The phenomenology of the historical jesus.

[Clive]

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss phenomenology, a style of philosophy developed by the German thinker Edmund Husserl in the first decades of the 20th century. Husserl's initial insights underwent a radical transformation in the work of his student Martin Heidegger, and played a key role in the development of French philosophy at the hands of writers like Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

Phenomenology has been a remarkably adaptable approach to philosophy. It has given its proponents a platform to expose and critique the basic assumptions of past philosophy, and to talk about everything from the foundations of geometry to the difference between fear and anxiety. It has also been instrumental in getting philosophy out of the seminar room and making it relevant to the lives people actually lead.

GUESTS

Simon Glendinning, Professor of European Philosophy in the European Institute at the London School of Economics

Joanna Hodge, Professor of Philosophy at Manchester Metropolitan University

Stephen Mulhall, Professor of Philosophy and Tutor at New College at the University of Oxford

There are so many assumptions in the standard history of christianity it is ridiculous, and fascinating how, what is actually a reasonable position to hold - that there is hardly anything and very likely nothing behind the idea of a Jesus of Nazareth as the founder - is continually harrumphed and poo pooed.

Why is not the history of christianity not discussed in standard academic terms? The idea of the real is a very studied area. It is as if certain areas have taboo labels on them!

Phenomenology (from Greek phainómenon "that which appears" and lógos "study

wiki

Jacques Derrida (trans. Marian Hobson), The Problem of Genesis in Husserl's Phenomenology (University of Chicago Press, 2003; first published 1954)

Penelope Deutscher, A Politics of Impossible Difference: The Later Work of Luce Irigaray (Cornell University Press, 2002)

Rosalyn Diprose, The Bodies of Women: Ethics, Embodiment and Sexual Difference (Routledge, 1994)

Sebastian Gardner, Sartre’s Being and Nothingness: A Reader’s Guide (Continuum, 2009)

Simon Glendinning, In the Name of Phenomenology (Routledge, 2007)

Sara Heinamaa, Toward a Phenomenology of Sexual Difference: Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Beauvoir (Rowman and Littlefield, 2003)

Edmund Husserl (trans. L. Hardy), The Idea of Phenomenology (Springer, 1999; first published 1907)

Gregory McCulloch, Using Sartre: An Analytical Introduction to Early Sartrean Themes (Routledge, 1994)

Dermot Moran, Introduction to Phenomenology (Routledge, 1999)

Dermot Moran, Edmund Husserl: Founder of Phenomenology (Polity Press, 2005)

Michael L. Morgan, Discovering Levinas (Cambridge University Press, 2008)

Katherine Morris, Starting with Merleau-Ponty (Continuum, 2012)

Stephen Mulhall, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Heidegger and Being and Time (Routledge, 2005)

Daniel Thomas Primozic, On Merleau-Ponty (Cengage Learning, 2000)

A.D. Smith, Routledge Philosophy GuideBook to Husserl and the Cartesian Meditations (Routledge, 2003)

Donn Welton, The Other Husserl: The Horizons of Transcendental Phenomenology (Indiana University Press, 2002)

Dan Zahavi, Husserl’s Phenomenology (Stanford University Press, 2003)

Useful Websites:

Phenomenology – Wikipedia

Phenomenology – Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

[outhouse]

- that there is hardly anything and very likely nothing behind the idea of a Jesus of Nazareth as the founder - is continually harrumphed and poo pooed.

How accurate is this opinion of yours?


It is accepted and well known. Jesus did not found Christianity. People after his death did, from many centers, all through the Diaspora.


Would you also like to argue Paul that Paul founded the movement?

[outhouse]

what is actually a reasonable position to hold

That in itself would have been a good question.


I think the current minimal position goes like this.

A traveling teacher staying in small poor Aramaic villages who was originally from Nazareth baptized by John, practicing Aramaic Galilean apocalyptic Judaism, teaching and healing, after taking over Johns movement and death. Made at least one trip to the temple where he caused trouble in the temple at Passover and was crucified for it under Roman rule.


Not much at all.

[MrMacSon]

... it is ridiculous, and fascinating how, what is actually a reasonable position to hold - that there is hardly anything and very likely nothing behind the idea of a Jesus of Nazareth as the founder - is continually harrumphed and poo pooed.

I agree. Though the real issue is Christianity being founded on narratives about the idea of a Jesus of Nazareth.

[Sheshbazzar]

Problem with the Jesus of Nazareth character is it whatever it may be that one thinks was 'there', the NT character and his alleged actions are all bound up in and motivated by 'prophecy fulfillment', from birth to death.

Putting aside for the moment the question of whether there was an actual person on which the NT tales were constructed, We have a 'set up' prophecy situation, where if such an individual did not exist, those who were certain that the OT prophecies were being fulfilled would have strong convictions and an impetus to 'find', and/or postulate just what prophecies this prophesied and expected 'person' would 'fulfill'.
Thus the tale begins with the miraculous birth story(s). All being based upon and so constructed as to 'fulfill' ancient Jewish 'prophecies';

"Now all this was done, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet(s)".

So, this being evident, the reasonable question to be asked regarding what the Gospels have to say about this birth, is this NT birth account to be taken as an accurate description of the actual circumstances of a certain Jewish mans birth?
Or is it not rather a 'just so' religious creation constructed so as to 'fit' it to the ancient prophecies?

What then, if we do not believe in the Jewish god, and in 'miraculous conceptions', can we take from these elaborate 'prophecy fulfillment' birth tales as being any accurate account of the circumstances of some Jewish persons birth?
Where 'he' was born? where he lived ? where did he preach? all straight from prophecies (Matt 2:6-23, 4:13-17)
Virtually everything of significance 'he' did in his 'life', and in the timing and manner of his 'death,' being in a 'fulfillment' of some old Tanakh 'prophecy' gussied up with a few details.
Was this 'man' some kind of mentally deranged lunatic who thought he was the 'fulfillment' of prophecies?
and spent his life creating and forcing 'situations' that would make him appear to be The Fulfillment of this that and another (literally hundreds of) ancient prophetic texts? (there is so much wrong with accepting that idea, that it is silly)
Or was not all this the literary creation of religious writers? And if so where is the man, other than that one being a writers literary protagonist created with pen and ink, for the sole purpose of the 'fulfilling' of prophecies?
Take away the 'miracle' worker, and 'fulfilling' of a prophecy' birth, and the 'prophecy fulfilling' of every major action and 'event'
of this Biblical character, and there is nothing descriptive of a man left.
Whatever one claims about the 'life' or 'death' of the Bible's Jesus character, is always ipso facto dependent upon some prophecy having been in fact 'fulfilled'.
Now it is self evident that the Prophecies of the 'OT' were not created after the fact,_ not written after this 'mans' life so as to 'fit', and to explain the actions this latter Biblical character.
But the Jesus of Nazareth character in all of its aspects, birth, life, and manner of death, was written so as to 'fit' him to the Tanakh's prophecies. Jesus of Nazareth is a literary prophecy fulfillment 'figure', not ever a living human being.

[Clive]

t is accepted and well known. Jesus did not found Christianity.

OK.

Why then propose a historical Jesus? If aJesus is not required, what precisely is the problem with proposing literary, imaginative creation?

[Clive]

I think the current minimal position goes like this.

A traveling teacher staying in small poor Aramaic villages who was originally from Nazareth baptized by John, practicing Aramaic Galilean apocalyptic Judaism, teaching and healing, after taking over Johns movement and death. Made at least one trip to the temple where he caused trouble in the temple at Passover and was crucified for it under Roman rule.


Not much at all.

OK, but why propose this? Why the assumption that there is history in the gospels?

[Clive]

A traveling teacher

It is not obvious that Homer is cracking one of the first jokes in European literature when the king of the faraway Phaeacians assures Odysseus that their sailors can take him home, wherever that may be - "even if it is far beyond Euboea, the most distant place there is, according to our people who have seen it". Euboea is hardly a name to conjure with these days: few could say where it is (let alone spell it). But if Homer was originally performing on the island of Chios, which is more than likely, then Euboea (modern Evia), the mountainous island that stretches down close to the eastern flank of mainland Greece, was a short, if hazardous, dash across the Aegean. In fact, as Robin Lane Fox points out, with a characteristically vivid glimpse of topographical reality, Euboea is visible from Chios on a good day.

In this seemingly effortless yet stupendously erudite book, Lane Fox attempts to put the Euboeans at the very centre of the map of early iron-age Greek history, the ninth and eight centuries BC. Traders or pirates (not always a clear distinction) from Chalcis and Eretria, the two main Euboean cities, are his "heroes". On their intrepid voyages they took with them an imperishable crockery that has been found in an extraordinarily wide scatter of places around the Mediterranean. The pendant semi-circle skyphos (cup) is their distinctive local pottery.

Documenting these finds, Lane Fox homes in on two areas in particular: one is what he calls the "Cyprus, Cilicia, north Syria triangle"; the other is bordered by Sicily, Sardinia and the Bay of Naples. He has even found a superbly apt passage of Gertrude Bell in 1906 likening the beautiful bay and mountain just north of the Turkish-Syrian border to the Bay of Naples and Vesuvius.

The ancient Greeks, like their counterparts today, spread a vibrant diaspora. The first great wave, in the late seventh and sixth centuries BC, set out from many base-cities, and established settlements from Trebizond to Marseille and Cyrene to Syracuse. But, according to Lane Fox, they were following in the slipstream of Euboeans who had opened up the way in the previous decades. And this was a cultural diffusion as well as geographical; they were the first to apply and adapt the Greek mindset to these distant, often multicultural, locations. One of them, he even claims, should be given sole credit for appropriating and transforming the Phoenician into the Greek alphabet (the not-too-distant forerunner of the letters you are reading at this moment).

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/n ... oes-review

[Robert Tulip]

Hello Clive,thank you for starting this thread.

I have a Master of Arts Honours Degree for a thesis on The Place of Ethics in Heidegger's Ontology. However I have found very few people with interest in discussion of the meaning of being as care, Heidegger's key ethical ontological idea, perhaps because of the way it confronts pervasive religious traditions and assumptions.

Husserl's phenomenology in his Ideas and his Cartesian Meditations is based on analysis of the relation between thought and its objects, against his motto,'To The Things Themselves'.

The relation between phenomenology and theology was prominent in Heidegger's early writings, such as his study of Thessalonians. Heidegger later developed a highly meditative and contemplative attitude, based on what he called the fourfold of Earth and Sky, Man and Gods. His trinity in his An Introduction to Metaphysics, - Nature, Language and Truth (physis, logos, aletheia) bears strong comparison to Christian theology. However, Heidegger and Husserl are generally regarded as located within an atheist stream of thought, with Heidegger's Being and Time providing the intellectual foundations for the existentialist ideas of Sartre's Being and Nothingness. Heidegger's appalling Nazism has been a major taboo preventing the broader study of his work. The general supinity of Anglo philosophy before science, with a general failure to appreciate Kant's Copernican Revolution against Hume, has also produced a large amount of bigotry towards continental philosophy.

Applying Husserl's phenomenological motto 'to the things themselves' to the material regarding Jesus of Nazareth produces little in the way of things, apart from extensive textual discussion. The phenomenology of Nazareth should analyse how the trope evolved in cultural and political usage. Memetic roots of Nazareth in the Nazarite watchers, the Netser branch, and other related Gnostic themes have a stronger phenomenological basis than conventional literalism. Similarly, the evolution of the concept of an anointed saviour provides a phenomenological basis to analyse the growth of belief in Jesus Christ.

It would indeed be immensely valuable to open conversations between phenomenology and Christ Mythicism. My impression is that most analysis of the mythicist evidence is rather weak in both philosophical and theological terms. Heidegger's question of being, grounded in Husserl's approach to logic, in fact provides a valuable theoretical framework for rational analysis of theological and religious phenomena.

[outhouse]

t is accepted and well known. Jesus did not found Christianity.

OK.

Why then propose a historical Jesus? If aJesus is not required, what precisely is the problem with proposing literary, imaginative creation?

Who said he was not required?


He was not the one who proposed a Hellenistic divorce from cultural Judaism, or wrote a single piece of literature.

His martyrdom lit the fire, that it.