Dr. Sarah's Friendly Refutation of all Mythicism

Discussion about the New Testament, apocrypha, gnostics, church fathers, Christian origins, historical Jesus or otherwise, etc.
rgprice
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Re: Dr. Sarah's Friendly Refutation of all Mythicism

Post by rgprice »

StephenGoranson wrote: Fri Oct 13, 2023 10:03 am rgprice today wrote above, in part:
"....Christianity is totally and completely a religion founded upon the reading of stories by people who didn't understand where the stories came from. The writings of the church fathers themselves tell us this directly. They clearly state everything they know about Jesus comes from these writings and no other source."

Though you, rgprice, are free to write that, you do not KNOW that.
Are we, for example, do you imagine, to dismiss oral tradition just because you say so?
I'm talking about what the founders of orthodox Christianity knew. They tell us explicitly what they knew and how they knew it. They all say quite plainly that all of their knowledge comes from writings. They cite the writings from which their beliefs are derived. They say very plainly, "We know that Jesus was born and became real flesh because Matthew says so when he says, 'blah blah blah' and because Luke says so when he says, 'blah blah blah' and because the evangelist John who was at the Lord's right hand said 'blah blah blah'."

That's what they say. That's how they justify each and every belief that they have. In many ways, this was very good and very reasonable. They wanted to make sure that their views were justified and they weren't just making stuff up. But the problem is that the writings they relied on weren't what they thought they were.

They had a very reasonable approach, they said they were only going to trust claims that could be cross validated by multiple sources. They said if more than one evangelist said something then it was more credible. Perfectly reasonable approach. Again, the problem is that these writings are all copies of each other. The assumption of the church fathers was that the writings of the NT collection were independently produced. They thought that the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were all written in isolation from each other, so if they agreed it was independent corroboration. They didn't realize they were all copied from each other, so their agreement are meaningless. They thought that the Pauline letters were written after the Gospels, and thus Paul was just repeating teachings attested to by the evangelists. They didn't realize that the Gospels are built on the Pauline letters and that the teachings in the Gospels are actually extracted from Paul's letters.

Etc., etc.

So their source of beliefs was the writings, that's unequivocal.
Last edited by rgprice on Fri Oct 13, 2023 10:46 am, edited 1 time in total.
StephenGoranson
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Re: Dr. Sarah's Friendly Refutation of all Mythicism

Post by StephenGoranson »

Not quite.
rgprice
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Re: Dr. Sarah's Friendly Refutation of all Mythicism

Post by rgprice »

Irenaeus talking about the Valentenians:

Such, then, is their system, which neither the prophets announced, nor the Lord taught, nor the apostles delivered, but of which they boast that beyond all others they have a perfect knowledge. They gather their views from other sources than the Scriptures; and, to use a common proverb, they strive to weave ropes of sand, while they endeavour to adapt with an air of probability to their own peculiar assertions the parables of the Lord, the sayings of the prophets, and the words of the apostles, in order that their scheme may not seem altogether without support. In doing so, however, they disregard the order and the connection of the Scriptures, and so far as in them lies, dismember and destroy the truth. By transferring passages, and dressing them up anew, and making one thing out of another, they succeed in deluding many through their wicked art in adapting the oracles of the Lord to their opinions.

This of course is just one tiny and very minor example out of thousands to be chosen from, but I find it an interesting one.

Irenaeus says that the Valentenians, and he make similar charges against many other sects as well, rely on "teachings", while he and others like him rely purely on a plain and direct reading of the scriptures.

Irenaeus and other orthodox Christians go on and on about how so many of these heretics claim that the Gospels and other writings are allegorical and have secret hidden interpretations, but the he and other orthodox Christians aren't falling for it, no, they adhere to a plain and direct reading of the scriptures. Orthodox Christianity is all about a strict adherence to the writings. Every belief is based on the writings and there is an inherent assumption that the writings are 100% correct, authentic and reliable. The orthodox position was that they possessed a set of writings that was true and any deviation from what their version of the writings said was false. Any reading other than a plain superficial reading was false. The writings were a plain and direct account of facts, period. And they came from reliable sources, period. That was the orthodox view. Deviating from a direct reading of these specific scriptures led you down the path of Satan.
StephenGoranson
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Re: Dr. Sarah's Friendly Refutation of all Mythicism

Post by StephenGoranson »

iiuc, rgprice, you hold to gospel priority of Mark.
That is a quite respectable opinion, if not absolute truth, as your rookie bombast pretends.
But where might other sayings of Jesus, not limited to canon, have come from?
rgprice
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Re: Dr. Sarah's Friendly Refutation of all Mythicism

Post by rgprice »

StephenGoranson wrote: Fri Oct 13, 2023 11:25 am But where might other sayings of Jesus, not limited to canon, have come from?
....Anywhere....

Where did the sayings of Yoda and Obi-wan Kenobi come from?

https://www.history.com/news/top-george ... oden-teeth
StephenGoranson
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Re: Dr. Sarah's Friendly Refutation of all Mythicism

Post by StephenGoranson »

So, is your view that because sometimes people make up stuff, like you do, that somehow your currently-preferred-though-changing sorting of such is the truth?
RandyHelzerman
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Re: Dr. Sarah's Friendly Refutation of all Mythicism

Post by RandyHelzerman »

StephenGoranson wrote: Fri Oct 13, 2023 10:46 am Not quite.
Well, as devastating and as knock-down of an argument as that was...n't, I do feel the need to tap on RG Price's point a bit, but ultimately I'll conclude that its pretty sound.

Surely, the original *authors* of the original texts didn't get their ideas from other texts. Rather, they had some pre-existing ideas, which they wrote in order to express as the best they could....but still pretty badly. E.g. Paul tells us vociferously that he got his ideas from direct revelation. But he did such a bad job of explaining it that generations of later writers felt the need to recontextualize and rewrite him to the point that his original vision is very obscured.

Which brings us to Mark. I've been persuaded that Mark was writing in service of rationalizing Paul's letters, but even he is writing at enough distance from Paul that he doesn't fully know what to make of him--he's just as confused about some very basic points of Paul's theology (e.g. how seriously should take the law of Moses?) as we are today about Paul. And he adds a metric truckload of his own secrets and mysteries.

I find Mark all but incomprehensible, but I'm in good company--Matthew completely missed the whole Mark as allegory thing. He recognized the allusions to the Torah, but mistook them as fulfilled prophecy. He even larded his gospel with yet more proof-texty citations from all over the place. Some of them are really strained, and some of them we can't even find in any copy of the Torah we have today--god only knows where he got them, but they all were "it was written" in some text or another.

The various Lukes probably had the best understanding of Mark, but canonical Luke-Acts are transparently anti-Marcionite texts, designed explicitly to get us to view Mark and Paul through proto-orthodox goggles. Once again, whatever the original ideas were, they were being overwritten, reinterpreted, and their original prominence made so obscure that all we have is the text, standing in the way of seeing the original ideas.

By the time we get to John, Mark is obliterated completely, and the author doesn't even refer to the Torah to clue us in, we get this Jesu-Logos, from Philo. I.e. from another written text.

At every stage, we can see how they misread the texts and got nutty ideas, and how they muddied the waters even further with new nutty ideas of their own--but those nutty ideas came by interpretation of source texts. And whoever first published the 4-fold gospel collection *deliberately* remained completely silent about when and where they were written, and how their original authors read them. Even the names they gave them are a transparent attempt to invoke apostolic authority while hiding their true provenance.

Back to RG Price's thesis that all these ideas came from texts. Since the original ideas of the original authors has so totally been hidden from us, where *else* could these ideas come from but the texts which mysteriously reached us? Really, there's only one more consideration preventing us from full-throated agreement, and even that falls away under pressure, viz, that any of the gospels, even the canonical gospels, can--via judiciously straining of gnats and swallowing of camels--be interpreted as supporting any version of Christianity, ancient or modern. The docitist loved Canonical Luke, the gnostics loved John--and even today there are arians (Jehovah's Witnesses, Unitarians) who thump the same Bible as the Trinitarians do.

The church fathers recognized this, and their answer was lame, but effective: *we*, they say, descend in an unbroken chain from the Apostles, so we are the ones who know how to interpret them. It's pretty ironic, because the only *actual* chain of apostolic authority that they give is for Marcion--they all say he was a student of Cerdo, who was a student of Simon Magus, who was a student of Philip the Apostle. Maybe they just made that up to discredit him, but I take it semi-seriously, because, after all, any of them could have made up their own chain of Apostolic descent, but didn't think they could get away with it. If they had even tried, they would have been exposed as fraud, because the chain was looong broken by the time they showed up.

Point being, all almost anybody had, at any stage of the process, was a mysterious set of texts, which they didn't really have any idea who wrote them or where they came from or what they meant. By the time we came around, the origins are so obscure that it is a viable intellectual position to hold that there was no Jesus at all, just a lot of interesting stories. It may be true or false, but the fact remains, any history we have is so obscure that, I have to concur, the only real place anybody ever could have gotten these ideas is from a written text. And anybody who ever seriously wrote about these texts--ancient or modern, theologians or scholars--makes the same claim: they get their ideas from the texts, they aren't just making this stuff up.
Last edited by RandyHelzerman on Fri Oct 13, 2023 1:02 pm, edited 5 times in total.
StephenGoranson
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Re: Dr. Sarah's Friendly Refutation of all Mythicism

Post by StephenGoranson »

rgprice wrote above that other (than Mark) sayings could have come from "Anywhere," but a priori excludes one possible source. Rookie move.
StephenGoranson
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Re: Dr. Sarah's Friendly Refutation of all Mythicism

Post by StephenGoranson »

RH, above, in part:
"....the only real place anybody ever could have gotten these ideas is from a written text."
Oh, does no person ever talk with you?
RandyHelzerman
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Re: Dr. Sarah's Friendly Refutation of all Mythicism

Post by RandyHelzerman »

StephenGoranson wrote: Fri Oct 13, 2023 12:13 pm rgprice wrote above that other (than Mark) sayings could have come from "Anywhere," but a priori excludes one possible source. Rookie move.
"Anywhere" it was written down, that is. We are people of the book, one and all.
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