How Long Before They Include 'Jesus Might Not Have Existed' in University Courses About Christianity?

Discussion about the New Testament, apocrypha, gnostics, church fathers, Christian origins, historical Jesus or otherwise, etc.
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Jax
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Re: How Long Before They Include 'Jesus Might Not Have Existed' in University Courses About Christianity?

Post by Jax »

^ Just a suggestion that I, Mary Helena, and others, would like to propose for the first lecture.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umj0gu5nEGs

Just to prepare the class for some narrative perspective. :cheers:
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GakuseiDon
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Re: How Long Before They Include 'Jesus Might Not Have Existed' in University Courses About Christianity?

Post by GakuseiDon »

Secret Alias wrote: Fri Jan 21, 2022 3:00 pm
Do we even need to try to guess the motives of people before examining their position?
But that raises another question. Is objectivity even possible? Are we free to choose what to believe or do drives determine what we see how we process information even before we have our first thought? I tend to think the latter.
At the end of the day, does it matter? People argue about whether free-will is possible or not, then go home to decide what to have for dinner.

1. Objectivity is worth striving for
2. We all have biases
3. Sometimes people with biases are right

The most fervent Christian and most convinced atheist can still be right. Let's not worry about people's motives until after we examine the argument being made. Understanding someone else's motives may shed light on why they are wrong, but we should determine they are wrong before wondering about their motives.
Secret Alias
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Re: How Long Before They Include 'Jesus Might Not Have Existed' in University Courses About Christianity?

Post by Secret Alias »

Objectivity ... if we start with the status quo and ask all others to prove it wrong. Right? Like that's the problem.
Secret Alias
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Re: How Long Before They Include 'Jesus Might Not Have Existed' in University Courses About Christianity?

Post by Secret Alias »

That's what they do with Secret Mark right? They know Morton Smith didn't forge it. His misread the nomina sacra. He said KU when it was KOU in the manuscript. He didn't forge it. If he wrote it he would get the nomina sacra straight.

But why do they argue against it. It doesn't fit in the 'categories' we have always accepted - Matthew, Mark, Luke and John and whatever 'gospel' is mentioned in the Church Fathers. If something comes out of left field totally challenging our understanding they demonize it and make it go away.

So my point is EVERYTHING is like that. Our parents told us what Jews were and that Jesus was one and Christianity is this and it developed from Judaism like this and so on and so on. And Paul is this and Peter that. And it all comes out of the box already understood. This is what they are fighting for. The stability of reality as they know it. It's like the first time you do acid. It's horrifying as reality as you know it just disintegrates ... and then it comes back and its fun. But if you've never had that experience you're just clinging on to reality desperately. https://youtu.be/JhgJsg2mMeQ
Secret Alias
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Re: How Long Before They Include 'Jesus Might Not Have Existed' in University Courses About Christianity?

Post by Secret Alias »

It's all a fight over what 'reality' is.
Chrissy Hansen
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Re: How Long Before They Include 'Jesus Might Not Have Existed' in University Courses About Christianity?

Post by Chrissy Hansen »

Jesus mythicism was taught in schools in the Soviet Union and in China. Early on it also maintained an academic consensus in those places (largely under the influence of Lenin). I even have a Soviet textbook that teaches this which was used in East Germany. Mythicism essentially became a tool to reinforce state atheism.

That is until the governments started allowing academic freedoms and more religious tolerance. At which point, the consensus quickly evaporated in both countries, and now mythicism has no academic presence in either country, as far as I'm aware. In the Soviet Union, the consensus dissolved during the Khrushchev Thaw, and largely under the influence of atheists. Archibald Robertson, a British Marxist atheist, essentially sparked the debate and by the end of the 1960s leading academics had declared that mythicism held back historical research. Even top mythicist scholars previously recanted their positions.

In China it took about a decade before the mythicist consensus was completely reversed. In large part this was due to China having no academic study of the Bible in their universities. Yu Ke essentially began those programs, and he came to the conclusion that Jesus existed and also was the first academic in the country offer a course on the history of Christianity. By the early 2000s came around, I was unable to find any support for that position. Even previous mythicist academics switched their positions.

From what I can tell, even in countries where atheists dominated academia, mythicism only remained in academic spheres when it was forced by the state.

If by some chance I ever became a professor of NT at University, I would attempt to offer courses on mythicism and historicity issues. I think there should especially be classes on the history of mythicism, which I think has had a much greater impact on the shaping of NT studies than most scholars ever wish to admit.
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Irish1975
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Re: How Long Before They Include 'Jesus Might Not Have Existed' in University Courses About Christianity?

Post by Irish1975 »

In the discourse of ‘mythicism,’ there is a large and loud contingent who seem to think that any negative or skeptical judgment on the question of Jesus’ historicity, i.e. whether Jesus of Nazareth lived, is ipso facto tantamount to mythicism: some positive claim about how both Christianity and the “myth” of Jesus originated. That’s wrong, as a matter of basic epistemology, method, science, whatever you want to call it.

Analogy: people can deny that the creation story of Genesis is in any way a true representation of how the cosmos, life, and humankind originated—without thereby committing themselves to any claim that they know how those things actually originated. Nobody knows that. But it is still possible to know that Genesis isn’t science.

Genuine skepticism, being able to affirm that we don’t know something about which some people/traditions have claimed absolute certainty, is actually a rare capacity. The average human needs to convince herself that she knows something about everything that is talked about. That the ‘experts’ can’t really be massively delusional or mendacious, etc.
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MrMacSon
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Re: How Long Before They Include 'Jesus Might Not Have Existed' in University Courses About Christianity?

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In the lead up to Christmas, an opinion piece by John Dickson commented on a surprising finding: that fewer than half of living Australians believe Jesus to have been a real historical person. Rather, a majority of us apparently now either accept a statement that he was “a mythical or fictional character” (22 per cent) or else do not know if he was real or not (29 per cent) [from this survey].

Dickson contends that such scepticism is “bad news for historical literacy” in Australia, for it flies in the face of “the overwhelming consensus of university historians specialising in the Roman and Jewish worlds of the first century” ...

Dickson’s argument is problematic in the first instance because it is an argument from authority. His evidence for historical consensus is that apparently authoritative works of reference — he cites the Oxford Classical Dictionary, the Cambridge Ancient History, and the Cambridge History of Judaism — all accept an historical Jesus as a premise. The Cambridge Ancient History, for instance, has a sizeable chapter on the birth of Christianity. Several chapters of the Cambridge History of Judaism mention Jesus in passing “as an interesting figure of Jewish History”.

All this may be true, but it is not itself evidence that Jesus ever existed. It is evidence only of a scholarly consensus in favour of not questioning the premise that he did. And we all know that expert consensuses of this kind can easily be misguided. Moreover, there are good reasons why such a consensus might have emerged autonomously of any assessment of the strength of evidence supporting it ...

... the existence of a critical mass of scholars who do believe in Jesus’s historicity will almost certainly have shaped the way that all other scholars write about the subject. Unless they are strongly motivated to argue that Jesus was not real, they will not arbitrarily provoke colleagues who do believe in his historicity by denying it casually ...

——————-

From On historians and the historicity of Jesus by Miles Pattenden, Senior Research Fellow in Medieval and Early Modern Studies at Australian Catholic University, and the co-editor of The Journal of Religious History. He is the author of Electing the Pope in Early Modern Italy, 1450-1700.



Neil Godfrey has also looked at Dickson's claims: https://vridar.org/2022/01/18/bearing-f ... for-jesus/
ABuddhist
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Re: How Long Before They Include 'Jesus Might Not Have Existed' in University Courses About Christianity?

Post by ABuddhist »

Chris Hansen wrote: Sat Jan 22, 2022 7:48 am If by some chance I ever became a professor of NT at University, I would attempt to offer courses on mythicism and historicity issues. I think there should especially be classes on the history of mythicism, which I think has had a much greater impact on the shaping of NT studies than most scholars ever wish to admit.
Why would such scholars be so unwilling to admit such a thing? Surely, there would be nothing wrong with claiming "Yeah, mythicism is absurd, but it inspired genuine and useful scholarship about Jesus" or something to that effect?

If such a statement was truly taboo, then that reveals, I think, how radioactive (figuratively) mythicism was to mainstream scholarship about Christianity - rather like Nagarjuna's Madhyamaka Mahayana Buddhism was to Shankara's Hinduism. And Shankara has been condemned by outsiders to his form of Hinduism for not providing a thorough and adequate refutation to Nagarjuna's Madhyamaka Mahayana Buddhism and instead secretly incorporating Nagarjuna's Madhyamaka Mahayana Buddhism into his hinduism.

None of the preceding paragraph should be interpreted as meaning that mainstream scholarship about Christianity is a religion, but it, like the dispute between Shankara and Buddhism, deals with matters that are religiously significant to many people. So it is not unreasonable to wonder whether the same blindspots, failures to fully engage, etc., have not manifested in mainstream scholarship about Christianity's response to mythicism. Neil Godfrey had produced ample arguments about how mainstream scholarship about Christianity more often asserts that mythicism has been refuted than provides refutations that address the mythicists' arguments (rather than misrepresentations or portions of their arguments).

I write these words as a non-mythicist, if I must say such a thing.
Chrissy Hansen
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Re: How Long Before They Include 'Jesus Might Not Have Existed' in University Courses About Christianity?

Post by Chrissy Hansen »

ABuddhist wrote: Sun Jan 23, 2022 3:20 pm
Chris Hansen wrote: Sat Jan 22, 2022 7:48 am If by some chance I ever became a professor of NT at University, I would attempt to offer courses on mythicism and historicity issues. I think there should especially be classes on the history of mythicism, which I think has had a much greater impact on the shaping of NT studies than most scholars ever wish to admit.
Why would such scholars be so unwilling to admit such a thing? Surely, there would be nothing wrong with claiming "Yeah, mythicism is absurd, but it inspired genuine and useful scholarship about Jesus" or something to that effect?
Because lots of non-absurd scholarship has its roots in mythicism. Mythicists essentially prototyped a lot of the recent research we see today, especially research on early Christianity and its rapid syncretism with Hellenistic culture. Others like Bruno Bauer would inadvertently be predictors of the trend to find Stoic and Hellenistic philosophy strewn throughout the Gospels, while other mythicists further built up a lot of the research on intertextual traditions with Jewish and Hellenistic writings.

Not to mention they also elucidated the folly of a lot of the quest of the historical Jesus, which lots of scholars refuse to give up on and continue treating as though it is a worthwhile venture.

The implications of this would firmly indicate that mythicism is worth engaging with... which especially Christian universities and scholars do not want to engage with. Acknowledging mythicism as relevant and also as preempting a lot of research, begs the question of just how right it is, and so warrants engaging with. And NT scholars would rather treat the debunking of Arthur Drews a century ago as if that was the last word and nothing more needs to be said.

I'm also a non-mythicist. Specifically a historicist.
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