Thoughts on Maurice Casey's new book

[Blood]

"I hope this introduction is sufficient to make clear the appalling state of pseudo-scholarship which has dominated the whole notion that Jesus of Nazreth was not a historical figure."

I presume he includes his buddy R. Joseph Hoffman is this cesspool of pseudo-scholarship, since Hoffman was openly advocating mythicism just a few years ago.

It's hard to read this stuff. It's heresiology for the 21st century. No matter how critical these guys may appear, you mess with their Jesus and they are gonna open a can of whip-ass on you.

[ficino]

I haven't formed a view on the question. I think, though, that some opposition to the non-historical view amounts to argumenta ad ignorantiam.

[stevencarrwork]

FWIW Casey provides several pages of information about himself as well.

Andrew Criddle

Ex-Professor Casey can't resist telling the world about the personal lives of people he has never met.

I quote from http://vridar.org/2010/11/29/historical ... iot-casey/

'Maurice Casey has explained the motive of Judas Iscariot, his level of literacy, his religious interest, his worship customs before he met Jesus, and along the way has proved the historical factness of Mark’s account of Judas’s betrayal of Jesus. This is all included in Jesus of Nazareth.'

Casey demonstrates more of his legendary psychic powers on page 426 of that book 'He joined the Jesus movement because he saw in it a prophetic movement dedicated to the renewal of Israel. Jesus chose him because he was a faithful Jew, dedicated to God and to the renewal of Israel, and with the qualities necessary to take a leading role in the ministry of preaching and exorcism.'

The trouble with mythicists is that they do not possess superhuman psychic powers and are unable to tell us the private inner thoughts of people who lived 2000 years ago.

Unlike ex-Professor Casey, who has so little trouble with things like that that psychically reading my date of birth would have been child's play to him - a mere warmup before reading the tealeaves of St. Thomas....

[Diogenes the Cynic]

Casey replaces mythicism with unbridled fantasism.

My question for Casey: Why did Paul think Jesus appeared to "the Twelve" if the betrayal by Judas was historical?

[Tenorikuma]

My question for Casey: Why did Paul think Jesus appeared to "the Twelve" if the betrayal by Judas was historical?

Bart Ehrman demanded an answer to that question twice in one of his debate against a conservative Christian (I don't remember who it was). His opponent refused to answer.

[Peter Kirby]

chapter 5 is a relatively short chapter arguing that the infrequency of references to the Historical Jesus in Paul and other epistles does not imply that the authors did not believe in a historical figure.

I see ex-Professor Casey's point.

There are many Soviet pictures where people who used to be in the picture have now vanished. Does that mean they never existed? Of course not.

There are many North Korean webpages where there is now no mention of Kim Jung Un's uncle. Does that mean he never existed? Of course not.

Doherty produces many examples of places in the Epistles where Paul seems to be deliberately leaving no room for Jesus to have acted.

Perhaps Jesus was subject to Communist style airbrushing from history by early Christians.

I'm sure ex-Professor Casey will complaining that I am strawmanning his arguments. Hard to avoid strawmanning people who are clutching so many straws...

Casey argues that in the ancient world (where writing letters was more hard work than posting messages on the Internet) a writer would only mention things that both he and the readers already knew if there was a real reason to do so.

Andrew Criddle

I agree with this. But it does make the Pauline corpus as a whole rather strange.

In the first century, you have writers like Seneca pushing the medium. This makes sense. Very wealthy, very connected, very literate guy.

At the same time -- the same exact time -- he is only second place, if the epistolary Paul is accepted as a construct. Nice try, Seneca. Somebody else was writing the longest letters known from the time. And who? Someone not as wealthy, whose connections are implied to be the middle class (the second 1% more than the top 1%), and who knows rhetoric certainly but who doesn't seem to be as literate as Seneca.

Now you can understand Seneca. The motive for pushing the medium the way he did was not practical. It was literary. While others might have to worry over word count (picture the telegraph era when people were charged by the word--now picture the ancient era where you would double costs for using a second sheet of papyrus), Seneca was wealthy and wasn't writing at length for a primarily practical purpose. Like Pliny the Younger later, he was writing for the benefit of those who would read the epistles later as much as anything.

Can we easily understand Paul? Ostensibly, as we are frequently reminded, he was writing for a practical purpose. He needed to deal with situations that arose in churches, such as the one at Thessalonica or the one at Corinth, when he was absent. While Romans appeared to be planned out and has little direct occasion pretended for it, several letters at least pretend to be written to address an immediate need for the author's own particular circumstances.

Even if a letter of the historical Paul to Corinth could have been written for a practical purpose, would we expect to see it to be as long as 1 Corinthians is? Would it have a statement of the faith that everybody agreed on as part of 1 Cor 15? Would it repeat the known story regarding the institution of the Lord's supper in 1 Cor 11? Would it add a poem about love in a letter already growing long in 1 Cor 13? Would it not find a way to address the important issues with a letter no more than half the length?

Wouldn't it be more efficient just to tell someone very carefully how to instruct the Corinthians, with the letter serving as little more than a device by which to establish the authority of the person acting on Paul's behalf and reassuring them in broad strokes?

In Acts 15, for example, dealing with circumcision, the letter purported to have been written is much more historically plausible as a real letter. (Even if it is not in fact a real letter, it reflects the sensibility under which a real letter might have been written.)

While I agree that arguing from silence is not that wonderful a tactic when applied to Paul's letters, I'd also suggest that they are already very strange in their cultural and historical context unless they are interpreted as writings falsely ascribed to an authoritative figure after his death (in which case, they make a lot of sense, given the large amount of Jewish and Christian pseudepigrapha written to reinforce religious opinion in such a way).

[Peter Kirby]

I'm not saying it's true or false.

I was talking about people in general. I don't know that Jesus existed, I don't know that he didn't exist. I just don't see a way of proving it either way. Nor do I think it matters. I read Carlos Castenada when I was growing up. I know people who claim they can perform 'lucid dreaming.' Does it matter that the source of their learning was fiction? It's disappointing in a way but they claim they can control their dreams. Never worked for me.

Totally off topic, stephan, but lucid dreaming is real. I have done it - once.

I didn't do it on purpose and could never replicate it. I didn't know what it was called until I described it to someone.

I think (I guess) it's as simple as part of the brain being awake while the other part is still in dream mode. So it's going to be highly dependent on your brain being wired up a certain way and then a bit of good luck. I could tell that I was in bed and that my body was still frozen from sleep, but I also could tell that I was dreaming. In the first part of my dream that I remember controlling, I was able to control the direction of a rocket in space. Then I was able to change the dream to another subject by concentrating on it.

Perhaps it isn't rational for you to believe in lucid dreaming (as you don't have my experience), but for me it is simply a fact.

[hjalti]

Same here. Have experienced lucid dreaming (and sleep paralysis). I don't recall me being able to "tell that I was in bed", I just realised that I was dreaming.

Then I was able to change the dream to another subject by concentrating on it.

What was her name?

[hjalti]

I think they've done some tests regarding the existence of lucid dreaming. They ask expert lucid dreamers (people who are good at getting lucid) to do some specific task while they think they are lucid, and it corresponds to some specific changes in their sleep pattern. So something is happening.

[Peter Kirby]

Yes, personal information that was/is totally unnecessary for any scholarly debate on JC. He has done the same with other people as well.......including Neil Godfrey - who is "apparently Australian". Casey has gone after the man instead of playing the ball.....He does not like the message so seeks to take down the messengers....

FWIW Casey provides several pages of information about himself as well.

That's not how this works, though.

He's got his own permission and full approval, clearly. Nobody's going to fault him for whatever he discloses about himself.

Without having read the book yet, I can see that Casey has clearly taken himself down a peg or two. Maybe he feels it is in the nature of the debate (which is apparently beneath him but into which he enters anyway).

Not in a hundred years could I bring myself to put a book in print that does the ghastly things that Casey does to the English language and other people.