angelo

Sorry. Wrong Price. This is the one I meant.....................http://www.lulu.com/shop/rg-price/je...t-2079912.html

aa5874

Your Jesus is different to Ehrman's Jesus. Your Jesus is without corroboration in and out the Canon.

Ehrman's Jesus was hardly known.

In effect, your Jesus is a Myth--never existed.

angelo

John Shelby Spong a retired Bishop who has written many left "liberated" books distancing christianity from the fundamentalists, also sides with Borg
and Crossan. His first book "Saving The Bible From Fundamentalist set the tone for his many other books. He also claims Jesus existed, but as nothing more than an ordinary man whom others saw what god would be like in this person. I think Borg, Crossan as well as Spong and others of their ilk just can't imagine their Jesus having no existence. All have christian backgrounds so it seems understandable in my opinion.

Toto

RG Price`is not Robert Price. RG Price used to post here - his educational background is business, not history. He is good, but definitely an amateur.

Steven Carr

So Crossan just doesn't have the first clue about mythicism or about questions of historicity.

Presumably he approaches the question of the historicity of Romulus by asking if somebody forged a work by pretending to be Plutarch.

Steven Carr

Hey, I do the sarcasm around here!

Peter Kirby

Why does nobody put their finger on the fallacy running through this thread?

Historians. What are they?

We'd usually identify them as people trained at university in the tools (languages, textual criticism, oral history) they need to study the sources for the history they write about the subject of principal concern to them.

Thus you'd have medieval historians, ancient historians, historians of India and of China and of Japan and of Russia and of the United States and so on, ad nauseam. They are all, to some degree, specialized, not least because of the different tools they need. Modern historians need to know how to do oral history, while ancient historians need textual criticism a lot more. Languages vary.

Now do you want me to come along and say all the Doctors of Divinity in this world practice history in good faith, or even bother to practice history? No, of course not. I agree that the NT study guild has a large galley of people not so inclined. For a lot of them, they aren't even trying to do history, per se, so it's not even dishonest of them to do what the do. It's just not history.

But a historian isn't a sainted knight of unerring truth. Historians screw up. Historians speculate. Historians have pet theories. Historians disagree.

And while this area has its problems with non-historians and what they do, bringing a historian to the table is no panacea. Historians might even disagree about whether there was a historical Jesus, or not, or to be agnostic. It's happened before, and it will happen again.

Also, these guys that are being called out for their affiliations. If they know Greek and other languages, know the primary sources, engage the secondary literature, and come to critical conclusions in all good faith, then they are doing nothing essentially different from what a historian would do, and bringing up their title can be taken as ad hominem.

MrMacSon

you mean argument from authority ?

Robert Tulip

Understandable against emotion and tradition and politics, but the faith of Spong and Crossan and Borg is questionable in terms of scholarly method.

Jesus in an inspiration, a best friend, a hero, an example, a leader, a symbol of courage and integrity and wisdom and love. The liberation theology of Gutierrez, Segundo and Boff in Latin America a generation ago served as powerful formation for the transformative vision of Jesus in the progressive church today, with its focus on the message of solidarity with the poor, deprived and oppressed. Texts like the Beatitudes and the Magnificat and the Last Judgment provide great emotional and political meaning for the moral legitimacy of a revolutionary faith.

Mythicism, unlike liberationism, is not primarily political in intent. Rather, it is a scholarly question of solving what Earl Doherty called The Jesus Puzzle, the appearance of strong discrepancies between the conventional story and the available evidence. Is it plausible that Christ founded Christianity when Paul only makes a few dubious scattered references to His actual life? What are the similarities between Christ and other mythical figures? How does the emergence of Christianity sit within ancient cosmologies? How do we explain the archaeological absence of evidence of a town in Nazareth at the time of Christ? To what extent were mystery groups primed for the story of an anointed saviour? If Christ was invented, what does that say about human gullibility, manipulation, imagination and religiosity, and what lessons might it pose for the broad intersection of psychology, philosophy and politics? Does the absence of Christ leave us staring into an existential abyss of betrayal and emptiness? If Christ did not exist, would he have had to be invented?

The removal of the Historical Jesus from the core of Western identity is simply unacceptable for true believers of every stripe. When people defend a claim that is not based on evidence we call it apologetics. Normally, Christian apologetics is restricted to conventional piety, but the progressive church also has its pieties regarding engagement on debate about the existence of Christ.

The idea that we have all been lied to on such a grand scale really boggles the mind. Further, the non-existence hypothesis for Jesus suggests that the gracious line of connection to God seen in Christ is purely imaginary. It makes the fall from grace much worse, because the fall extends to inventing a redeemer.

Where does the blame sit? The memetic evolution of the Christ Myth can be seen as like a game of Chinese Whispers.

The mythicist view is that the Gospels are a fiction that was written in Alexandria with the conscious express purpose of establishing a new religion by inventing a mythical saviour who would press all the buttons needed for mass appeal. Christians maintain that the gospels were written between 70 and 100 AD, but there is no real evidence that they existed in their final form before the second or perhaps even the third century.

It is easy to imagine an evolutionary memetic process akin to ‘Chinese whispers’ which turned an original work of fiction into a dogma. A good example of Chinese whispers is the story from the First World War, where an order from the front was passed by word of mouth to the rear, and “We’re going to advance, send us reinforcements” was eventually transmitted as “We’re going to a dance, send us three and fourpence.” People’s hearing and memory and desires are flawed, giving great potential for hearing whatever you want to hear, rather than what is actually said.

In the Christian example, we have to look to the psychology of belief to explain how the Christ meme became the Christian dogma. This psychology is well captured in one of the famous “proofs” of the existence of God – that if we can imagine a perfect being, then a real one is better than an imaginary one so a real one must exist. (I kid you not, this is one of the main pieces of “logic” of Anselm). Anyway, exactly the same psychological logic applies to Jesus, that if we can imagine a perfect messiah, then a real messiah is so much better and therefore exists.

Trying to recreate how this meme may have evolved, the religious scholars of Alexandria had a strong agenda to imagine a better world than the Roman Empire. We can imagine their original thought processes, building on the prophecies of the Old Testament. Starting from ‘if only we had a messiah, this is what he would have been like’, the oral transmission of these messianic stories occurred over centuries before they found their final form. Conceivably, the first tellers meant the stories as myth. However, it is well known that a tale improves in the telling. As hearers tell a good story to others, they steadily embroider it. A very useful first embroidery, when you have a political agenda, is that the fantasy you heard is an actual story of events. If, as stated in John 20:31 the agenda is that “these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God” then clearly the agenda is not to provide an accurate record of events, but rather whatever will be most conducive to spreading belief.

So the idea of the meme as an evolving and mutating idea is very helpful to interpret the origins of Christianity. A key point is that in an oral culture, the weight of moral stories is increased by falsely claiming that invented fictions are historically based. This would go through several stages, each of which could last decades as the view of a community –
1. I know its false;
2. I heard that it is false;
3. I don’t know if its true or false;
4. It may be true;
5. It is probably true
6. It is definitely true
7. If you so much as ask if it is true you are a heretic and blasphemer and will go to hell.

This last dogmatic imperial phase is expressed in the Bible, with the statement at 1 John 4:2 “This is how you can recognize the Spirit of God: Every spirit that acknowledges that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God. Every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus is not from God but is the spirit of the antichrist.”

So the Christian meme became that belief in the story of the incarnation was a test of faith. Pagans such as Celsus regarded this Christian method with contempt, as there was no historical evidence that Jesus lived. However, history shows that this meme of the Word made Flesh proved more powerful than pagan logic, and produced the Dark Ages. This meme of blind faith is only now unravelling at the popular level.

Zaphod

And what of the members of this august group of historians without an actual History degree, raised as Christians, educated in Christian institutions, and doing their "good faith" investigations as paid employees of religious institutions who demand adherence to a code of Doctrinal beliefs? Would it be an ad hominem to submit that such a background might well induce a lack of "good faith" scholarship?

Here, for example, is text from the application for employment form at Dallas Theological Seminary, where there eleven professors of New Testament studies:

DOCTRINAL BELIEFS
Please write a brief statement describing your conversion to Christianity. Please indicate what a person must do to receive eternal life and when you took that first step.
The mission of Dallas Theological Seminary as a professional, graduate-level school is to prepare men and women for ministry as godly servant-leaders in the body of Christ worldwide. We are seeking applicants who are passionately committed to our mission and will subscribe in good faith to the school’s doctrinal beliefs.
Do you adhere to the following doctrines:
• The authority and inerrancy of the Scripture
• The Trinity
• The full deity and humanity of Christ
• The spiritual lostness of the human race
• The substitutionary atonement and bodily resurrection of Christ
• Salvation by faith alone, in Christ alone
• The physical return of Christ


Bart Ehrman received his education at Moody Bible Institute, Wheaton College, and the Princeton Theological Seminary. At Princeton, where he received his PhD, he was required to adhere to a Mission Statement, which includes the following paragraph:

"A professional and graduate school of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), the Seminary stands within the Reformed tradition, affirming the sovereignty of the triune God over all creation, the Gospel of Jesus Christ as God’s saving word for all people, the renewing power of the word and Spirit in all of life, and the unity of Christ’s servant church throughout the world. This tradition shapes the instruction, research, practical training, and continuing education provided by the Seminary, as well as the theological scholarship it promotes."


This is the mission statement from Wheaton College. Among other things, it asserts the existence of Satan, evil powers, and that Jesus was "true God and true man":

http://www.wheaton.edu/About-Wheaton...tional-Purpose

Does the scholarship evident in Ehrman's "Did Jesus Exist?: The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth" indicate that Ehrman was doing historical research in the same manner as an actual historian?