What Do Mythicists Want?

Discussion about the New Testament, apocrypha, gnostics, church fathers, Christian origins, historical Jesus or otherwise, etc.
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Peter Kirby
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Re: What Do Mythicists Want?

Post by Peter Kirby »

Diogenes the Cynic wrote:I just want to know what the truth is. I'm truly agnostic on the issue and have no preference for one answer over another, but I wish the historicists were more honest about the true paucity of their evidence.
An excellent approach. I agree entirely. I also wish the strident rhetoric (issued from all angles) could be turned down to a bit of a dull murmur so that people would be more inclined to spend more time thinking about the actual issues and evidence involved.

I'm pretty sure Einstein's ideas were slightly controversial for a time, but imagine if everyone were accusing everyone else of betraying God, reason, and common sense at every turn. We might be still stuck with Newton, if we had all heat and no light on the question.

(Then again, Darwin won, but that was only under the most crushing avalanche of conclusive evidence, something we are not so lucky to have here.)
"... almost every critical biblical position was earlier advanced by skeptics." - Raymond Brown
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Re: What Do Mythicists Want?

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I want everyone to be friends.
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Re: What Do Mythicists Want?

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Diogenes the Cynic wrote:I just want to know what the truth is. I'm truly agnostic on the issue and have no preference for one answer over another, but I wish the historicists were more honest about the true paucity of their evidence.
By quantity their evidence rises above that for Apollonius of Tyana but not above that for Mithra or Hercules. Their evidence is no where near the evidence for the divine Julius Caesar -- and you don't even have to change the JC monogram on the napkins.

The nature of the evidence rather than the evidence itself carries the constant implication that the winner is right and no comparison with other examples of demigods like Jesus or of the deification of humans is permitted or even possible. How difficult to create the arguments and are they really different in kind from holding the tales of Hercules and Perseus and others were based upon real people?

Nor among the early Christians, and the winner is just the winner not the one who was correct, is Jesus as deified human or demigod lacking. Adoptionist at baptism is deified human. Both true god and true man is a modest variation upon demigod.
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Re: What Do Mythicists Want?

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This seems applicable to describing why there is such a stark rhetorical difference between the Historical Jesus problem (you must assume the historicity of Jesus) or Pauline authenticity problem (you must accept the Hauptbriefe) and the Synoptic Problem (anything goes):

"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate."
- Noam Chomsky, The Common Good, p. 43
"... almost every critical biblical position was earlier advanced by skeptics." - Raymond Brown
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Re: What Do Mythicists Want?

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Peter Kirby wrote:This seems applicable to describing why there is such a stark rhetorical difference between the Historical Jesus problem (you must assume the historicity of Jesus) or Pauline authenticity problem (you must accept the Hauptbriefe) and the Synoptic Problem (anything goes):

"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate."
- Noam Chomsky, The Common Good, p. 43
Which keeps the approved range of discussion within those of academia which has acceptable pros and cons and maybes on everything discussable within the academic method.

Just ignore the fact that people using these methods have been going back and forth with each other for two centuries or more and have not gotten anywhere. Ignore the fact that all they have produced is dizzying complexity of argumentation until it gets to much for even them and they come up with another variation to argue. And all the while ignore they have next to nothing new to introduce as evidence when they discover something new to argue.
The religion of the priests is not the religion of the people.
Priests are just people with skin in the game and an income to lose.
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Re: What Do Mythicists Want?

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Peter Kirby wrote:This seems applicable to describing why there is such a stark rhetorical difference between the Historical Jesus problem (you must assume the historicity of Jesus) or Pauline authenticity problem (you must accept the Hauptbriefe) and the Synoptic Problem (anything goes):

"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate."
- Noam Chomsky, The Common Good, p. 43
Biblical scholarship/theology in a nutshell. You must accept at least the basic framework they have outlined, or you will not be allowed to participate.
“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: What Do Mythicists Want?

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But I have to say this is true for mythicism as well. I acknowledge that it's true - most scholarship just assumes that Jesus existed because, hey, what else could he have been? But on the mythicists side there is very little effort to attempt to explain how or why a belief could have been sustained in a Jewish culture (or a culture affiliated with Judaism) if he was just made up. Indeed I think there is a tendency for each side to see each other as caricatures - i.e. on the one side 'atheists' who hate Jesus promoting 'mythicism' and 'believers' 'clinging' to their traditional beliefs.

Since I am a contrarian by nature I will tell you what drives me crazy about mythicists. In fact I will tell you several things which drive me crazy about mythicists. Here's what bothers me today

1. they tend to hate 'authority' when it works against them but then all of a sudden if they can find a claim that sounds 'authoritative' that helps their side they parade it around like a flag. Like the stupid belief that Christianity wasn't Jewish. This drives me batty. Let's start with Paul. Mythicism begins and ends with Paul and Paul is filled with references to the Jewish scriptures. Now even if we boil down that set of writings down to the Marcionite recension there were references to the Pentateuch, Isaiah etc. Not as many of course. But it was still there. What fucking kind of white people do mythicists imagine Paul was writing to with these offhand references to "How beautiful are the feet of them that preach the gospel of peace, and bring glad tidings?" Who the fuck would this make any sense to other than someone who was brought up in a Jewish culture.

To this end, while there is no reason to believe that the early Christians were as 'Jewish' as let's say Hebrew National Hot Dogs, his audience had been 'initiated' in to Judaism already. This is impossible to argue with. The first Christians weren't white people like Barbara Bush (even a white person from New York has some familiarity with what Jews believed - much more in fact that what we should expect from the average Roman). Indeed the leadership of early Christian communities were remarkably 'fluent' in Jewish cultural ideas and especially the scriptures. Much more than Barbara Bush.

Image

In my mind this severely curtails what is possible about Jesus the invented founder of Christianity. If he was a supernatural man he was a supernatural man compatible with or found in the Jewish scriptures.

Now we are all very limited in terms of figuring out what sort of an invented man Jesus was. And I think most mythicists demonstrate their lack of scholarly interest by basically poking holes in the story of the historical Jesus. Ok, we get that Jesus wasn't who everyone says he was. Now get off your ass and come up with a plausible explanation for how this relatively large Jewish affiliated community of believers believed in a fictitious heavenly man. The problem is they can't do it because they are only this for the hate.
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Re: What Do Mythicists Want?

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stephan happy huller wrote:... The problem is they can't do it because they are only this for the hate.
The imputation of motives is not going to get you very far. In fact it has been noted as one of the problems. Now if you just mean the modern substitution of 'hate' for 'you refuse to agree with me' fine please say so. Prior to the above nonsense it has a real meaning and it is an emotion. How one could work up a sweat about a man two millennia dead I have no idea.

It could refer to the old ritual hatred by Jews but their late discovery of him, not mentioned in the Mishna while three other fake Messiahs are, is one of the arguments against. But that was just a ritual declaration of hate without real hate like "Next year in Jerusalem" with no intention to go.
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Re: What Do Mythicists Want?

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stephan happy huller wrote:But I have to say this is true for mythicism as well. I acknowledge that it's true - most scholarship just assumes that Jesus existed because, hey, what else could he have been? But on the mythicists side there is very little effort to attempt to explain how or why a belief could have been sustained in a Jewish culture (or a culture affiliated with Judaism) if he was just made up. Indeed I think there is a tendency for each side to see each other as caricatures - i.e. on the one side 'atheists' who hate Jesus promoting 'mythicism' and 'believers' 'clinging' to their traditional beliefs.

Since I am a contrarian by nature I will tell you what drives me crazy about mythicists. In fact I will tell you several things which drive me crazy about mythicists.

...

Now get off your ass and come up with a plausible explanation for how this relatively large Jewish affiliated community of believers believed in a fictitious heavenly man.
I basically have no problem with this critique.

Pretty much every time I read something on this subject, at this point--unless it's written by Neil Godfrey or Rick Sumner or spin or some enlightened soul (like that one guy writing for Bible & Interp with the op ed for the historicity of Jesus, can we hope to see more from him?)--then I have to resist the urge to roll my eyes and force myself to be sympathetic to the perspective of the writer ("irregardless" of whatever they choose to tack on at the end of their QED, "therefore" statement).

At this point I wonder why I even bother reading the literature on the historical Jesus. Wouldn't my time be better spent changing the parameters of the discussion by coming up with my own systematic argument (for whatever I discern--I'm not sure what)? In my opinion, the place to start today is the largely-unsettled (and thus deeply unsettling) question of Pauline authenticity. The fun part is that there's a lot less excrement written about that.
"... almost every critical biblical position was earlier advanced by skeptics." - Raymond Brown
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Re: What Do Mythicists Want?

Post by Tenorikuma »

I've been amusing myself by figuring out if James the Just existed. Thus far, I have gone over every reference to James (anyone by that name) in the texts on this site as well as all the Pre-Nicene Fathers and the Nicene fathers up to Eusebius.
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