[color=#004000]maryhelena[/color] wrote:
.. history tells us that a Jewish insurrectionist movement did not fail - it succeeded, albeit for 3 short years of freedom from Rome.
MrMacSon wrote:
What 3 yrs are you referring to here?
MrMacSon wrote:The gospel crucifixion story may well reflect "the Roman execution of Antigonus - the last real *King of the Jews* - in 37 b.c.e", regardless of the other narratives or the way they developed.
History is what history is......
By all means suggest other narratives but support them with Jewish history. As regards Antigonus and the gospel crucifixion story - you would have to demonstrate that a King of the Jews was executed by Rome later than the date for Antigonus - and that's a fruitless exercise anyway because there was not another King of the Jews executed by Rome. A former King, Hyrcanus II? Executed by Herod in 30 b.c.e. - no direct Roman involvement. The Roman execution of Antigonus ended Hasmonean rule in Judea. Herod's execution of Hyrcanus changed nothing politically.
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
W.B. Yeats
maryhelena wrote:
By all means suggest other narratives but support them with Jewish history.
Why?? The gospel narratives don't have to be based on history...
maryhelena wrote:
As regards Antigonus and the gospel crucifixion story - you would have to demonstrate that a King of the Jews was executed by Rome later than the date for Antigonus ...
Why??! -- I thought that you wanted the gospel crucifixion story to be based upon the history of the Roman execution of Antigonus, or considered as such.
maryhelena wrote:Well - that truly says it all......and mythicists wonder why they never get a hearing from NT scholars...
I think that this is a misidentification of the real reason why most NT scholars reject "mythicism" in order to give your personal pet theory more weight than it possesses. "History" isn't just what happened in the real world. "History" also encompasses ideas, texts and stories, with no regard of whether those texts or stories deal with facts or ideas.
There's lots of NT scholars who see the gospel narratives as myth. Anything historical is just treated as an echo, and scholars differ over what is what. If you see the gospels as the result of a game of Chinese whispers, the connection to history becomes quite tenuous.
maryhelena wrote:Well - that truly says it all......and mythicists wonder why they never get a hearing from NT scholars...
I think that this is a misidentification of the real reason why most NT scholars reject "mythicism" in order to give your personal pet theory more weight than it possesses. "History" isn't just what happened in the real world. "History" also encompasses ideas and texts, with no regard of whether those texts deal with facts or ideas.
I think we have been here before.....History is what it is - events that happened in the past. Just as Kennedy was assassinated and various ideas, stories etc, grew up around that assassination; but while these ideas sit next to the assassination - the assassination stands on its own. The ideas, the stories, depend upon the historical reality in the real world.
There's lots of NT scholars who see the gospel narratives as myth. Anything historical is just treated as an echo, and scholars differ over what is what. If you see the gospels as the result of a game of Chinese whispers, the connection to history becomes quite tenuous.
That's nothing they should be proud of! As Bermejo-Rubio wrote regarding the sedition issue - NT scholars have wax in their ears.....
History is paramount, it's the bottom line in any search for early christian origins. Carrier's pet mythicism theory rests upon an interpretation of Pauline theology/philosophy. The pet theory of the Jesus historicists is based upon historical assumptions. My pet theory rests upon Hasmonean/Jewish history.
History is not a game of Chinese whispers - history is raw and dangerous - and is an unwelcome visitor for both the Jesus historicists and the Carrier mythicists.
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
W.B. Yeats
maryhelena wrote:I think we have been here before.....
Indeed.
maryhelena wrote:History is what it is - events that happened in the past.
Right, and the telling of stories and writing down of ideas are also real events that happened in the real past. Plato wrote his texts, and those had a huge influence on the next centuries. Your idea of what "history" encompasses is far too limited to be useful in any way or form.
Real events of course influence ideas. They are not all there is though.
maryhelena wrote:I think we have been here before.....
Indeed.
maryhelena wrote:History is what it is - events that happened in the past.
Right, and the telling of stories and writing down of ideas are also real events that happened in the real past. Plato wrote his texts, and those had a huge influence on the next centuries. Your idea of what "history" encompasses is far too limited to be useful in any way or form.
Real events of course influence ideas. They are not all there is though.
I have not discounted ideas and stories etc - I am saying that the primary source, in relation to searching for early christian history, is history in the real world. Without seeking a historical foundation in the search for early christian origins - then ideas can become just a case blowing in the wind....
Philo did not only write about ideas - he also wrote about Jewish history. His story re Agrippa I and Carabbas finding reflection within the gospel Jesus and Barabbas story.
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
W.B. Yeats
Maryhelena, please note that the view of the prof is different from your insofar he writes:
It would be unfair to claim that by proposing the image of a rebellious Jesus we are straying far from the synoptic Jesus. I have nowhere resorted to the Slavonic Josephus, neither to pagan anti-Christian authors (Celsus, Hierocles…) hinting at Jesus as a rebel, neither to Jewish polemics, neither to suspicious apocryphal texts. Moreover, the Jesus here portrayed is not a Jesus hidden behind or beyond the sources. The building blocks of the Jesus figure we have reconstructed come from the canonical Gospels themselves (occasionally supplemented by other New Testament writings). It is the Christian Scriptures that afford us with this view, not the ‘fanciful minds’ of Reimarus, Hennell, Kautsky, Eisler, Brandon, Maccoby, and so on. Put otherwise, the seditious Jesus is also a remembered Jesus.378 This, in turn, means that if Jesus was not a seditionist, the Gospels—as far as they contain much evidence which is otherwise unintelligible—would be desperately absurd and meaningless texts. Unless the Gospels are tales told by an idiot, the involvement of Jesus in anti-Roman activities is an inescapable corollary.
(p. 99, my bold)
Sincerely, I am going to be convinced by his arguments. I wait his next article about a revaluation of the Criterion of Embarrassment.
Nihil enim in speciem fallacius est quam prava religio. -Liv. xxxix. 16.
