mountainman

This reminds me of the Hans Eusebius Christian Anderson story about the Emperor who had no clothes. Why do you think that these academic and scholarly historicists persist in blindly claiming that there is irrefutable history in this myth-like "Ghost Story"?





εὐδαιμονία | eudaimonia

mountainman

Negative evidence does have its role to play.

"Is there any other point to which you wish to draw my attention?"
"To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time."
"The dog did nothing in the night time."
"That was the curious incident", remarked Sherlock Holmes.

~ "Silver Blaze", by Sir Arthur Conon Doyle

εὐδαιμονία | eudaimonia

mountainman

Thanks Robert, I do agree, however I made this restriction in the OP in order to demonstrate that I am quite capable of discussing other important and influential matters outside of the 4th (and earlier) century.

A study of blasphemy is a very revealing study by which researchers can start in the present modern epoch, and be gradually led back century by century to the 12th century when the inquisitions by the all-powerful church authority were in full swing. Some people need to be led backwards into time in a gradual manner in order to understand how utterly depraved and barbaric the history of the Christian Church has been.

Thanks for your comments related to Astrotheology. How many people were burnt at the stake for suggesting stuff like that? We have all seen the modern (so-called) scholarly reactions to treatments of mythicist theories which attempt to incorporate astrotheology into a framework of explanation. Today myth is still blasphemy, and touted by the great fearless leaders of the mainstream historicist position, as "holocaust denial".

The historicist position is still bolstered by pseudo-historical criteria such as the "Criterion of Embarrassment", "Criterion of Dissimilarity", etc but the illogical and false nature of these criteria is slowly being brought to the light. When these non-scientific and non-historical criteria are fully exposed, there will be nothing left to defend the historicist position other than blind faith and the inertia of tenure in the world-wide Bible Indu$try.





εὐδαιμονία | eudaimonia

Robert Tulip

Yes, it is important to see how the enforcement of orthodoxy has been such a pervasive historic theme for Christianity. Considering the whole sweep of time since the Gospels, the cultural entrenchment of bigotry is very deep, and resistant to change. A thousand years of preceding dogmatic faith enabled the anti-blasphemy movement of the second millennium to assume it had God on its side.
Two good books relevant to this study are The European Witch Crazes of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries by Sir Hugh Trevor Roper, and A More Perfect Heaven by Dava Sobel (or via: amazon.co.uk). Roper shows the fervour of the inquisition, while Dobel illustrates how Copernicus had to be very cautious to enable publication of his theory that the earth moves in a context where Christian dogma completely ruled the roost. Astrotheology is simply a scientific method applied to religious studies. The ancients encoded observation of natural cycles in their myths. Jesus Christ builds on the myth of Osiris as an annual fertility celebration, with the cross replacing the djed. The motif of Christ on the cross with women weeping at the base goes back through the Moses snake on a pole to the snake in the tree with Adam and Eve, and further back to Sumerian depictions of snakes on a pole. These symbols are part of a theological cosmic vision of the four corners of the heavens which was appropriated by the Christian cross and the symbols of the four evangelists. Christian believers have little appreciation that their saviour symbol evolved from a snake. But the association of the snake with blasphemy illustrates how comprehensively Christians have internalised a false supernatural theocratic attitude. What is really Embarrassing is that anyone could try to use this so-called criterion as a sensible argument. What is really Dissimilar is the Biblical Studies Guild and sound academic scientific research. Using faith as a foundation is a research method with feet of clay, weighed in the balance and found wanting.

Huon

1762 - Jean Calas.
1766 - Jean-François de la Barre.
1769 - Pierre-Paul Sirven.

Huon

Jean Calas (1698 – 10 March 1762) was a Protestant merchant living in Toulouse, France, famous for having been the victim of a biased trial due to his being a Protestant.

Louis, one of the Calas's sons, converted to Catholicism in 1756. On 13–14 October 1761, another of the Calas sons, Marc-Antoine, was found dead on the ground floor of the family's home. Rumors had it that Jean Calas had killed his son because he, too, intended to convert to Catholicism.
Despite overwhelming evidence that the death was a suicide, the court in Toulouse held that Jean Calas had murdered his son.

On 9 March 1762, the parlement (regional legislature that also tried cases) of Toulouse sentenced Jean Calas to death on the wheel. On 10 March, at the age of 64, he died tortured on the wheel, while still very firmly claiming his innocence.

Voltaire, contacted about the case, after initial suspicions that Calas was guilty of anti-Catholic fanaticism had subsided, began a campaign to get Calas' sentence overturned. He claimed that Marc-Antoine had committed suicide because of gambling debts and not being able to finish his university studies due to his confession. Voltaire's efforts were successful: king Louis XV received the family, and had the sentence annulled in 1764. The king fired the chief magistrate of Toulouse, the Capitoul. The trial was done over by another court and in 1765 the unfortunate Jean Calas was posthumously exonerated on all charges. His family was paid 36,000 francs by the king in compensation.

Huon

Jean-François Lefevre de la Barre (September 12, 1745 – July 1, 1766) was a French nobleman, famous for having been tortured and beheaded before his body was burnt on a pyre along with Voltaire's "Philosophical Dictionary."

He is often said to have been executed for not saluting a religious procession.

Among other things, it came out that three young men, Gaillard d'Etallonde, Jean-François de La Barre, and Moisnel had not removed their hats when a Corpus Cristi procession went by, on August 9, 1765 in the devout town of Abbeville, Northern France. This incident is often cited as the main basis for the charges.

The english wikipedia version describes the events in a form which would not been accepted presently in France. It mentions that numerous other blasphemies were alleged as well, including defecation on another crucifix (not proved), singing impious songs (not proved) and spitting on religious images (not proved).

Gaillard d'Etallonde flew to Holland, and was sentenced in absentia.
Moisnel was 15 years old in 1765, and testified that he had seen d'Etallonde strike the statue with his cane on previous occasions. Moisnel was not sentenced.

On July 1, 1766, La Barre was tortured early in the morning. Though he appears to have been with others when he committed some of the lesser acts named in the sentence, he refused to name any even under torture. Later the same day he was beheaded and his body burned, the ashes thrown in the Somme River. Voltaire's work was burned along with La Barre's body.

The sentence was reversed by the National Convention during the French Revolution in 1794.

One of the most famous, if unexplained [opinion of wikipedia], later references to the case, comes from Dickens, in the first pages of A Tale of Two Cities (1859):

France, less favoured on the whole as to matters spiritual than her sister of the shield and trident, rolled with exceeding smoothness down hill, making paper money and spending it. Under the guidance of her Christian pastors, she entertained herself, besides, with such humane achievements as sentencing a youth to have his hands cut off, his tongue torn out with pincers, and his body burned alive, because he had not kneeled down in the rain to do honour to a dirty procession of monks which passed within his view, at a distance of some fifty or sixty yards.

Huon

Pierre-Paul Sirven (1709–1777) is one of Voltaire's causes célèbres in his campaign to écraser l'infâme (crush infamy).

Sirven became an archivist and notary in Castres, southern France, in 1736. He was a Protestant with three daughters; the middle one, Elizabeth, was mentally handicapped.

Elizabeth disappeared on 6 March 1760, aged 21. After having searched for her without success, Sirven learned that she had been taken into the convent of the Dames Noires (the ‘black ladies’), a convent founded in 1686 to keep daughters of Protestants sent to them under a lettre de cachet, the infamous means by which certain persons in authority could lock away those against whom they had a grudge, without trial or appeal. On 9 October 1760, Elizabeth suffered such a mental breakdown as a result of the ill treatment she received from the Dames Noires that they released her.

Sirven was so angry over the state of his daughter that he publicly denounced her treatment by the Dames Noires. They retaliated with a law suit accusing him of mistreating his daughter in order to prevent her conversion to Catholicism. They obtained an order against Sirven to allow Elizabeth free access to the convent and to accompany her himself to the services.

At the end of August 1761, the Sirven family moved to Saint Alby, near Mazamet, to avoid further persecution. On 16 December, Elizabeth disappeared again. Two weeks of searching yielded no results but on 3 January 1762 three children found her body down a well.

Initially medical examinations found that she had suffered no violence but, under pressure from the public prosecutor Trinquier of Mazamet, they changed their evidence to say that Elizabeth had not died by drowning. A warrant for Sirven’s arrest was issued on 20 January 1762, but the family was able to escape in time.

A sentence passed on them in absentia on 29 March 1764 condemned the father to be broken on the wheel, the mother to be hanged and the two surviving daughters to be banished. Their effigies were burned in Mazamet on 11 September 1764.

Sirven returned to Mazamet in 1769 and was remanded in custody to await the decision of the Toulouse parlement.

The mood in Toulouse had changed radically since the Calas case, partly in response to the public outcry over that case, partly as a result of the formation of the more liberal ministry in Paris headed by Maupeou. Sirven was released in December 1769 and on 25 November 1771 the Toulouse parlement overturned the original sentence, rehabilitated the entire Sirven family and ordered the town of Mazamet to pay compensation.

Toto

Go back to the OP. Blasphemy is a victimless crime and persecutions for blasphemy are some of the low points of European history - but does any of this support Pete's contention that blasphemy laws can explain why we never even hear of mythicism before the 18th century?

Huon

Certainly. The power of the Catholic, Anglican, and Protestant Churches on every attitude which could be understood "against religion" was very restricting. But the idea that "God does not exist" was at that time (and still is) more important than the idea that "everything about Jesus is mythical".

God can exist without Jesus, ask the religious Jews.