outhouse

In context, mythicist have issues with this criterion. Do a search those complaining about it the loudest are mythicist.


I posted this long before your entrance





YOu may not take me serious because I dont follow all that mythicist bullcrap, and brother it is not a problem at all. Is this for the most part a known mythcist forum, or not?

REAL scholars dont hang here because they get fed up with the double standards and non scholarly methods that dont bother me.

I have no problem shining a light on the mythicist bias and standing up for real scholarships many here claim as biased apologetics.

spin

As has been pointed out to you many times, anyone but religious scholars have issues with this nonsense criterion.

This stuff falls over its own presuppositions. The writer hasn't got a clue whether the story of Jesus's baptism was available to the writer of Jn. If Mt's JtB says to Jesus "I should be baptized by you", what does that say to you about any modern-imputed sin of Jesus?

It is idiotic to argue that the crucifixion of Jesus was some sort of embarrassment, when Cybelean acolytes had no trouble with Attis being castrated, and when followers of Adonis believed their savior was torn to pieces by dogs. For Jesus to be a redeemer of people he had to pay for them by dying in their place. To take away the curse of the law he had to take it on, for cursed is anyone who hangs on a tree. The death of Jesus is such an embarrassment that Paul reveled in it.

What they don't say about multiple attestation is that it needs to be multiple independent attestation. It doesn't matter if many texts say the same thing if they all copied from the one source. When they can demonstrate multiple independent attestation, they can start using it.

These arguments that you cling to are religious. They have nothing to do with history. They are attempting to turn stories into reality without any way to connect them to the real world. This embarrassment nonsense is something out of the dark ages and only advocated seriously by believers and people who once believed.

How many times must you be beaten down for this blunder? You are not talking only to people who believe in mythicism. You must stop this childish nonsense. If you want to bleed about mythicism, do so to mythicists and not to people who have no commitment on the issue.

The issue regards evidence for the existence of Jesus. Changing the topic and talking about mythicists does not deal with the issue.

You wouldn't know a real scholar if one bit you.

If you were correct, I'd prefer double standards to your no standards any day.

How can you fit both your head and a torch?

TedM

I'll jump in. It is absurd to think that the story of Jesus' baptism wasn't available to John, who has JTB repeat many of the same things found in the other gospels, and has Jesus going to JTB, but not being baptized by him. Whether it was from Mark originally or not isn't important.

??


You are just parroting Paul's awkward attempt to explain it by saying that to take a way a curse one has to become cursed! Of course there would be attempts by believers to explain something so 'awkward' by making it seem to be part of God's plan -- what else would you expect? Christians weren't embarrassed by it -- but some of the unbelieving Jews were REPULSED by the idea of a crucified Messiah. Paul referred to it as a 'stumbling block' to the Jews -- it clearly didn't fit their pre-conceptions. In doing so, Paul has revealed that it was opposed because it was UNEXPECTED for the Jewish Messiah to be crucified! Paul himself didn't believe it until he had message/insight from God. It was bizarre to any Jew, and yet the message originated among the Jews.

Was the idea a based on bizarre new interpretation of Scripture? If so, what prompted that? Attis and other non-Jewish stories? Why should they? How in the world can the Jews suddenly think that their Messiah who was expected to save Israel and usher in the kingdom had already come if they had no record of his existence and no evidence that the kingdom had really arrived, while becoming more and more demoralized by the Romans? What evidence was there? That's idiotic!

outhouse

So far only people that are mythicist or agnostic have been proud and mouthy.


There are times I should be corrected, but I know a biased or unorthodox view when I see it.



Because you take a mininal view with your agnostic stance, doesnt make you right or correct or mirroring that staus quo of modern scholarships.

I follow certain professors of which you are not.

Solo

Hi Andrew,

FWIW, Matthew also found Mark's account of Peter's confession-Transfiguration highly problematic and did not expunge it. I would venture that in either story, the recension could have been motivated by different community values and theological imperatives rather than preference for a different pre-existing tradition.

Best,
Jiri

aa5874

You statement is a fallacy. The Pauline writers claimed that Jesus died for OUR Sins, was buried and resurrected on the THIRD day ACCORDING to the Scriptures.

Paul got his crucifixion story of Jesus, NOT from God, but from Jesus cult Scriptures.

The blasphemy that Jesus died for the Sin of Jews is NOT found anywhere in Hebrew Scriptures.

1 Corinthians 15:3-4 KJV

TedM

sigh..Please stop being so contrary when there is no need to be, aa.

re-read what Paul says about it in Galatians. He says GOD revealed Jesus to him. That's what made him convert. Whether he did it THROUGH scripture or not is something else. It doesn't make my statement wrong.

aa5874

I just posted what Paul wrote.

Did NOT Paul write 1 Corinthians?

You seem to be now admitting that the Pauline writers either lied or did not know what they were really talking about.

1 Corinthians 15:3-4 KJV Now, what did Paul say in Galatians? Please, be specific--chapter and verse.

I want to see where Paul MODIFIED his claims.

Paul was embarrassed that he used the Jesus cult Scriptures??

It must be true??

spin

You needn't bother. You've already made your contribution when you accepted the conjecture without serious question. You've added nothing to change that or give this nonsense any more credibility. Just the usual crapping on from ignorance of the era without any attempt at showing how you could possibly know what would be embarrassing to the writers concerned.

What exactly was the significance of John saying what he did? Does he give any indication that he thinks Jesus is a sinner???

I certainly am "parrotting Paul". That's because I like to base my thoughts on fucking evidence. If you don't like Paul's gospel, well, you don't have to believe it. You shouldn't pervert what he says because of your prior commitments. The notion of redemption is well presented by Paul. His gospel has it as its foundation. Jesus redeemed believers by dying for them. In Gal 3 he details those under the law suffer and are cursed. That is his belief, just as the notion that, to redeem, Jesus had to suffer and die in their place. How else could the curse be bought off, as the Greek verb "redeem" (exagorazw--with "agora" in it) indicated? Crucifixion had a long history before the Romans arrived. Paul has no problem whatsoever accepting that Jesus was crucified. It followed from the curse, just as his Passover death followed from his role as a sacrifice. Paul has no problem with the crucifixion and the fact that others did just showed that they were still cursed. The cross was redemption. Why shouldn't Paul have been happy about that? There is nothing awkward to him. In fact he preached Christ crucified and nothing but. So there! It was a stumbling block for the unsaved. Awkward? You're off your nut.

Paul plainly repudiated the beliefs of the Jerusalemite Jews who still followed the torah. He is so explicit in Gal 5:2, either Christ or circumcision, not both. Being Jewish was not significant to him. So, fuck off Jerusalem morons, who were still worrying about eating practices. His beliefs obviously did not come from them. There is no way back to a Jesus belief passed to Paul from that direction. The implied trajectory that you cling to for Paul's beliefs is simply wrongheaded.

Paul's non-messianic messiah was actually a dying savior. Redemption is guaranteed by the substitution death and subsequent belief. Paul explains why his savior/messiah died as he did. If you want to try to explain it away, take that up with Paul. He might be more swayable.

spin

But you beat that hands down! You're both proud and mouthy, plus slavish and lacking in discernment in the topic of discussion.

Sorry, you've proven a bust when it comes to bias. Slavish adherence to status quo beliefs makes you incapable of approaching a neutral analysis.

My minimalist approach, if you want to call it that, makes me less prone to blunders that committed people make. I work from what we can know, not from what we believe.

Now remember that people without training in history who make pronouncements about history, be they professors or not, are just amateurs. When they do so in fields that they have commitments in, they are biased amateurs and they make it extremely difficult for themselves to say anything of historical significance.

And when you do so, the blind leading the blind, you wonder what you're doing in the ditch you're floundering around in at the moment.

Biblical studies, or theological studies as it has been known for much of its existence, has been around since before universities were created. It has practically always been around and has not earned its place in the halls of academia. It inherited that place. Its need to exist has never been tested, because, well, it's always been there. It's original place was to provide new clerics, so it had the full backing of the church.

Humanism hit it badly, letting the learned world know that there were christian forgeries, that there were other ways to look at the cosmos. The church fought back, burning people at the stake or forcing them to recant their humanist ways, though Humanism took its toll on christian scholars.

Then Humanism paved the way for the Enlightenment, which gave us organized thought and put us on the road to scientific critical analysis. To stay up with changes this time the church was forced to adapt and as historiography became more secularized, christian scholars, because of the ethos, took on aspects of Enlightenment thought. It was hard not to and christian historiography readjusted to the changing high cultural developments and theological studies started to look at history more coherently, though still through the distorting lens of belief, so we get a century of well Jesus is difficult to justify historically, but there is enough to say that the resurrection happened, because it was multiply attested. A whole set of looney tune reasons were developed to confirm the religion's narrative in this new age, turning text into the real world. (At the same time the intellectual tools of the Enlightenment set the stage for the development of freethought and rational atheism.)

But biblical studies is still a medieval field tarted up over the centuries. It has been recontextualized in continuation because of cultural developments basically external to the field, while all the time those developments took place in an otherwise christian culture!

Biblical studies because it has always been in tertiary education has inherited an air of scholarship that has never been tested. It's proponents are predominantly religious believers and those who are not were trained by believers. These are the people making pronouncements about the historicity of Jesus, people with an obviously tendentious approach to their field. Any sensitive issue is likely to be filtered through their prior commitment to the religion. At many institutions there are protocols for teaching staff to follow regarding what they can say and do regarding the religion they study and teach.

I work on the notion that I can trust the studies of the scholars in the field to analyse text with skill and precision, but outside that, caveat lector or, to quote a sixties icon, "Danger, danger, Will Robinson, danger".