McGrath in Bible and Interpretation on mythicism

Discussion about the New Testament, apocrypha, gnostics, church fathers, Christian origins, historical Jesus or otherwise, etc.
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hjalti
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McGrath in Bible and Interpretation on mythicism

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hjalti
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Re: McGrath in Bible and Interpretation on mythicism

Post by hjalti »

This is funny:
And yet, despite such statements [the consesus should not be dismissed lightly] from Carrier, we still find him offering rude insults on his blog, of a sort that are par for the course in the online apologetics of Intelligent Design and other denialist movements, aimed at Maurice Casey’s recently-published critique of mythicism. Casey may well be wrong about things, and he certainly does not always reflect the scholarly consensus in his volume Jesus: Evidence and Argument or Mythicist Myths? But he is not a fool.
stevencarrwork
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Re: McGrath in Bible and Interpretation on mythicism

Post by stevencarrwork »

Gosh, McGrath found the time to write a lot of words. Has Dr. Who been cancelled or something?

MCGRATH
If we visit the Facebook page of Robert M. Price, another mythicist, and one of the few who has appropriate credentials, we find that he has embraced climate change denialism just as he has embraced mythicism. When one is open to conspiracy theory thinking about experts in one field, is it any surprise if they fall for it in others?

CARR
Presumably this means that McGrath will rule out any Biblical scholar who thinks Jesus really was resurrected as somebody who is ruled out as a serious thinker.

After all, if Price can be misled in a field in which he is not an expert, and so be revealed as an unserious thinker, how much more unserious can somebody be who falls for conspiracy theories in the very field in which he does claim to be an expert?


And Casey is not a fool.

He is a highly gifted psychic who can see what I was doing at Cambridge. Even though I personally have totally forgotten the times I visited Tyndale House, blanked from my memory as though I had never been there, Casey can see my visits as clearly as he can see the Aramaic wax tablets he can read better than the Gospel writers who had them in front of them.....
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Blood
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Re: McGrath in Bible and Interpretation on mythicism

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Brodie’s argument, in a nutshell, is that everything in the Gospels is explicable as a direct literary reworking of earlier texts, and therefore stories about Jesus were created through a purely literary process, and not on the basis of historical memories or oral traditions stemming from historical events.
This can actually be demonstrated. It is therefore far more credible than positing a complex process of oral transmission and translation, which cannot be demonstrated.
Brodie’s view of the compositional method used by New Testament authors seems unparalleled, and thus historically problematic. Examples need to be provided of texts being composed in the manner that Brodie posits, where not only are major themes and phrases echoed or quoted, but minor or tangential details and prepositions from an earlier text are utilized as the inspiration for composing a new story, and indeed, a complete new work filled with stories about an individual.
It is neither unparalleled nor problematic. Examples include every other book in the Bible and related texts such as the pseudepigrapha. James Newsome wrote a book on the subject of The Synoptic Harmony of Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles : With Related Passages from Psalms, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezra.
Last edited by Blood on Thu Mar 27, 2014 5:10 am, edited 2 times in total.
“The only sensible response to fragmented, slowly but randomly accruing evidence is radical open-mindedness. A single, simple explanation for a historical event is generally a failure of imagination, not a triumph of induction.” William H.C. Propp
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Blood
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Re: McGrath in Bible and Interpretation on mythicism

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It sounds like McGrath is starting to crack.
“The only sensible response to fragmented, slowly but randomly accruing evidence is radical open-mindedness. A single, simple explanation for a historical event is generally a failure of imagination, not a triumph of induction.” William H.C. Propp
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Re: McGrath in Bible and Interpretation on mythicism

Post by neilgodfrey »

I can't resist alerting readers here to a very nice post "Some Thoughts on the Nature of the Evidence and the Historicity of Jesus" by Tim Widowfield on James McG's Bible and Interpretation post.
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hjalti
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Re: McGrath in Bible and Interpretation on mythicism

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If Paul Egtvedt is on this forum, then I would like to thank him for an excellent comment over at The Bible and Interpretation :)
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hjalti
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Re: McGrath in Bible and Interpretation on mythicism

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Emmanuel Pfoh comments:
Dear James,

you write: "Casey may well be wrong about things, and he certainly does not always reflect the scholarly consensus in his volume Jesus: Evidence and Argument or Mythicist Myths? But he is not a fool."

Given the mistreatment, the misrepresentation and the misunderstanding Casey has offered in his recent book about the work of Thompson, Lemche and, most bizarrely, myself--which stands closer to libel and propaganda than to proper scholarship--he at least can be accused of writing foolishly, which does not live up to his previous reputation as a scholar. I'm pretty sure Thompson, Lemche and myself have never written that Jesus never existed. I for one wrote in my one and only paper on the matter that there are epistemological problems for historical reconstruction of an ancient individual--pretty standard procedure in professional history circles. I can say then only a fool would consider that 'mythicism'.

Emanuel Pfoh
#18 - Emanuel Pfoh - 03/28/2014 - 10:24
"Shots fired!" :lol:
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Re: McGrath in Bible and Interpretation on mythicism

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Interesting question raised over on the Bible and Interpretation site:
According to the myth theory, the idea that Jesus was known to Cephas and the others during an earthly life was a later invention. Carrier and Doherty think that Jesus was originally thought of as a celestial being. This original understanding was then completely superseded by the idea of a historical Jesus.

This raises an interesting question: why did the later idea supersede the original one? Presumably, because it was a better story. In fact, it must have been a much better story because no one bothered to preserve the original. This appears to create a problem when we try to understand the origin of Christianity. The challenge here is to understand what made the belief so attractive in the first place? From the mythicist perspective, the original belief was so unappealing that it was soon replaced by something completely different. This creates a fatal problem for mythicists. Mythicism makes the origin of Christianity inexplicable.
#35 - Stuart - 03/31/2014 - 19:52

http://www.bibleinterp.com/articles/201 ... 8024.shtml
I think this writer is correct re the Carrier-Doherty thesis. That version of the mythicist position cannot succeed in establishing early christian origins. Why? Because tracing the development of ideas without tracing the people who held those ideas is futile. Ideas don't exist in a vacuum, people hold ideas, they develop ideas. Who were the people that held the ideas in the NT? What does the NT itself indicate was the history that influenced the creation of its Jesus story? What events within that history were important enough, of significance enough, for the NT writers to reflect them in their Jesus story? Answers to these questions could well lead to the people for whom that Jesus story had personal, and historical, value. Personal value of such esteemed worth that they saw fit to preserve that value for prosperity. Others, reading their story, finding their own value in it.
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stevencarrwork
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Re: McGrath in Bible and Interpretation on mythicism

Post by stevencarrwork »

Yes, we can't tell something is a myth unless we know who developed that myth, how and why.

That is why I doubt that the story of Jack and the Beanstalk is a myth.
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