Cesc

Generelly, protestants believe the only authority to be Christ, God, directly from Him to the individual believer (for Luther this entails the sola scriptura principle), therefore no church has any authority at all, whatsoever. Only Christ, God. Therefore anyone can be a priest (except unreliable people of course, such as woman and children, he says, unless it's an emergency!)

spin

Using the notion of a "historical" anything requires the user to have some notion, no matter how facile, of historiography, which is the problem.

Fuck no. A christian--at least as we understand the term--perceives Jesus as real or, as I defined it in my previous post, "a figure perceived to have been part of the mundane world". Modern historians and those who polemically use their terminology may call Jesus "historical". Nobody in the ancient world called anyone "historical", because they lacked the philosophy of history that underpins the notion.

But your thinking assumed that there was a HJ, ie you were making a substantive claim which you can't justify. If you could provide a dependable way of deciding then you might have something, but we've had three rounds of hopefuls looking for a HJ and failing. We have to accept the possibility that Jesus may not have existed and then stop assuming that he did.

It doesn't matter to a non-christian whether Jesus existed or not, especially as there is no way of verifying that existence and there has been a vested interest by those who maintained the literature from the past in the existence of Jesus. Such an interest interferes with any validation of sources on the subject they maintained. This is a grave epistemological problem: we have no way of knowing about the existence of Jesus. This gives the non-believer a push to not enter into making rash judgments. You don't need to choose whether Jesus existed or not. It's nothing to you, even if he did exist (for he may have).

spin

Wiki is not a reliable source. I should know: I write for it at times.

The dogma around Clement of Rome is unsubstantiated.

What time frame does Pagels work on for the emergence of apostolic succession and are her ideas correct?

Horatio Parker

So mine or anyone's revelations are as good as anything from the Protestant churches, and the Protestant churches would concur?

Chili

Where you go wrong is in calling Jesus the same as Christ wherein Jesus must die to set Christ free, and later Jesus rose to be one with Christ, or not, as in Matthew and Mark where 'back to Galilee' he goes instead.

In this Christ never was crucified to die, and so, at best, we can be followers of Jesus to die on our own cross be one with Christ as Christian our self.Except that God does not raise Jesus but religion does simply because those who are destined for hell also are raised to be eternally there, and that is where religion has a copyright on heaven as their claim to fame.But that is wrong. God saves, Christ is the end and Jesus is the way to that end, with no if's, but's, or maybe's about it.That is correct, and that is what the Inquisitor was all about because to confess Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior who you think existed is the abomination, and that is precisely that they tried to stamp out like a wild fire on the move inside the Nation wherein they were given the duty to exercise this dominion as they saw fit.

Their reason for this was to remove the historical attachment to the person called Jesus so the believer may encounter the real Jesus in his own life and become a Christian in the same manner as follower of the example he set.

Horatio Parker

I picked the Clement reference because it mentioned Jesus. Much of the entry traces succession only back to the apostles, as if the Wiki editors didn't want to mention Christ too frequently.

Second century is Pagel's time frame, Tertullian came up frequently IIRC.

As to correctness, I admit it didn't occur to me that it was controversial.

Chili

That would be number 20.001, I suppose.

Horatio Parker

At one time I would've, and most people still think that way.

But after reading about philosophy and psychology I no longer think so.

I think that myths are in a sense living things. I think that our minds are real, and our thoughts are real and collectively the mind and its domain constitutes an alternate(if empirically provisional) reality. There is potential for good here since self examination, reflection, contemplation and so forth are generally good things for people to do.

Problems can occur, though, when thoughts are projected into physical realty ie because I can imagine Hippos dancing on point in tutus I start believing they physically do that.

By keeping Jesus mythical, he stays in the mind where he belongs, and, though not meaning to proselytize here, where he can do the most good and least harm.

It's a paradox, but the most effective way the church marginalizes itself is by insisting on its traditional magical thinking.

It's another paradox that mythicism enables Christianity. IMO.

Cesc

Spin, do you know what the point is that I've been trying to make?
If you think my point is undermined because I'm using epistemological categories where they dont apply (the term "historical" to ancient Christians), fair enough, then say so. But I'm not sure at all you understand what I'm trying say.

In making my point, it really is quite irrelevant whether we use the modern term "historical" or we say "perceived to have been part of the mundane world"... In this case they both mean the same thing. If a person in the ancient world had eaten a muffin, he would consider that muffin to have been "historical", by which I mean having existed.

My point is pretty clear:
Christians believe the figure of Jesus Christ to have existed at some point in time. Otherwise they are not Christians, but something else.


Whether there de facto was a HJ or not is wholly irrelevant to my point. I'm not assuming here there was or there wasn't.

Cesc

I don't know what you mean by revelation, but I think that generally Protestantism holds the Bible as the only revelation.