apologize. At the same time, I did find the discussion interesting, and for that, I thank you.

Nomad

[ January 30, 2002: Message edited by: Nomad ]</p>

Apikorus

I do not know why you have insisted on the later dating, but no matter.

Nomad, really it is quite silly to attempt to argue by veiled implication, especially when my statement is so easily defended. Obviously I believe that Mark was written ca. 70 CE. So do Udo Schnelle, Raymond Brown, Howard Clark Kee, Werner Kummel, Bruce Metzger (65 to 75 CE), Edward Sanders (65 to 70 CE), Joseph Tyson, et al.

Raymond Brown, a NT scholar of unimpeachable authority, wrote, "There is wide scholarly agreement that Mark was written in the late 60s or just after 70." (INT p. 164). I have therefore presumed, perhaps wrongly by your reasoning, that Brown was competent to assess the scholarly consensus in his own field.

By the way, if you truly do believe that Mk 13:6,21-22, which warn of false messiahs which would appear during the time of Jesus' disciples, came from Jesus' own lips, then are you saying that Jesus was wrong? That no such "false Christs" did arise?

It strikes me as strange that you would deem it laughable to adduce the Homilies and the Acts of Peter and Paul in support of Simon's claimed messiahship, while shortly thereafter conceding "I do not reject the historicity of late documents automatically." The figure of Simon is known from Acts. That he worked wonders and arrogated divine authority seems plain from the text. It is true that Acts does not use the word "christos" when referring to him. But given the warnings of imminent "false Christs" (from Jesus' own inerrant lips, according to you!), and given the extracanonical references to Simon, it seems abundantly defensible to label Simon Magus a messianic claimant. I expect you will continue to disagree, but I hardly think my position extreme.

Incidentally, Meier's dictum also applies to the Hebrew Bible as well. The character of Melchizedek, who appears only in Genesis 14 (for various and detailed reasons I do not think Melchizedek appears in Psalm 110) is, like Simon Magus in the NT, a "one-pericope wonder". Yet during the late Hellenistic and Roman periods, this non-Israelite priest of el elyon attracted much attention (e.g. at Qumran). Faced with the reality that Jesus could not simultaneously be a Levitical priest and a (Judahite) descendant of king David (let's elide the issue of his actual paternity, athough I would be interested in knowing how many chromosomes you think Jesus had!), the author of Hebrews solved this problem by identifying Jesus' priestly status with the notional Melchizedek strand.

[ January 31, 2002: Message edited by: Apikorus ]</p>