JoeWallack

JW:
The McgWrath of Con

Okay, so Joel Watts, partially inspired by The McgWrath of Con/partially inspired by the Devil, has marooned Neil Godfree on the island of Australia. He has done far worse than kill Godfree, he has killed his freedom of speech.

I suppose the most interesting issue here is that Joel Watts has apparently become the first to discover time travel. The most interesting question is who was/is a bigger ham, Kirk, Khan or Watts (this is for you SH)? Regrettably, this Thread will be concerned with a far less interesting issue/question:

Is Neil Godfree a "Mythicist"?

This question is inspired by my observation that per James McGrath, University Religious Professor, Neil Godfree is not just a "Mythicist", he is "The Mythicist". Now this conclusion by a University Religious Professor is mystifying to me because I think I have read Neil Godfree as much as anyone, perhaps even more than Godfree himself. I do not remember Neil Godfree ever referring to himself as a "Mythicist". My memory is that a few times he has indicated that he is AG, Agnostic Jesus, not sure if Jesus existed or not. I get the sense from reading Neil Godfree that his primary point is that supposed scholarly support for HJ is overstated and contains an unhealthy amount of bad scholarship. Neil goes into more detail than anyone else I've seen trying to analyze and criticize HJ scholarship and only than makes his conclusions. McGrath to some extent, is the opposite. He will start with and repeat his conclusion and give a few examples to try and support.

Seems to me this is all backwards for an amateur and Professor. Now McGrath no doubt is still dumbing from his association with Watts but to his credit has stated that he is pretty far from okay with Joel Watts. Anyway, I asked McGrath why he thinks Neil Godfree is a "Mythicist" and the only response I got was from his apparent spokesman Jonathan Burke (excuse me, a flock of owls just flew in the window, "who, who", shew you stupid owls, shew):

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/explori...#disqus_thread

McGrath did vote for "liking" whathisface's response.

A second chance [from me to McGrath]:

And a second response (from "that man" from the McGrath Bible Blog)

JW:
While anticipating a forthcoming charge of copyright infringement from Joel Watts here I think perhaps the most amazing thing here is that this person thinks that after describing me as a "Mythicist" (I'm not), possessing "atypical cognitive behavior" (I have faith that this person is The One who believes that God sacrificed himself to himself thereby conquering death by dying in order to end his eternal Law) and a troll, that I would continue a dialogue with him. Last I checked James McGrath is still incapable of giving any response to my question of why he thinks Neil Godfree is a "Mythicist", other than approval of the types of response above.

Why hasn't McGrath answered my question. Does it prove he is incompetent or lying? No, it just proves he has not answered my question. It may mean he's not sure how. Maybe he suspects a trap. In contrast to Jesus though, Neil Godfree is alive and well. 1st person witness is available. We could ask Neil. We could ask someone who knows Neil (2nd hand). This would be much better evidence than criteria of Embarrassment or Dissimilarity.

So, the question of this Thread:

Is Neil Godfree a "Mythicist"?


Joseph

ErrancyWiki

Grog

I actually like this question and i think you are right that we have to define what a "Mythicist" is. The idea gets confused when the definition that a mythicist is one who believes that Jesus never exited but is "just" a myth.

My approach to Christianity and to the question of the HJ is that the idea of Jesus evolved out of the primordial soup created by the clash of hellenistic culture and judaism. To me the word "mythicism" carries some baggage. In some ways, I think it is accurate. Looking at the definition of "mythicism" (this from merriam online dictionary):

A "Jesus Mythicist" would argue that belief in Jesus of the early Christians came from the belief that spiritual truth was attained through revelation or secret knowledge. Early Christians (similar to modern Christians, by the way) thought of Jesus as a figure residing in Heaven who shared insight or intution with them, an intermediary between humankind and the ineffable God.

I see the term "myther" used in such a way that implies that early Christians believed in a mythical Jesus. That's not the way I read the evidence. I see, in particular, Paul, as talking about a real Jesus who spoke to him through scripture and revelation. Jesus was not a "myth" to Paul, anymore than he is a "myth" to Christians who say "Jesus spoke to me" or "Jesus watched over me."

How does this apply to GodFree? I have read Neil say on numerous occasions that he is not all that interested in the question of was there an actual Jesus of Nazareth or not. His interest is in the origins of Christianity. If, in trying to answer the question, How did Christianity begin? We are led to an answer that does not include an original founder, Jesus of Nazareth, then so be it. His point regarding scholarship is that they take for granted one possible contingency: that Jesus of Nazareth founded Christianity through his preaching and his ultimate sacrifice in the first third of the first century. He has shown how this one hypothesis is sustained and reconfirmed through fairly shoddy scholarship that fails to examine any other hypothesis, such as that Christianity evolved without a founder, Jesus of Nazareth.

In this sense GodFree is not a mythicist. He is a critic of current methods and holds an open mind toward other possibilities. I think his blog is extremely valuable and has had some impact on the field, at least in the sense that scholars have had to respond to him and the ideas that he publishes on his blog. I would say GodFree is agnostic toward the Historical Jesus.

We should have a bumpersticker:

Live (God)Free or Die!

mountainman

From the WIKI page on Irving and Holocaust Denial

It's too bad McgWrath & Co have no history to back up their defence of historicism. They fight what they perceive as mythicism (i.e. questioning the authority of historicism) from the high moral ground of complete ignorance.


Go Joe.



εὐδαιμονία | eudaimonia

neilgodfrey

Am I allowed a say in this? (I just voted for the "who cares" option so I don't know why I want a say.) I think McG labels me a mythicist because I have shot down every one of his arguments against mythicism and for an HJ.

The bottom line for me is that I have never come across any reason to think Jesus did exist. So my default position is that we can do no more than work with the evidence we have to try to construct some idea of Christian origins, and that evidence is all theological and/or symbolic.

The question of historicity almost never arises. Except when it is gratuitously introduced to explain this or that aspect of the evidence and then it usually has to be shot down because it is nearly always based on a misreading of the nature of the evidence (e.g. treating a theological tale as an historical report).

Grog got it right. He gets a free pass to my blog.

avi

as opposed to a "legend", in which a (potentially) genuine human's conduct is exaggerated.

A mythicist is one, (like me), who believes that an account referencing a particular individual, or object, or locale, is "mythical" (and not "legendary") in that circumstance where a a supernatural force is invoked, to explain the origin or function of this person, object, or place.

The moment that the redactors inserted nomina sacra into Mark 1:1 of Codex Sinaiticus, thereby qualifying Jesus Christ as "son of god", the nascent ideology changed from one, which potentially could have been based on an historical legend, to a myth.

It matters not a whit, how many references subsequent to that text, reflect genuine historical observations (assuming that there may have been some), for every good novel includes descriptions of genuine characters, places, or events.

Disagree

The bottom line is not whether or not "Jesus" existed. The bottom line is that no person can be "the son of god", because there is no such thing as "god".

mountainman

What are you doing in Darwin?




εὐδαιμονία | eudaimonia

Grog

My point is that early believers did not see themselves as following a "myth," but following a heavenly Revealer. At least, that's the hypothesis.

gurugeorge

To me, "mythicist" means simply someone who doesn't think there's evidence for an eponymous, historically identifiable originatory person who might have formed the kernel of the Jesus Christ myth, and that's good enough reason to think that the Jesus Christ myth is "myth all the way down".

I mean, the Jesus story we have now is evidently and obviously a myth, right? Miracle-working Jewish superhero, born of a virgin and a ghost, all things to all men, yadda yadda.

OK, so it's one hypothesis that there might have been a real human being who somehow gave rise to the myth. It's not implausible, and it's quite a respectable idea given that many cults do indeed start with an identifiable founding figure.

It just so happens that, unfortunately, there's no independently identifiable person we could pin down as that originatory figure. Nobody human-looking in the record who's story might have gotten blown out of proportion. That doesn't put the historicist hypothesis out of consideration altogether, but it does reduce it to mere conjecture until and unless such a person is found.

So, because of the lack of that triangulation, the historicist hypothesis remains unproven and conjectural. But because it remains unproven and conjectural, any reconstruction of a "quotidian Jesus" story based on the Jesus myth we all know and love, that takes for granted the historical hypothesis, must necessarily beg the question. (For example a popular idea is to strip the story of the supernatural elements and imagine that - lo!, we have the human Jesus. But this idea would only have some purchase if we had already identified our man, and we wanted to see what stories from the myth might plausibly be considered as having actually happened to that ordinary man; without the independent triangulation it's just more conjecture, on top of the historicist conjecture.)

On the other hand, given the absence of independent evidence for the historical Jesus idea, the proposal that the Jesus myth we all know and love is "myth all the way down" is a perfectly decent and attractive alternative. While it's true that cults often start with founders, they needn't be eponymous founders, and made-up deities in whose name people do things, are a dime a dozen.

But we have more than just this, to tend things in a "mythicist" direction. We have the testimony in some of the earliest cult texts (Paul, granted orthodox datings), that the first experiences of Jesus may well have been purely visionary. That, again, is something that happens, something to be expected, a bland function of human physiology and psychology. All sorts of otherwise perfectly respectable people may, under certain conditions, have visions and see things that change their lives profoundly and incline them on a religious path (if they weren't so inclined already).

Of course it could have been "visions in response to a recently-deceased eponymous founder", but then we're back to square one - where's the independent evidence for that eponymous founder? Again, in the absence of that evidence, sheer visionary experience alone (or more likely, along with intense text-bothering) is perfectly fine as a start for a religion.

So in these terms, yes, I think Neil is a mythicist