The Tide Turns

Discussion about the New Testament, apocrypha, gnostics, church fathers, Christian origins, historical Jesus or otherwise, etc.
bcedaifu
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Re: The Tide Turns

Post by bcedaifu »

Ulan wrote: Yes, I meant the naming of historical figures within the texts, which gives the texts the air of history, which of course doesn't mean that it is history, but gives you a rough pointer of where to start looking for clues.
Ulan, that is completely nonsensical. Scrutiny of ancient texts cannot provide a “rough pointer of where to start looking for clues” to demonstrate the historicity of fictional character.

Do you get some clues about the life of Hikaru Genji, “an incredibly handsome man”, reading Murasaki Shikibu's 11th century text? So, when reading Catch-22, will we chance upon some clues about the real life of Captain John Yossarian? War and Peace includes reference to a genuine human, general Kutuzov, who indeed did fight Napolean. If we then read Tolstoy's opus, carefully, cover to cover, will we uncover some clues about the life of Natasha Rostova?
Ulan wrote:However, now that I think about it, I'm not really sure whether the Herakles stories mention any clearly historical figures. It's been a while that I looked at them.
Hesiod, “Shield of Herakles”, Plato, and Philo, all reference Herakles, as a genuine, living, breathing human, with supernatural abilities. We know, without any doubt, that Philo regarded Herakles as a myth, but wrote as if he had been a living human. Herakles was so famous, and so widely acknowledged as a genuine human with supernatural capabilities, at the time of Philo, that an entire city in Italy, was named after him: Herculaneum, about 75 kilometers north of Paestum.
Ulan wrote:My main point in that post was that you can lead the task to prove the historicity of a man who was Jesus or his prototype ad absurdum by asking for proof that the supernatural God in heaven was his father. This is disingenuous and doesn't even match mainstream historicist models.
But that was not my point. I do not “prove” that there was, or was not, a supernatural god in heaven who was Jesus' father.

That “fact” is written in the gospels. I don't need to prove it. It is right in front of your nose. You cannot “prove” the historicity of a supposed human, whose paternal DNA is coming from πνεῦμα . One cannot prove anything about something nonexistent. The gospels, not my writing, proves the ahistoric character of the fictional character Jesus of Nazareth.

My point, in case you had misread my verbose submission, was that the Jesus story is remarkably parallel to the Herakles story, especially as regards paternal DNA, and resurrection post mortem, with ascent to a lofty place situated above the ordinary terra firma upon which we live.

I think Ulan's posts counter Philospher Jay's hope that the tide has turned: if even intellectuals cannot acknowledge the impossibility of garnering historical reality for a mythical figure like Jesus of Nazareth, what hope is there, that the football watching, diluted beer swilling males of USA could distinguish reality from fiction?
Ulan
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Re: The Tide Turns

Post by Ulan »

bcedaifu wrote:
Ulan wrote: Yes, I meant the naming of historical figures within the texts, which gives the texts the air of history, which of course doesn't mean that it is history, but gives you a rough pointer of where to start looking for clues.
Ulan, that is completely nonsensical. Scrutiny of ancient texts cannot provide a “rough pointer of where to start looking for clues” to demonstrate the historicity of fictional character.
Of course this can be a starting point. The gospels are placed in a historical context, in particular gLuke. As far as I know, the search for direct evidence came up empty. Which leaves us with Josephus and Tacitus and the problems attached to this (are those texts original? Where are Tacitus' sources? Are they just evidence for the existence of the movement or the existence of the person?). You may rightly or wrongly dismiss these pieces of evidence, but they are there. You have to deal with them.
bcedaifu wrote:War and Peace includes reference to a genuine human, general Kutuzov, who indeed did fight Napolean. If we then read Tolstoy's opus, carefully, cover to cover, will we uncover some clues about the life of Natasha Rostova?
If there really was a world that forgot who Tolstoy was, they could go and search for clues about the persons in this book. You would find lots of evidence that it's a novel.
bcedaifu wrote:Hesiod, “Shield of Herakles”, Plato, and Philo, all reference Herakles, as a genuine, living, breathing human, with supernatural abilities. We know, without any doubt, that Philo regarded Herakles as a myth, but wrote as if he had been a living human. Herakles was so famous, and so widely acknowledged as a genuine human with supernatural capabilities, at the time of Philo, that an entire city in Italy, was named after him: Herculaneum, about 75 kilometers north of Paestum.
It's nice how you basically answer your examples yourself. You say yourself that Philo regarded Herakles as a myth. This still doesn't answer the question whether there was some real person at the root of the myth. Which is basically the real problem with the "Jesus historicist" position: the claim the historicists make is reduced to such a miniscule detail that they made it near impossible to debunk the historicist claim. Proof of non-existence is much harder than proof of existence.
bcedaifu wrote:That “fact” is written in the gospels. I don't need to prove it. It is right in front of your nose. You cannot “prove” the historicity of a supposed human, whose paternal DNA is coming from πνεῦμα . One cannot prove anything about something nonexistent. The gospels, not my writing, proves the ahistoric character of the fictional character Jesus of Nazareth.
Which is your silly and outright idiotic claim for proof needed you already made further up. No, this proof is not needed, as that is not the claim of most serious NT scholar historicists. You misrepresent the historicist position.
bcedaifu wrote:My point, in case you had misread my verbose submission, was that the Jesus story is remarkably parallel to the Herakles story, especially as regards paternal DNA, and resurrection post mortem, with ascent to a lofty place situated above the ordinary terra firma upon which we live.
And my point, in case you misread what I wrote, was that historicists have done away with all those miracles, "Son of God" and resurrection parts. Which means you are fighting windmills here.

They mostly immunized their position against refutation and just stick to the miniscule leftover that is extremely hard to disprove. Which is the real unfairness in the historicist vs. mythicist debate.

Edit: Or, to put it differently: Most so-called "historicists" are "mythicists" where it actually counts. The whole battle is more or less over an inane detail.
Bertie
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Re: The Tide Turns

Post by Bertie »

Ulan wrote: And my point, in case you misread what I wrote, was that historicists have done away with all those miracles, "Son of God" and resurrection parts. Which means you are fighting windmills here.

They mostly immunized their position against refutation and just stick to the miniscule leftover that is extremely hard to disprove. Which is the real unfairness in the historicist vs. mythicist debate.

Edit: Or, to put it differently: Most so-called "historicists" are "mythicists" where it actually counts. The whole battle is more or less over an inane detail.
Well, maybe. But a lot of secular Jesus scholars just take away the supernatural bits and leave most of the gospel narrative intact, and what is left is still a Jesus that can be pressed into service in the social-political fights of today as long as Christianity itself has any force: Jesus the liberal social justice warrior; Jesus the Cynic sage; Jesus the devout Jew, and so forth.

Now, I agree there's a point at which the distinction between historicity and mythicism becomes pretty unimportant. Maybe someone says, "Yeah, there was some guy named Jesus. Probably a Jew. Probably lived in the near east either 1st C. CE or 1st C. BCE. That's about all I know." A very rough equivalent to the knowledge about the historical King Arthur(s), if he/they existed. A Jesus that is of no use to anyone in current social-political disputes. That would be the point at which historicity and mythicism becomes not so very important. But I don't think most of secular scholarship is there yet (and there may in fact be good evidence-based reasons for it not going all the way there).
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Blood
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Re: The Tide Turns

Post by Blood »

Stephan Huller wrote:Right and I always think that we have to be careful to imitate our adversaries. They look stupid in their certainty, we too look stupid when we seem entrenched in our certainties. In both cases it comes down to personal biases.
I think you meant careful to not imitate our adversaries, yes?
“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
bcedaifu
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Re: The Tide Turns

Post by bcedaifu »

Ulan wrote:The gospels are placed in a historical context, in particular gLuke.
Do you understand the problem here, Philosopher Jay? You seek, in this thread, to assure forum members that "the Tide has turned", but then one of the most intelligent, best educated, members of the forum comes along, and writes nonsense about gospels in an historical context. In particular gLuke?

No, Ulan is not joking. He wishes to assure us of his sincere opinion, that a text of unknown date of publication, written by an unknown author, with unknown provenance, and undoubtedly possessing instances of redaction, in our extant copies, during nearly two millenia of political fighting about the message and its significance, represents history, in some fashion, not fiction.

Nevermind that the subject of gLuke is born with paternal DNA of spirit origin: Luke 1:35. Ignore the fact that this subject has only to speak, to a corpse, carried in a coffin, to allow that dead man within, to alight, speaking to his mother. Luke 7:14.

Where is the history in such a work of obvious fiction? Is there history to be found in Wu ChengEn's famous novel "Journey to the West", or "Monkey" as it is often called in English speaking countries? Even the author of this work of fiction is unknown with certainty. Can we place this 16th century novel in "historical context"? Did XuanZang, in the 7th Century CE, travel to India, riding YuLong, a dragon prince, appearing as a white horse, as Wu Chengen recounts? Was XuanZang the founder of the Dharma school of Buddhism? Did XuanZang actually arrive at Vulture Peak, to receive the sutras from a living Buddha, himself, in the 7th century CE?

Physics is physics. Fiction is fiction. Nothing is gained by citing a work of fiction to explain the laws of physics. When an account of an event, or people in the event, is presented in a manner deliberately distorted, with an intention to violate the laws of physics, then the work is pure fiction, not history. The gospels are entirely fictional, hence, there is nothing contained within them, of any merit, for understanding history. Is it not the case, that the early 19th century European immigrants to USA felt such a keen sense of irrelevance of the ancient texts, that they created their own bible: brought to North America by an Angel, Moroni. Is there something, ANYTHING, useful in the book of Mormon, something that helps us to understand any part of human history or civilization? No? Why not?

We cannot employ a work of fiction to explain non-fiction.
Ulan
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Re: The Tide Turns

Post by Ulan »

bcedaifu wrote:No, Ulan is not joking. He wishes to assure us of his sincere opinion, that a text... represents history, in some fashion, not fiction.
It is as if I spoke Chinese. The text makes historical claims. Which you can check against other texts. Why don't you try and address what I said, not what you think I said? The rest of your post is irrelevant to what I said and also to the historicity question. Except maybe at some Christian apologetics website.
Stephan Huller
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Re: The Tide Turns

Post by Stephan Huller »

It's best not even to try and engage him in a discussion Ulan. Seriously.
bcedaifu
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Re: The Tide Turns

Post by bcedaifu »

Ulan wrote: It is as if I spoke Chinese. The text makes historical claims. Which you can check against other texts. Why don't you try and address what I said, not what you think I said? The rest of your post is irrelevant to what I said and also to the historicity question. Except maybe at some Christian apologetics website.
I notice, Ulan, that you ignored my point: “historical claims” about a fictional character, cannot be checked “against other texts”, to obtain history, using sources of mythology. Your “other texts” here, are of dubious authenticity, see below.
Ulan wrote: Of course this can be a starting point. The gospels are placed in a historical context, in particular gLuke. As far as I know, the search for direct evidence came up empty. Which leaves us with Josephus and Tacitus and the problems attached to this (are those texts original? Where are Tacitus' sources? Are they just evidence for the existence of the movement or the existence of the person?). You may rightly or wrongly dismiss these pieces of evidence, but they are there. You have to deal with them.

We know nothing, reliably about Tacitus' Annals, XV, for our only extant copy was produced in an Italian monastery during the Inquisition. We know without doubt, that at least one page of that text had been tampered with, changing the “starting point” from chrestus to christus. (n.b., not “Jesus of Nazareth”). Josephus' writings have been disputed for decades. Jay's suggestion, and the raison d'etre for this thread, is that the argument that Jesus was a fictional character in a Greek mythological fantasy, is now gaining so much traction, that the masses are now moving against Christianity, towards atheism.
I am unconvinced that the tide has turned, as Jay hopes. When I see a person as talented as Ulan, still asserting that gLuke, offers scholars a chance to derive historical facts about Jesus, (“a starting point”), I cringe. I must ask, sincerely, Ulan, which historical fact about Jesus is contained in gLuke?
Ulan wrote: If there really was a world that forgot who Tolstoy was, they could go and search for clues about the persons in this book. You would find lots of evidence that it's a novel.

At what point in time did folks on planet earth forget who Mark was? Oh, that's right. No one ever knew who wrote gMark, or any other gospel, nor, for that matter, any of “Paul's” letters. Gee Ulan, do we “find lots of evidence that” gLuke is a novel?
Yes, we can search the gospels, and find clues about the fictional characters contained therein. At what point, mathematically, does a fictional character, surrounded by a mountain of historical evidence, become real?

Can I multiply i by n to get a real product?
Ulan wrote: It's nice how you basically answer your examples yourself. You say yourself that Philo regarded Herakles as a myth. This still doesn't answer the question whether there was some real person at the root of the myth. Which is basically the real problem with the "Jesus historicist" position: the claim the historicists make is reduced to such a miniscule detail that they made it near impossible to debunk the historicist claim. Proof of non-existence is much harder than proof of existence.

“a real person at the root of the myth.” Captain John Yossarian is widely acknowledged to be the persona representing the author of Catch-22, Joseph Heller. So, yes, there was a real person, who served as template for the main character of the novel. However, Catch -22 is not a biography, it is not an accurate account of the life of Joseph Heller. It is a work of fiction, like gMark. Was there, in ancient times, an itinerant religious figure wandering from locale to locale preaching doomsday? Sure, why not? Was his name Jesus? Sure, why not? So what? Was there a guy crucified by the Roman army? I am certain that there were thousands of men tortured and killed by the Roman army, including Germans, Persians, Egyptians, and Jews, including some, having the name Jesus. Did one of those guys, three days post mortem, rise up from the dead? Of course not.

I am not obliged, nor is anyone else, to “prove” that Jesus did not exist, any more than I need to “prove” that the square root of minus one is “i”. Must I “prove” the non-existence of Jimmy Olsen? We know, that in the 1930's newspapers were still relevant, still being read, still required reporters to gather the “facts”, so we are confident that there were men and women like Jimmy Olsen and Lois Lane, who had been employed as reporters for New York City newspapers. Does that mean, then, that we should analyze Superman comic strips for facts about Jimmy Olsen and Lois Lane, as historical persons, not fictional characters? I need not “prove” the non-existence of these two fictional characters. Their status is self evident.

What is the status of Jesus of Nazareth? How is his stature different from that of Superman?
Ulan wrote: Which is your silly and outright idiotic claim for proof needed you already made further up. No, this proof is not needed, as that is not the claim of most serious NT scholar historicists. You misrepresent the historicist position.

Well, apologies, if I have hurt someone's feelings by misrepresenting “the historicist position”. To me, the idea that person X is “historical” implies, first and foremost, that this person X actually existed as a human, on planet earth. Is that a “misrepresentation” of the “historicist position”? If I claim that Einstein was an historical figure, is it not necessary for me to offer evidence of his existence? Where is the evidence of Jesus' existence? What then, is this “claim of most serious NT scholar historicists”? I don't know a single NT scholar, so I will just take a shot in the dark:
Jesus of Nazareth had lived and breathed as a real person, i.e. he was not a fictional character in a Greek mythological tale.
So, we return to Jay's link. Where's the evidence for Jesus' existence, from folks living at the same moment in time, when Jesus supposedly inhabited terra firma?
Ulan wrote: And my point, in case you misread what I wrote, was that historicists have done away with all those miracles, "Son of God" and resurrection parts. Which means you are fighting windmills here.
Gosh, Ulan, on whose authority do you have permission to reject those components of the gospels which offend you, while retaining components attractive to your world view? Upon discarding “those miracles”, what remains?

Was it not spin, himself, who claimed “slam dunk” victory by citing the childish paintings at Dura Europos, one of which supposedly portrayed the miracle elaborated in your favorite gLuke, about the fishermen, seas rising, Jesus walking on water, etc, ad nauseum? The portrayal of “miracles”, as if genuine events of history, is what spin and others illustrate, as evidence of the existence of an organized christianity in mid third century, in the Syrian desert, in that Roman fortress, constructed on the west bank of the Euphrates river, not too far from the path traveled by caravans, following the traditional silk route en route to, or coming from Ctesiphon, capital of the Persian empire in ancient times.

How can you reject “son of god”, when that is the entire basis of the religion? That concept was so critical to the earliest Christians, that the tiny letters representing the Greek words corresponding to “son of God”, were added to gMark in codex Sinaiticus, after it had already been completed. Andrew thinks that the letters may have been added even in the Scriptorium itself. Every bible created after Codex Sinaiticus bears that distinctive epithet. “son of god” is to Jesus, as “man of steel” is to Superman. In fact, I would argue, that the three word phrase adds to the overlap between Jesus and Superman. That observation only applies, obviously, to the English version of the text.

“fighting windmills”? I understand the idea of Don Quixote, but I don't follow which tenet you find insurmountable? Which force of the historical camp is so mighty that my jousting lance will be broken like a toothpick? Is the mighty gale propelling the “Jesus was an historical figure” windmill, based on the gospels, or some other documents? I see their windmill as a wooden concoction, located in the Florida everglades, where there are, most days, two kinds of wind forces: absolute calm, or hurricane. There are, in that locale, inland, not along the ocean, essentially no economically productive windmills: they either sit at rest, blades not rotating, or remain in fragments after the storm.
Ulan wrote: They mostly immunized their position against refutation and just stick to the miniscule leftover that is extremely hard to disprove. Which is the real unfairness in the historicist vs. mythicist debate.

Edit: Or, to put it differently: Most so-called "historicists" are "mythicists" where it actually counts. The whole battle is more or less over an inane detail.
Hmm? Which inane detail is that? Is it found in gLuke?
PhilosopherJay
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Re: The Tide Turns

Post by PhilosopherJay »

Hi All,

Thanks for lots of interesting posts on this thread.
Has anybody read "No meek Messiah"?
I just ordered it from Amazon. I'll give my opinion after I've read it, or at least the first few chapters.

Warmly,
Jay Raskin
ficino
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Re: The Tide Turns

Post by ficino »

bcedaifu wrote: We know nothing, reliably about Tacitus' Annals, XV, for our only extant copy was produced in an Italian monastery during the Inquisition.
For what it's worth, the primary witness to Annales 11-16, sc. Laur. plut. 68.2, is usually dated 11th century; cf. Roger's website,
http://www.tertullian.org/rpearse/tacitus/

I'm not sure what period you mean by "during" the Inquisition, bcedaifu. I thought the legal, procedural institution of the Inquisition started in the next century (12th) and persisted, gradually expanding, in various Catholic countries, involving fluctuating numbers of inquisitors and detainees acc. to circumstances and the authorities' reactions to them.

I'm also not sure how much you want to press "know [[my bold]] nothing, reliably." I assume you are familiar with texts from antiquity, the transmission of which occurred via a single manuscript - e.g. Catullus' poems. I don't think anyone who works on Latin poetry would say that we know nothing reliably about Catullus' poems, though there is much about their production and subsequent transmission that we don't know. Obviously, a lot of the time in ancient studies, "know" boils down to "can arrive at a well-supported conclusion." Surely your requirements of proof in ancient studies aren't stricter than the nature of the case allows. But perhaps I'm getting hung up on "know."

Anyway, I agree that the authenticity of the TT, whole or in part, is a problem. It seems to me that the difficulties arise more from Chrestianos/Christianos, as you say, and from the content of the passage than from the fact that we have but one primary MS.
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