Skrbina's view about Jesus

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maryhelena
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Re: Skrbina's view about Jesus

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Peter Kirby wrote: Fri Apr 30, 2021 10:59 am I was wondering why someone would even ask the professor a pointed question like that.

https://canarymission.org/professor/David_Skrbina
Skrbina is a supporter of the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. ...

Skrbina has been pushing BDS among faculty at the university since as early as 2006.

On December 15, 2016, Skrbina said that he twice introduced BDS resolutions to the UM-Dearborn Faculty Congress (FC), which meets once a year. Both times, the resolutions were rejected and Skrbina faced opposition from the university chancellor. Skrbina also spoke on behalf of a faculty BDS resolution at the FC in 2014. Skrbina said he plans on introducing another BDS resolution at the FC meeting in April 2017.

Although the UM-Dearborn student government passed BDS resolutions five times since 2005 — most recently in 2014, when Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) at UM-Dearborn authored a resolution — Skrbina expressed his "disappointment" that student-led anti-Israel BDS activity had declined on the campus in recent years.

Skrbina also condemned the "Anti-Semitism Awareness Act of 2016," embraced by both Republicans and Democrats in response to the rise of anti-Semitic incidents attending BDS activity.

Skrbina said: "For my part, I will probably accelerate my efforts. If it becomes a law, I should probably be prepared to get arrested because I might do something that is considered 'illegal.' And I will test them and see if they are willing to test me."
He's clearly anti - anti - anti-semitic, given his opposition to a bipartisan bill to raise awareness about anti-semitism. That's pretty close to being in some way anti-semitic, even if (for a philosopher) not exactly the same.
I've just finished reading the book....... Suffice to say it left a bad taste in my mouth. Its almost like it has an undercurrent of negativity towards Jews.
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Peter Kirby
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Re: Skrbina's view about Jesus

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maryhelena wrote: Fri Apr 30, 2021 11:46 am I've just finished reading the book....... Suffice to say it left a bad taste in my mouth. Its almost like it has an undercurrent of negativity towards Jews.
From an Amazon review by a certain Konrad Riggenmann:
Himself, however, he regards as one of those “dedicated and persistent truth-seekers in the world, who might take the trouble to expose their hoax” (p.83). Their, they, them, that’s the Jews, stupid!
The message of his thin book is a new conspiration myth figuring the old culprits: “Paul’s gang”, that is the thirteenth apostle with his “band of little ultra-Jews” (as he translates those “kleine Superlativ-Juden” Nietzsche smiles about in his “Der Antichrist”), constructed a “simple and elemental lie based on common ideas in mythology and a kernel of actual truth, in order to manipulate the Gentile masses for the benefit of the Jews. It was, quite frankly, a brilliant plan.” Brilliant really, as its result, planned three centuries in advance (“The Jews were, after all, famous for always taking the long-term view of things”) was nothing less than the downfall of Roman Empire.
I never read so much pseudo-scientific nonsense within just seven hours, the time I needed to work through Skrbina’s eye-opening work. “The media have no interest in examining this alternate story” he laments in the first chapter, but “the guilty parties need to be exposed”.
“Just the facts” is the title of the second chapter, where Nietzsche warns us that “The first thing to be remembered, if we do not wish to lose the scent here, is that we are among Jews.”
In the next chapter the Michigan philosopher, like a schoolboy who just discovered that Santa Claus doesn’t come with reindeer, explains that Jesus’s miracles are not reliable facts. In chapter 4, then, we are told that “The Jews, perhaps, had something to fear in this Jesus, but they were not so scared that they couldn’t push for his execution.”

The depravity of Jews yet in antiquity appears “as if the Jews took out their anger on the rest of humanity”. Wherever they settled amongst other peoples, “they seem to have made enemies.”
PhD Skrbina tells us, trusting Greek philosopher Poseidonios, that those Jewish cannibals held a Greek citizen captive in their temple, to be “fattened up for sacrifice, and eaten”. Maybe with Judas in mind, he wonders “at the evident readiness of the Jews to side with their enemies, for pay”.
While Skrbina has heard that “religious intolerance derives from the monotheistic fundamentalists (Jews, Christians, Muslims), not the polytheists or religious pluralists”, he relates various Roman acts of intolerance against Jews; understandable measures since “in the case of the Jews, though, monotheistic arrogance was combined with racial distinctness and other cultural characteristics, resulting in a deeply-embedded misanthropic streak”.
Contrary to his healthy scepticism regarding gospels and Jews, sceptic Skrbina takes all anti-Jewish commentaries of antiquity at face value, for instance when a certain Molon calls them “the very vilest of mankind”. Willingly he trusts Roman author Cassius Dio who wrote that “Jews would eat the flesh of their victims and make belts for themselves of their entrails, anoint themselves with their blood, and wear their skins for clothing”. Israel’s defeat in 850 BC, recorded on the Tel Dan Stele, makes clear that Israel was “a belligerent people, and once against [sic!] paid a price.” And Skrbina comments: “For those today who argue that Jews were perennially the cause of wars, this would provide some early evidence.”

“To say that the Jews were disliked is an understatement”, Skrbina quips. The critiques of Judaism in antiquity are “uniformly negative”. Really? Investigating the issue, Menachem Stern (Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1984) found that among 161 Greek and Roman authors who dealt with the Jews, 133 wrote respectfully about the high age of Judaism, its well documented history and literary grandeur, its emphasis on family and community; they praised the monotheism of the Jews, their rejection of all God-images and their high codex of morale. 28 expressed negatively on them. Main point of the critics was that Jews were different and bothersome, because obstreperous, rebellious, insubordinate.

Again Skrbina: “As the saying goes, “When one person hates you, it’s probably them; when everyone hates you, it’s probably you.” Logically Skrbina is among “everyone”.
But the Jews deserve it. “The media and Hollywood are working hard to continually remind the public of Jewish suffering during the war and of the evils of Nazism. I see no good reason why Jews should continue to merit special sensitivity.”
Skrbina’s shamelessness peaks when he, in order to prove the Jews as eternal liars, unabashed and applaudingly quotes my Catholic compatriots Adolf Hitler and Josef Goebbels, well-known for many things but hardly their love of truth.

In chapter 5, “Reconstructing the Truth”, the Romans came to Palestine “as bringers of civilization”. Including, by the way, the cruellest execution method ever practised on this planet.
The most crucified people of antiquity (500 daily in 70 CE), the people who from Crusades to Auschwitz suffered from the defamation of having crucified Jesus, in Skrbina’s view have created this accusation themselves.
If he’d read, for instance, James Carroll’s “Constantine’s Sword”, Skrbina would have known that the Christ-converted Roman imperator during the Council of Nicaea chose Pauline doctrine as state religion not because of Paul’s rebellious “message of resistance” but because the doctrine of this Roman citizen didn’t question slavery, preached passivity and obedience, condemned rebellion and therefore suited every authoritarian state until today. “Wives, submit yourselves to your husbands as to the Lord”, writes the author of Ephesians, “for the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the Church ... Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right ... Slaves, obey your earthly masters with respect and fear, in singleness of heart, just as you would obey Christ.” (Eph 5:22; 6:1-5); Paul’s all-embracing hierarchy of obedience centers in the one who “taking the form of a slave ... humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death, even the death on a cross” (Philippians 2:7-8).

“For centuries afterward”, Skrbina knows, “Christians would blame the Jews for killing Christ, not realizing that the whole tale was a Jewish construction in the first place. Perhaps there’s a kind of justice in that irony after all.” Skrbina would like us to understand his hearable schadenfreude as justified due to his insight that Paul and his "Jewish cabal" created, “simply for the benefit of Israel and the Jews”, the myth of the crucified godson, his resurrection and afterlife in general.
I think I'll pass on the book.
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MrMacSon
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Re: Skrbina's view about Jesus

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Giuseppe wrote: Fri Apr 30, 2021 12:34 am
[color]=cornsilk].[/color]... They lack the courage or the will to look hard at the evidence, and to envision a more likely conclusion:  that Jesus was a deliberately constructed myth, by a specific group of people, with a specific end in mind.  None of the Christ mythicists or atheist writers have, to my knowledge, articulated the view that I defend here.

Skrbina, David. The Jesus Hoax: How St. Paul's Cabal Fooled the World for Two Thousand Years (p.12). Creative Fire Press. Kindle edition, my bold.
.
If Jesus was a 'constructed myth' the construction of that myth may not have been deliberate, nor might those who participated in its construction have had a 'specific end' in mind.
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Re: Skrbina's view about Jesus

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Paul the Uncertain wrote: Fri Apr 30, 2021 4:56 am
From the author's website https://www.jesushoax.com/book
Could it be that Jesus, the miracle-working Son of God, never existed? That he was merely a man, a social agitator, who managed to get crucified? Yes--or so argues Prof David Skrbina in this compelling and even shocking new book. The weight of evidence strongly suggests that the biblical Jesus never existed, and that what we read in the Bible is an elaborate scheme, a hoax, regarding a divine god-man who came to earth to save humanity.
That's consistent with a "minimal" historical Jesus, a rejection of the historical accuracy of the Gospel Jesus and Jesus of Faith, while accepting the ontological existence of a real man who actually lived.
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(This is not a dig at Paul, but merely using Paul's post to make a point about a common trope in the discussion of whether there was a historical Jesus and, if so, that he was different to the NT Jesus.)

The proposition that the NT or Gospel Jesus was vastly or even completely different to 'the historical Jesus' would leave 'the historical Jesus' without a shed of evidence. Nil. None. Nada. Zip.

It's a false dichotomy.

The term 'the historical Jesus', especially in that context, is a kind of reverse poisoning-the-well fallacy: say, a 'filling-the-well' fallacy.
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MrMacSon
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Re: Skrbina's view about Jesus

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According to Skrbina ...

....  A:  Paul needed a kernel of truth for his hoax. 

  • No he didn't.

.... What better way than to take a real person who was really crucified for his pro-Jewish, anti-Roman activities, and turn him into God?  This makes complete sense.

  • Yes, it does [make complete sense]. And it appeals to many, many people - the majority, no doubt.

    But that doesn't mean that that is what actually happened.
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MrMacSon
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Re: Skrbina's view about Jesus

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maryhelena wrote: Fri Apr 30, 2021 7:38 am There is no historical evidence for the Josephan figure of Jesus b. Sapphat.
  • I think whether the [Josephan] figure/s of Jesus b. Sapphat / Jesus b. Sapphias were 'historical'—as in real—or not is beside the point.

    The accounts about them in Josephus were still ripe for inspiring subsequent writers.

    The second century AD was a haven for writers or other tellers of such accounts.

I am increasingly interested in this -
maryhelena wrote: Fri Apr 30, 2021 7:38 am
My theory relates to a historical figure, a King and High Priest of the Jews executed by Rome in 37 b.c. An exceptional man, a zealot par excellence, brother of a zealot that got beheaded by Rome and a son of a zealot who was 'taken off by poison given him by those of Pompey's party". Yep, a whole family of Hasmonean zealots....

''Dion Cassius says, 'Antony now gave the Kingdom to a certain Herod, and having stretched Antigonus on the cross and scourged him, which had never been done before to a king by the Romans, he put him to death'. The sympathies of the masses for the crucified king of Judah, the heroic son of so many heroic ancestors, and the legends growing, in time, out of this historical nucleus, became, perhaps, the source from which Paul and the evangelists preached Jesus as the crucified king of Judea.'' (History of the Hebrew's Second Commonwealth, 1880, Cincinnati, page 206)

Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise (1819-1900), scholar and novelist

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MrMacSon
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Re: Skrbina's view about Jesus

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Giuseppe wrote: Fri Apr 30, 2021 7:58 am Jesus b. Sapphat existed beyond any doubt and he is surely more titled to be defined a Zealot than any past asmonean king.
Oh, oh-kay.

(did you mean Hasmonean king? or were you being facetious and meant Assmonean king? :P )
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Jax
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Re: Skrbina's view about Jesus

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maryhelena wrote: Fri Apr 30, 2021 11:46 am I've just finished reading the book....... Suffice to say it left a bad taste in my mouth. Its almost like it has an undercurrent of negativity towards Jews.
Hi Mary, as it is unlikely that I am going to part with some beer money buying the book could you please assuage my curiosity as to why the author feels that Paul decided to pull this scam. Was Paul some kind of evil Jew bent on the overthrow of the Roman empire or something dumb like this?

Thanks, could use a good laugh. :cheers:

Lane

Edit: Never mind. Just read the review bellow.

Some of it.
Last edited by Jax on Fri Apr 30, 2021 4:22 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Jax
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Re: Skrbina's view about Jesus

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MrMacSon wrote: Fri Apr 30, 2021 1:57 pm
Giuseppe wrote: Fri Apr 30, 2021 7:58 am Jesus b. Sapphat existed beyond any doubt and he is surely more titled to be defined a Zealot than any past asmonean king.
Oh, oh-kay.

(did you mean Hasmonean king? or were you being facetious and meant Assmonean king? :P )
You are on a real pun run these days! :lol:
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MrMacSon
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Re: Skrbina's view about Jesus

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fwiw, another review of Skrbina's book, https://www.unz.com/article/review-of-d ... and-years/ (and a discussion below)
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