Dr. Sarah's Friendly Refutation of all Mythicism

[StephenGoranson]

This is so stupid.
Do you know all that was written down?
Do you know all that was spoken?

[rgprice]

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.

I would disagree with this a little bit. I would say that people in the 2nd century were less capable of sophisticated textual analysis than we are capable of today. No fault of their own.

We have a lot of textual data in hand today. We can perform more sophisticated analysis on this data today than what people 2,000 ago were capable of.

This is sort of a pet peeve of mine. The claim that, "So much time has gone by, we simply can't know anymore. Too much has been lost to time."

No, this is false. A lot of data has been preserved. We absolutely can analyze the data and draw more justifiable conclusions from that data today than the conclusions that people 2,000 years ago drew.

Its not a matter of saying, 'We can't know". We can know. We can analyze fossils and DNA to reconstruct the evolutionary lineage of creatures that have been extinct for millions of years for Chirst's sake.

[rgprice]

@SG Your question wasn't worth a serous answer. You're doing the same thing that creationists do regarding fossils and "missing links".

Evolution is a framework for understanding the development of life. Of course there will always be gaps in the evidence, but the issue is establishing a framework that explains the evidence we have. Yet creationists will say, "Show me all the fossils that lead to the development of man," and of course we can't identify every single fossil in a lineage.

Same here. If we have 1,000 sayings attributed to Jesus and we identify 999 of those as having been sourced from the Jewish scriptures, Paul, Philo, Plato, etc., then you would still come back and say, "See there is a saying you can't explain, it must have come from Jesus!!!"

[RandyHelzerman]

This is sort of a pet peeve of mine. The claim that, "So much time has gone by, we simply can't know anymore. Too much has been lost to time."

Thanks for the clarification; I didn't want to give the impression I was of the "we're living in the matrix" school of skepticism.

[andrewcriddle]

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.

FWIW Irenaeus does claim access to tradition via Polycarp and others. See for example Irenaeus on Tradition
(I have doubts about how reliable this tradition was but that is another matter.)

Andrew Criddle

[gryan]

I guess the easiest way to say this is that I view understanding the development of these texts and how they relate to one another and other texts as an analytical problem.

(...)
The data scientists go crazy on it: They measure the dimensions of the bills, the thickness, etc. They compare the bill's fibers and materials against huge databases of paper and textiles, and note that this particular type of paper wasn't used to make any other thing. They carefully translate the latin phrase "E pluribus Unum"--out of many, one--and speculate that it has to have something to do with the numeral "1" printed all over the bill. We're always on firm ground with numeric, quantitative data!

All great stuff--and actually, all more or less true. But it massively misses the whole point: how did those ancient people, in a very different time and place, actually *use* these dollar bills?
(...)

Just want to say I love this analogy.

Me too.

I'd like to touch on the current consensus regarding Paul's encounter with James, the Lord's brother, as described in Galatians 1:19. The interpretation suggests that Paul saw no 'heteron' (numerical other) apostles except for James, the Lord's brother. There's an ongoing debate about whether James should be considered an apostle, and the answer is affirmative. Consequently, we have a record of Paul encountering only two apostles, Cephas and James, the Lord's brother. The emphasis here is on the numbers – specifically, two and only two. It's akin to counting money without understanding its significance.I propose an alternative interpretation of 'heteron.' Instead of a numerical reading, I suggest a qualitative one: 'Of the apostles, I discerned no one heterodox, except James, the Lord's brother.' In this interpretation, Paul saw two apostles, but as in the Acts parallel, there's no specified limit in number. What's crucial to grasp is that the Lord's flesh and blood brother, with whom Paul consulted regarding his many revelations, was preaching a heterodox Gospel (referring to 'heteron' in Galatians 1:6). At that point in time, he was the only one among the apostles whom Paul discerned to be doing so.

[rgprice]

FWIW Irenaeus does claim access to tradition via Polycarp and others. See for example Irenaeus on Tradition
(I have doubts about how reliable this tradition was but that is another matter.)

Andrew Criddle

This is quite intersting:

3.4. But Polycarp also was not only instructed by apostles, and conversed with many who had seen Christ, but was also, by apostles in Asia, appointed bishop of the Church in Smyrna, whom I also saw in my early youth, for he tarried [on earth] a very long time, and, when a very old man, gloriously and most nobly suffering martyrdom, departed this life, having always taught the things which he had learned from the apostles, and which the Church has handed down, and which alone are true. To these things all the Asiatic Churches testify, as do also those men who have succeeded Polycarp down to the present time,-a man who was of much greater weight, and a more stedfast witness of truth, than Valentinus, and Marcion, and the rest of the heretics. He it was who, coming to Rome in the time of Anicetus caused many to turn away from the aforesaid heretics to the Church of God, proclaiming that he had received this one and sole truth from the apostles,-that, namely, which is handed down by the Church.

What is underlined: Eusebius was born around 260. So, if Eusebius met Polycarp around the age of 10 it would have been about 270. If he met Polycarp when Polycarp was 100 years old, then Polycarp would have been born in 170. If Polycarp knew disciples of Jesus including John Zebedee, and these people knew Jesus before he was killed around 30, then at minimum those apostles would had to have been 140 years old, but to imply any kind of reasonable relationship they would have needed to be around 170 or 180 years old... So of course something isn't adding up here.

It seems to me that what Eusebius is describing in bold is Polycarp handing over the four-Gospel New Testament collection in Rome, and this collection of writings causing many to turn away from Marcion and Valentinus.

But overall, what Eusebius is describing here are not teachings based on traditions, rather he is describing the traditions that testify to the validity of the scriptures, upon which their teachings are founded. Yes, of course there was a reliance on traditions to explain the origins of the scriptures, but orthodox faith itself is based on the scriptures, not traditions. For every article of faith specific scriptures are pointed to as the justification.

[StephenGoranson]

Of course good history research is possible!
I am trying to say that if one first excludes, for example, even the possibility of oral transmission, then the quality of the result will be negatively affected.

[rgprice]

Of course good history research is possible!
I am trying to say that if one first excludes, for example, even the possibility of oral transmission, then the quality of the result will be negatively affected.

Its not a matter of excluding the possibility of oral transmission, its a matter of doing research and identifying literary sources that preclude oral transmission. That's what my book that Dr. Sarah reviewed is all about, identifying the literary basis of the Gospels.

and yes, if one establishes a framework for understanding how the narratives were developed, and that framework directly explains 90% of the content, then it is reasonable to conclude that the other 10% that isn't directly explained also still fits into the same framework. Just as evolutionary theory provides a framework for understanding the development of life and the progression of fossils. Even for life forms for which we cannot identify a fossil lineage because they are soft bodied and didn't live in fossil conducive environments, we can still conclude that those life forms evolved within the same framework as everything else, as opposed to saying, "There are no fossils of this creature or its ancestors, so it must not have evolved!"

What I lay out in my book is a framework for understanding Gospel development. The first Gospel was based on the Pauline letters and the Jewish scriptures. We can see how the writer constructed his narrative from those materials. We can determine that the writer did not work from outside traditions or other information because we can see how those materials account for the narrative. We can also then see how other narratives derive from the first narrative and modify scenes that were originally constructed from the Jewish scriptures and Pauline letters.

[StephenGoranson]

You may imagine you showed such, but have not.

added:
I like fossils: I dug for fossils.
They may not be homologous here.

2nd add:
Let me state this more emphatically: they are not homologous!