Giuseppe wrote: ↑Mon Apr 22, 2024 7:11 am
It is clear that you want to nail me between the two horns of the beast.
I am trying to persuade you, but I don't think that trying to crucify you between two theives will persuade you or anybody else .... this is just a pleasant conversation among friends.
BTW I wasn't going that way at all....the point I was trying to make is that matters of identity are not determined by whether or not the material they are composed of is identical. But if its not the identity of atoms which make things identical.....what does?
I would answer "yes" to reassure you that I understand perfectly your point: in abstract logical terms the Talmudist was a historicist, he didn't deny the historicity of Jesus.
I am reassured
Here's the thing though: the more carefully and precisely you want to speak about these matters, and the more certain and secure you want your inferences to be in these matters, the more precise you have to be in *stating* your points....which is to say, the more abstract and logical they are going to have to be.
Its an easy trap to fall into to make some rough inference speaking causally, and then try to present the conclusion as secure. You have to make sure that each step of the argument doesn't rely on extraneous or distracting details---and leaving out those details *is* abstraction. And you have got to make sure that each step of the argument is valid--that's what logic is. "Abstract and Logical" is what you are going for in scholarly work.
I felt someway 'obliged' to answer "no" because in the case of the Janneus's Jesus, the chronological error is so giant that hardly, very hardly, ordinary people would think about the Talmudist view as a historicist view, because under this hypothesis the corollary is that very a lot has been altered to the point of complete unrecognizability.
I'm sympathetic to that point. Lets take an even more extreme example: Santa Claus!! He started out as a resident of Asia Minor, with a swarthy complexion, and a temper. He was basically God's own Luca Brasi. But it was said that he saved 3 virgins from marriages to horrible old men by buying them off....which evolved into viewing him as being generous and giving gifts to children...as christianity spread north, his complexion started to match that of the people living up north...eventually his abode moved up to the north pole too....then in the 19th and 20th centuries, corporate advertisements by coca cola and others gave him a red suit, made him old enough that his beard was white....
So, Does "Santa Clause" refer to the same person as Saint Nicholas? It seems very reasonable to conclude they are two different people. Where he started is soooo different from where he ended up.....
But, the process was very gradual, with many more stages than I mentioned above, over hundreds of years. If we took any 50-year window, and asked somebody about St. Nick, they would say that they were talking about the same person as everybody was 50 years ago. There was no specific point in that chain you can point to and say "here is where we started talking about somebody else!" Much like how there's no particular point in my growth that you could point to and say "here is where Randy started being a different person."
So at the very least, there is an argument to be made that no, we are not talking about two different people.
How to resolve the conundrum? Well, my parents never let us believe the stories about Santa Clause were really true. But of course I knew about them, and I remember asking my mother, "was there really a Santa Clause?" How she answered that question is key. She said that yeah, there was some guy, named Saint Nicholaus, but he lived in Turkey and not at the North pole, its just that legends started growing around him..."
So that's how I resolve the conundrum. Yes, we are speaking about the same person, and that person was a historical figure. But, we are speaking *mythically* about him. Santa Clause really existed, but his life was very different than the stories told about him. Nevertheless, those stories are still *about* him in the sense that, even though he is in a fictional situation, the story still says something true about how we remember Santa Clause. Kind of like a parable--these myths are meant to be "more true than literally true."
And that's pretty much how we speak about Jesus too. Was there a historical Jesus, like there was a historical Santa Clause? Who knows, and ultimately, who cares. The gospel writers knew very well that what they were writing wasn't literally true. They were meant to be "truer than literally true." Its only later, people started taking the Gospels as literally true--a mistake on the order of taking Santa Clause to literally see whether you are naughty or nice, and visits every kid in the whole world to give them what is coming to them.
This is the reason why I am extremely troubled by the mention by Josephus of the Samaritan false Prophet slain by Pilate: was he Jesus? The requisite 'connection with Pilate' is satisfied fully with him. The Tacitus's reference would work perfectly with him
That very well be true--but if so, it perfectly illustrates my point. What you are saying is that maybe when everybody says "Jesus", they are really talking about Josephus the Samaritan. They are talking about a historical figure, but they are talking "mythically" about him. Like "Saint Nicholas" was shortened to "Santa Claus", his name got shortened from "Josephus" to "Jesus"---not a big jump at all, especially in Aramaic. He has accumulated a lot of legends and mythical stories about him, which are not literally true, but meant to reveal something about him that we want or need to hear.