The Criterion of Embarrassment strikes back

[Giuseppe]

Changing Methods, Disturbing Material
- Should the Criterion of Embarrassment Be Dismissed in Jesus Research?
by Fernando Bermejo-Rubio.

http://poj.peeters-leuven.be/content.ph ... l_code=REJ

A promise: If even this re-evaluation of the CoE fails, then I will give up permanently to any attempt to recover the historical Jesus by imagining some kind of chimeric ''oral tradition'' behind our stories.

[outhouse]

link not working besides title.

Caution should always be used. But we don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

[MrMacSon]

Changing Methods, Disturbing Material
- Should the Criterion of Embarrassment Be Dismissed in Jesus Research?
by Fernando Bermejo-Rubio.

http://poj.peeters-leuven.be/content.ph ... l_code=REJ

A promise: If even this re-evaluation of the CoE fails, then I will give up permanently to any attempt to recover the historical Jesus by imagining some kind of chimeric ''oral tradition'' behind our stories.

It's interesting that's published in the 'Journal of Jewish Studies'. I wonder if he tried to have it published in a Christian or Jesus-studies journal (such as the Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus)...

[Giuseppe]

So Richard Carrier in Proving History:

Surely if anything was actually embarrassing about Jesus, we can fairly well assume it would not survive in the record at all, since very likely no one would have recorded it, at least not faithfully.

(p. 135)

And so the answer of prof Bermejo-Rubio (in the article above) just to that point of Carrier:

...embarrassing traces (in this case, of Jesus' political involvement) have been indeed recorded, but not faithfully.

(n. 84, original corsive)

If I understand well after only a first rapid reading, the argument of Bermejo-Rubio for a revaluation of CoE, is the following:

1) “quite a few passages are rather cryptic and muddy”,

2) “their opacity usually presents a consistent form”.

3) point 2 implies the intention (by the evangelist) of describing and explaining something.

4) point 1 implies the failure of realizing the intention shown in point 3.

5) a seditious Jesus explains the apparent contradiction between 3 and 4 because it is probably the “something” that the evangelist has failed to explain (=has recorded not faithfully).

MY PERSONAL CONCLUSION:

If it's true that the Bermejo Rubio's argument in support of CoE seems very well argued (even if in a form strictly linked with the specific historical Jesus by him held in mind: a seditious Jesus), it is also true, at least in my view, that the emphasis of the critics, as the same prof recognizes again and again, is on the weight of the perception more than on the reality of a seditious Jesus:

...Jesus was not an actual threat for the Romans, but was only perceived to be such...

...Jesus was crucified because he was deemed to be mad...

...Jesus would be executed because in politics, perception is reality...

While I disagree with their (clearly) apologetical explanation (''a historical Jesus would be crucified because of the Jewish pressure and conspiracy, misunderstanding of Pilate'', etc...), even so I agree on the right weight that has to be given on the power of perception:
how can Bermejo-Rubio prove that the Gospels weren't instead a REAL apologia against a real but FALSE accuse of sedition?

If a “crucified Christ” is only a myth, then an apologia would be necessary to remove a real accuse against the myth but basically false in his claim: a mythological Christ would be considered “seditious” (and even euhemerized as such on the Earth even before the first Gospel was written) insofar the mythic Christ is really seditious not against the Roman Empire but against the Pagan Gods.

If the adorers of Mithra claimed that Mithra's goal in the imminent future was the total destruction of the Pagan idols, then also Mithra would be been euhemerized on the Earth as a seditious man.

Therefore the ''cryptic'' and ''muddy'' passages, disiepta membra of sedition, may be the last traces of a proto-Gospel or of an oral tradition coming back to the first preachers of a mythical “Crucified Christ”, in this sense very much more seditious than we can imagine, even if mythical.

[Giuseppe]

Three reasons of the evangelists to remember and mask the memory of a seditious Jesus:

1) we have disiepta membra of sedition. The risk is to see the single trees, but not the entire forest.

2) any single element of the pattern is semi-hidden by other invented material, sometimes created to the precise goal to neutralize the relative seditious element.

3) the pattern is been tamed deliberately sometimes. So we have the paradox of episodes who are clearly fantastic and not-historical even if they allude to sedition.


THE CHALLENGE of the prof:

No people are able to explain the entire forest (and not the single trees taken in isolation) of seditious clues without doing appeal to the hypothesis of a historical seditious Jesus as best explanation of the evidence.

MY CRITICISM:

I think that the solution of this apparent enigma is the exact opposite of what was claimed by this scholar:

J. A. Trumbover.

The Historical Jesus and the Speech of Gamaliel (Acts 5.35-39)

we can be fairly certain that no Christian (including Luke) would want to initiate such a process [ ...] It seems highly unlikely that any Christian source would want to paint the Christian hero in terms reminiscent of failed revolutionary or prophets.

I think that the work of Lena Einhorn has shown indirectly that the opposite is true:

It seems highly likely that the evangelists would want to paint the Christian hero in terms reminiscent of failed revolutionary or prophets.

The hypothesis is confirmed by Detering just in his criticism of the work of Lena Einhorn.

What do you think?

I am curious to know your view about.

Very thanks.

[Giuseppe]

Now I agree fully with Detering about this precise point:

I quote his precise passage (translated in English thanks to Renè Salm) where he is open partially to Lena Einhorn's work:

I do not dispute that some of the parallels Einhorn draws between Josephus and the New Testament have a certain plausibility. Nevertheless, I cannot ascribe to her hypothesis of a “time shift” in the form presented. The reason ultimately is that Einhorn believes she must adhere to the historicity of the Christian messiah. [...] In my opinion, cleaving to the historicity of Jesus is a premise that may help explain the sometimes striking parallels and anachronisms, but that premise itself is not necessary.

The fact that Einhorn has not proven anything does not diminish her book. The explanation for the striking parallels between the New Testament and Josephus must be sought elsewhere. For me, that “elsewhere” becomes apparent when one jettisons the presupposition of a historical existence for Jesus. Doing so allows one to appreciate that Jesus is in all probability a late literary construct, the product of various messianic and gnostic streams of tradition that have flowed “synthetically into one.”

Elsewhere I have described how a savior entity, conceived in purely mythological terms, underwent a process of “historization.” In the eyes of its devotees, the entity was originally indistinguishable from other divinities familiar to the mystery religions, divinities that may well have preceded it. Through mingling with historical—in fact, pseudo-historical—elements, the author of the Gospel of Mark (or perhaps his predecessor) was one of the first to meet his community’s demands for a more concrete divinity, this presumably in Rome in the second century. Hence the creation of a savior in history, a savior combining traits of various messianic contenders and prophets mentioned by Josephus (for example, the preacher of destruction Jesus ben Ananias). This is not the art of the historian but of the storyteller, for though it begins with historical events it uses them for fictional and literary ends.

Replace in the above quote ''Lena Einhorn'' with ''Bermejo-Rubio'' and you will have a quasi-identical valid and effective answer to the challenge thrown by the theoric of a seditious Jesus.

After this analysis, I feel myself more 'mythicist' than before.

[Giuseppe]

I find that a valid similar criticism is raised by Carrier against Einhorn, and I think it can be raised very well also against Bermejo-Rubio in an effective way just to answer his apparent more strong argument: the pattern of seditious clues finds really an explanation of the its presence considered in its totality, but that explanation doesn't assume a historical Jesus. That hypothesis is really not necessary.

Just as they lifted the story of Jesus ben Ananias, from the era of Nero, to fabricate a plot for their Jesus ben Joseph (OHJ, pp. 428-30), they may well have done the same for The Egyptian, and indeed may have borrowed from all the Josephan Christs to build their mosaic (all of whom were portraying themselves as a Jesus Christ, i.e. a messianic Joshua reborn: OHJ, pp. 67-73, 245-46). That does not in any way mean Jesus of Nazareth is Jesus ben Ananias, and thus actually lived under Nero. He very certainly is not, and did not. Nor, therefore, can it mean he “is” The Egyptian, if he was built out of him, too. Rather, the stories that accumulated from famous Jesuses and other prophets in the three decades between when the sect began its new gospel in the 30s and the Jewish War of the 60s were simply thrown in a hamper and drawn from, collectively, when finally there came the thought of building the mythical Jesus of the Gospels.

(my bold)

[Giuseppe]

Unfortunately, it seems that Carrier disagrees with my counter-argument to Bermejo-Rubio's argument. I find it very strange.

Is not to find seditious clues in the Gospels the same thing of finding midrash from Josephian Christs in the Gospels ?

This is a question I would like to put.