Thoughts on Maurice Casey's new book

[TedM]

BTW I've seen Hoffman's name mentioned a few times and I can't help but wonder if it is Ted Hoffman, who used to be a 'mythicist' but it sounds as though he no longer is..?

[Peter Kirby]

BTW I've seen Hoffman's name mentioned a few times and I can't help but wonder if it is Ted Hoffman, who used to be a 'mythicist' but it sounds as though he no longer is..?

R. Joseph Hoffman, blogger, author, professor.
http://rjosephhoffmann.wordpress.com/

[andrewcriddle]

but it is perfectly clear that the 'typical' mythicist 'skeptic' has formed a conclusion that in fact Jesus did not exist

That's not really clear.

I agree that there are real problems with how labels distort positions.

However I do regard it as useful to distinguish between those, (such as spin on this forum), who are genuinely agnostic about the existence of a historical Jesus, and those (such as most of the people Casey labels mythicists) who are putting forward what they regard as a plausible alternative to a historical Jesus.

Andrew Criddle

[stevencarrwork]

but it is perfectly clear that the 'typical' mythicist 'skeptic' has formed a conclusion that in fact Jesus did not exist

That's not really clear.

I agree that there are real problems with how labels distort positions.

However I do regard it as useful to distinguish between those, (such as spin on this forum), who are genuinely agnostic about the existence of a historical Jesus, and those (such as most of the people Casey labels mythicists) who are putting forward what they regard as a plausible alternative to a historical Jesus.

Andrew Criddle

Jim West is complaining bitterly that Casey is firing his shotgun labelling of 'mythicist' (equals bad person) at people who are not mythicists.....

Casey is labelling the wrong people, and so West objects bitterly.

[TedM]

I"m all for accurate labeling. Just don't think it will happen. Just as agnostics still have to tell people they aren't atheists, those skeptical about a historical Jesus will have to tell people they aren't true 'mythicists'. It's unfortunate, but inevitable IMO, and it is already happening.

[andrewcriddle]

I agree that there are real problems with how labels distort positions.

However I do regard it as useful to distinguish between those, (such as spin on this forum), who are genuinely agnostic about the existence of a historical Jesus, and those (such as most of the people Casey labels mythicists) who are putting forward what they regard as a plausible alternative to a historical Jesus.

Andrew Criddle

Jim West is complaining bitterly that Casey is firing his shotgun labelling of 'mythicist' (equals bad person) at people who are not mythicists.....

Casey is labelling the wrong people, and so West objects bitterly.

Jim West is generally highly positive about Casey's book maybe more positive than I would be.
His criticism IIUC is that Emanuel Pfoh (of whom I know almost nothing) should not be regarded as a mythicist.

Andrew Criddle

[Tenorikuma]

Emanuel Pfoh is a sharp up-and-coming anthropologist and historian whose area of expertise is the ANE. He's dipped his feet into the Jesus debate, contributing an article to Verenna and Thompson's volume.

He brings fresh eyes and expertise on Near Eastern mythology and literature to the table, and bluntly notes that "modern theological necessity" drives the insistence in Jesus' historicity, arguing that a more secular approach is needed.

[stevencarrwork]

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[andrewcriddle]

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).

Hi Peter

I've been thinking a bit about this.

One problem with using the length of the letters attributed to Paul as an argument for inauthenticity is that it seems to imply that fictitious letters would tend to be longer than real letters. (Otherwise length is not a reason for doubting authenticity).

I don't think this is true.

Most clearly fictitious letters are rather short. The most obvious exception is the epistula apostolorum where the pretence that this is a real letter is very thin.

Andrew Criddle

[stephan happy huller]

No offense Andrew but that's a stupid justification. The argument shouldn't be that the letters were created from scratch but that shorter Marcionite letters were lengthened by a Catholic editor (presumably Irenaeus). The example of the Syriac Ignatian epistles being similarly developed into absolute monstrosities is the extremely close parallel.

I would add that scholars rarely have any imagination. One of many reasons they make bad lovers typically. So the fact that they can only think of one type of sandwich for lunch each day does not prove that there aren't a wide range of other possibilities waiting to be tried beyond peanut butter.

Irenaeus says that the heretics not only shortened but rearranged the individual sentences and paragraphs of the gospel and letters presumably. This means that 1 Corinthians might well be for instance a composite of a number of Marcionite or heretical Pauline sources (look at Clement cite Paul making reference to a pagan source again from memory). The 'letter to the Alexandrians' mentioned in the Muratorian canon. Perhaps the best example of what I am talking about - look how the third Syriac epistle of Ignatius becomes 'to the Romans' and 'to the Tarsians' (from memory). How is that to be explain? Has anyone even bothered?

If only someone could spike the punch at a conference of Biblical scholars with LSD. The 60s revolution turned Les Paul into Jimi Hendrix but there are no equivalents in Biblical scholarship. We are still all working in mono ...