outhouse

Yet Gluke claims sedition and tax evasion


It is my opinion none of the gospel authors were there and they filled in what they believed to be true, and when in doubt they used fiction trying to follow the tradition they found important to teach.

Many claim the trial to be fiction, I agree.

Much of the gospels are Hellenistic gentiles using Judaism to meet personal needs, writing to and for a Roman audience making the Jews out to be the bad guys. They wanted to distance themselves from those pesky Jews and NOT start a movement that would be under the Roman sword viewed as trouble makers. They were trying to make a roman friendly movement.


Im saying we don't know.

He could have known, might not have.

MrMacSon

Same can be said for the Pauline documents.

Clivedurdle

Bollox squared. This was the largest temple in the Roman Greek world. Sacrifices were part of it. It was a core part of the world then and was built with Roman and Greek support!

Grog

How do you sort history from fiction then? How is the gMark trial in which Jesus is charged with blasphemy a "fiction" and the gLuke trial, which you rely on to build you picture of Jesus, "history?"

What was gLuke's source for that information, separate from gMark? The earlier source says blasphemy. Where does gLuke come up with tax evasion and sedition?

metacristi

The historical Jesus 'was almost unrecoverable'. Well depends also on your philosophy of science. If one wants certitudes or almost certitudes then maybe it's true. But if one want to establish fallible knowledge tout court (renouncing also at positivism which proved rather harmful in the history of science) then I don't think the above can be sustained. What research program does have the most justification at this time and deserve the status of main paradigm?

Let me believe that it is not mythicism* (which needs a lot of claims of interpolation, forgery, New Testament cannot be a source, all current methodologies have to go, nothing established using them is viable and so on). There are just too many 'epycicles' here which are not really needed by a scientific approach. Personally I see their 'revolution' dangerously close to being on a par with a reversal of that of Copernicus. Finally as one who lived under communism I can say that you should never try to push your ideas via bloody revolutions even if your solution is really the best approach possible in the universe. But of course some just want to become famous with all costs...

In the place of the mythicists I would try to develop the program in silence without any claims of epistemological privilege (that mythicism should be the first paradigm in academia, all rational people should believe the same etc) in the hope of a decisive breakthrough in the future. After all one can be very rational even if one decides to pursue the research program that aliens visit earth (because of some strange personal experiences while camping on a remote mountain for ex.) if claims of epistemological privileges are avoided. It is true that there is some authoritarianism in the New Testament studies but my view is that the direct assault on academy is not really the best approach (Carrier should have put differently his disagreements with Ehrman; who by the way did only minor mistakes in my view, the general line of the argument is fully viable if one talks only of fallible knowledge, in the sense that Jesus historicity is the first choice at this time in academia).


*finally if even non specialists can spot a lot of problems with Carrier's approach I don't think he can expect much from the part of academia (I'm afraid Paul is still the best pro historical Jesus evidence and Carrier lost a crucial game to Tom Stark and Ehrman, there is no reason to think that the idea of a dying crucified messiah existed before Christianity, what is possible is not also probable). Bayesianism cannot really help him (after all Swinburne used it to prove that Jesus was God incarnate with a result of 0.97 logical probability), even if bayesianism is viable (not at all sure given the scarcity of data) it is definitely very sensible to auxiliary assumptions (I bet that if one accepts that Paul talks of a historical Jesus bayesianism show clearly that Jesus existed). Finally maybe Carrier should have used first Bayesianism to make a distinction between the over 200 scholarly hypotheses of why the Roman empire fell (should we also throw to the dust bin everything in that academic department )...

Tommy

The explanations of Jewish customs in gMark suggest it was intended to be accessible to Gentiles. Would Gentiles care about the trauma of the Jews?

Grog

IN your link, I ran into the first major assumptive problem here:

Here's the explanatory note:

There are huge assumptions in this line of thinking.

First, there is the issue of what is the exact timeline? When does this commentator think the process of "successive revision and divergence and redaction" begin? He obviously thinks it ends in the second century. Already we are talking at least one hundred years. I would argue that the process began a century or more before the start of the common era.


Second, by "well-defined" second century Christianity, he must cherry pick from a range of Christianities then existing to pick something called "well-defined."

Third, he makes an unsubstantiated assumption that syncretism cannot occur at a rapid pace. The analogy here would be punctuated equilibrium from evolutionary biology. What I see occurring in those instances is a rapid recombination of closely related hybrids until something new and well-adapted takes hold. What we see in the fossil record looks more linear because we only get snapshots of what occurred over a vast period of time. So we can miss the moments of flourishing of hybrids. I think a similar argument can be made concerning the emergence of Christianity where rapid change occurs, but we only can see what was preserved. I see a pretty clear linear progression from apocalyptic and messianic Judaism, from Daniel, Isaiah merging into thought contained in writings like the Wisdom of Solomon and finally incorporated in Christian writings like Paul and the Gospel of John, which, in my opinion, is an attempt to reconcile NEW ideas, like that of a Jesus walking on earth in recent times, with OLD ideas like those contained in the writing of Philo, a generation earlier.

The blogger cited makes an assumption of the time frame that would be involved. But what is the yardstick he is using?

Making the distinction between Philo's historical and philosophical works is nonsense and irrelevant. The point is that Philo articulated a belief in a heavenly being quite similar to Jesus Christ. Carrier is not arguing that, as it appears this commentator thinks, that Philo is arguing that the Joshua from Zechariah 6, was actually the messiah on earth. He is arguing that Philo linked this character to the heavenly logos and that it just so happens, that character's name was Jesus. This commentator missed the point here, it seems. Or is arguing a strawman.

On the Ascension of Isaiah, this commentator also completely ignores the arguments concerning the dating of portions of AoI. Also, the commentator makes the consistent assumption of things 'post-dating' Christianity. When do you "date" the origin of Christianity? Christianity obviously developed over time and in dialogue with culture in which it grew. Other philosophies and ways of thinking were similarly taking root and growing. As in punctuated equilibrium, these things can combine, separate, recombine over time until clear speciation takes place. Too many assumptions, here.

I think already we can see that your argument that "if even non-specialists" can spot weaknesses, then the argument must be flawed. You have to first verify the strength of the non-specialist's arguments. I think they are lacking.

Grog

Maybe. Can you say definitively that there weren't some Gentiles who might care about the trauma of the Jews? I remember when the United States supported genocidal tyrants in Guatemala, there were significant populations of Americans who cared about the trauma of indigenous Mayans in the Guatemalan highlands.

metacristi

Ok let's see what experts say then. But I'm not too optimistic for Carrier. His hypothesis has all chances to still be 'fringe' even long after publishing the book. Finally, in my view of course, the attempt to explain away that Paul refers to a Jesus who had died recently is the weakest link in the mythicist approach (i found the argument to be really creative but extremely weak). Maybe Carrier should have studied more theology? Finally I'm definitely with Ehrman, the criterions have problems but what to put in place? Bayesianism? Let's see but there are good reasons to think that we will see the same subjectivism as in the case of the current methodologies.

outhouse

Doesnt matter, if the cow doesnt give milk, they eat the cow, period.


The temple was on thin ice the whole time.

It was built by Herod, not Rome.