Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

DCHindley wrote:

Stephan Huller wrote:"The Flavian fingerprints" - like that's discernible

Yes, I demand to know whether these Flavian fingerprints are Loop, Whorl or Arch patterns.

Fingerprints? I thought all they had was a Flavian signature. Wonders never cease.

DCHindley wrote:

Stephan Huller wrote:"The Flavian fingerprints" - like that's discernible

Yes, I demand to know whether these Flavian fingerprints are Loop, Whorl or Arch patterns. The first two can be identified by the presence of "deltas" (only one per fingerprint on a loop pattern, two for whorl pattern), or lack thereof (arch patterns have no delta).

Once we have descriptions of our recovered patterns (types of loop patterns include ulnar and radial; types of whorls include plain, central pocket loop, double loop and accidental; types of arches are plain & tented; and ridge lines themselves have minutiae, or ridge characteristics, that make them unique from those of any other fingerprint) then we can compare to known Flavian fingerprints.

Without the ability to compare the fingerprints recovered from the NT with known Flavian fingerprints, the process will become tediously speculative and essentially moot.

DCH

Nice exercise in wit, David. How about turning your attention to what you would need in order to discern the 'truth' of this theory:

1. Jesus began as a celestial being in the minds of Christians.
2. This celestial being reveals ‘truths’.
3. This celestial being had tricked the Devil by becoming incarnate and was crucified by the Devil.
4. Thereby atoning for all of Israel’s sins and Temple no longer mattered.
5. Christians conjour the angelic being’s ‘salvific story’ from a pesher-like reading of scripture.
6. Several decades later – cult members start to “allegorizing the gospel” of this “angelic being” and place him in history as a ‘divine man’.
7. Jesus is “a cosmic savior, later historicized”.

( Carrier's theory in a nutshell
http://www.bibleinterp.com/articles/201 ... 8028.shtml)

DCHindley wrote:Without the ability to compare the fingerprints recovered from the NT with known Flavian fingerprints, the process will become tediously speculative and essentially moot.

Heh. The sad thing about this statement is that NT research will always stay "tediously speculative" to some extent. Fascinating, yes, but never ultimately conclusive.

Which is not meant as defense of that Iulius Caesar=Jesus Christ thesis. I agree that there should be at least something more tangible than just distant similarities in words and the fact both died at some point.

mh,

Why not turn my attention to proving that Obama's birth certificate is legit and not the product of a long running Islamic plot to take over the world? I just don't care for sheer speculation or fanaticism of any kind, left, right or even center.

If one were to ask me, the Marxists Engels and Kautsky, and the Monist Kalthoff, have made the best attempts at actually explaining, with plausible antecedents, how the Christian salvation-myth could have formed in the 1st century Roman empire without a human Jesus actually existing.

Not to say I agree with their explanations, just that they have done a far far better job than any modern JM proponent has. When someone gets around to re-examining those explanations, I'll get around to examining these newer ones.

"On the History of Early Christianity," by Frederick Engels, First Published in Die Neue Zeit, 1894-95, Translated into English by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism, 1957 from the newspaper. Transcribed: by director@marx.org.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/wo ... /index.htm

The Rise of Christianity, by Albert Kalthoff, Translated by Joseph McCabe from Die Entstehung des Christentums:
Neue Bzitriige zum Christusproblem (1904), Issued for the Nationalist Press Association, Limited, London: Watts & Co,
1907
http://www.archive.org/details/riseofch ... 00kaltrich

Foundations of Christianity, by Karl Kautsky, Translated by Henry F. Mins, Russell & Russell, New York: 1953, Based upon the 13th German ed. of Der Ursprung des Christentums: eine historische Untersuchung, Dietz: Stuttgart, 1923, first edition 1908. Transcribed by Sally Ryan for Marxist Internet Archive, who claims it is in the public domain.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1908/christ/

Enjoy.

Warning ... no mention of Antigonus Matthias II or Marcion anywhere, so THEY MUST BOTH BE WRONG! Do not even bother to read them unless you are intrigued by unique thinking by pioneers in the non-theological study of the origin of Chr ... Naaaaaahhhhhhh!

DCH

maryhelena wrote:

DCHindley wrote:

Stephan Huller wrote:"The Flavian fingerprints" - like that's discernible

Yes, I demand to know whether these Flavian fingerprints are Loop, Whorl or Arch patterns.

Nice exercise in wit, David. How about turning your attention to what you would need in order to discern the 'truth' of this theory:

1. Jesus began as a celestial being in the minds of Christians.
2. This celestial being reveals ‘truths’.
3. This celestial being had tricked the Devil by becoming incarnate and was crucified by the Devil.
4. Thereby atoning for all of Israel’s sins and Temple no longer mattered.
5. Christians conjour the angelic being’s ‘salvific story’ from a pesher-like reading of scripture.
6. Several decades later – cult members start to “allegorizing the gospel” of this “angelic being” and place him in history as a ‘divine man’.
7. Jesus is “a cosmic savior, later historicized”.

( Carrier's theory in a nutshell
http://www.bibleinterp.com/articles/201 ... 8028.shtml)

Ulan wrote:

DCHindley wrote:Without the ability to compare the fingerprints recovered from the NT with known Flavian fingerprints, the process will become tediously speculative and essentially moot.

Heh. The sad thing about this statement is that NT research will always stay "tediously speculative" to some extent. Fascinating, yes, but never ultimately conclusive.

Which is not meant as defense of that Iulius Caesar=Jesus Christ thesis. I agree that there should be at least something more tangible than just distant similarities in words and the fact both died at some point.

I think that even without absolute proof that something or another occurred exactly as described in holy writ, we can still reconstruct plausible explanations based on the other known histories and/or accounts of the same general time. This is why I think that explanations that posit a human Jesus who promoted royal ideas (whether an earthly one he was to lead or a heavenly one god would establish supernaturally), went afoul of the Roman authorities, was executed for those ideas, and around whom the salvation myth arose in consequence of the rationalizations of his followers, are more likely than those which figure the "Christ myth" magically popped up like a mushroom from spores in the air.

DCH

DCHindley wrote:

Ulan wrote:

DCHindley wrote:Without the ability to compare the fingerprints recovered from the NT with known Flavian fingerprints, the process will become tediously speculative and essentially moot.

Heh. The sad thing about this statement is that NT research will always stay "tediously speculative" to some extent. Fascinating, yes, but never ultimately conclusive.

Which is not meant as defense of that Iulius Caesar=Jesus Christ thesis. I agree that there should be at least something more tangible than just distant similarities in words and the fact both died at some point.

I think that even without absolute proof that something or another occurred exactly as described in holy writ, we can still reconstruct plausible explanations based on the other known histories and/or accounts of the same general time. This is why I think that explanations that posit a human Jesus who promoted royal ideas (whether an earthly one he was to lead or a heavenly one god would establish supernaturally), went afoul of the Roman authorities, was executed for those ideas, and around whom the salvation myth arose in consequence of the rationalizations of his followers, are more likely than those which figure the "Christ myth" magically popped up like a mushroom from spores in the air.

DCH

But let's take this conversation one step further. Rather than framing the discussion in terms of 'was Jesus God or man?' let's speak in rather plainer terms. Was there a time that the gospel was not about the salvation of the human race i.e. did it begin as a 'history of a man' or was it always about the means by which the crucifixion in 21 CE saved the human race? If you can argue that the gospel story was a history first and then later transformed into a mystical text which effected salvation for everyone fine. But I think the question comes down to which is more implausible or irrational:

1. arguing that Jesus was a man whose death somehow effected salvation for everyone in the world independent of anyone 'hearing it' (= the tree falling in a forest).
2. arguing that Jesus was a God who descended to earth who somehow ended up crucified or trading places with another human being who died on the Cross which effected human salvation

Much time is spent recently deriding (2) but how is (1) any more plausible? Again, if you can argue that the Passion WASN'T originally seen to effect universal salvation. But I think that is cheating. Everything we know about Christianity points to the Passion being the central 'thing' in the religion because of its salvic potency. Yes you can argue that Judaism was filled with revolutionary groups. But the gospel story clearly was written after these revolutionary groups had proved impotent and now the death of a particular 'man' - rather than revolutionary activity - 'saves' everyone.

This requires an acknowledgement that the gospel works purely on a literary or 'mystical' level. As such it wasn't originally conceived as history so it isn't worth much or it isn't very productive to stress the importance of Jesus's historicity. The important thing is the idea WASN'T effected by revolutionary activity but by means of a divine fiat which makes (1) a plausible explanation because it - the gospel - worked strictly on a literary/mystical level.

DCHindley wrote:mh,If one were to ask me, the Marxists Engels and Kautsky, and the Monist Kalthoff, have made the best attempts at actually explaining, with plausible antecedents, how the Christian salvation-myth could have formed in the 1st century Roman empire without a human Jesus actually existing.

FYI, Kautsky actually contradicted Engels on Jesus existence. He believed there were authentic scraps of history in which Jesus was one of many Jewish rebels/zealots in his time. For the leading German socialist, the ultimate historical proof of Jesus was the 'primitive Christian communist society' in Jerusalem. He wrote a Marxist theory on the Origins of Christianity for which he received the nickname the Pope of Marxism. I have never been convinced by the argument but nonetheless it is an interesting and absorbing reading. I have discovered that despite his being lamented as an infamous "renegade" by Lenin and the bolsheviks (he was committed to parliamentary democracy), in the latter Soviet Union, his theory was readily embraced and the "mythical Jesus" of Bauer, Engels, Lenin and Drews (which I was taught at university in Prague in 1960's) all but discarded in the 1980's by the Soviet Academia. Many Russian Orthodox churches were built under Gorbachev and many historical ones, destroyed by the early bolshevik activists, rebuilt. Most famous among them is the cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow (yes, yes the one in which Pussy Riot screamed obscenities).

Best,
Jiri

Stephan Huller wrote:But I think the question comes down to which is more implausible or irrational:

1. arguing that Jesus was a man whose death somehow effected salvation for everyone in the world independent of anyone 'hearing it' (= the tree falling in a forest).
2. arguing that Jesus was a God who descended to earth who somehow ended up crucified or trading places with another human being who died on the Cross which effected human salvation

Much time is spent recently deriding (2) but how is (1) any more plausible?

Talking about plausibility is all fine, but it isn't that clear-cut. By the way, I'm not really arguing against the majority assumption in this thread - it's indeed easier to just assume that some sect leader got crucified at some point and was the starting point for all these stories, even if there may not be anything left of this original leader in our extant stories, with Jesus of the Gospels being some composite figure of lots of teachers, preachers and military insurgents of the time (see all those similarities with different figures in Josephus accounts).

Which means that some kind of historical Jesus is basically an "Occam's Razor" position. Which doesn't necessarily mean it's true. It's a pity we seem to have nothing left of the beliefs of that Jerusalem group, at least nothing tangible and nothing we can unequivocally attribute to them. What we have is Paul, who has about zero to contribute to any Jesus figure that lived on Earth (probably because he was only interested in the resurrected Jesus). And we have the gospel of Mark, which has a hard time convincing me that anything of that in there happened in reality, outside of AT texts. But that's also a source that comes from a group (or person) opposed to any Jerusalem group. So we have this void at the start. Which means that Occam's Razor is good and fine as a principle, but doesn't necessarily mean it applies here.

In the end, I don't agree with the your assumption that any historical person was necessary as initial starter of the movement, given that those people who were the main driving force behind the movement seemed have about zero interest in any history of this person. I still think there was some person, but it's not necessary.

Finally, I have to add that I see this as an utterly unimportant question. If the gospel figure doesn't have much semblance to the real thing, who cares.

What I should have clarified in that citation of my previous post is that I wasn't arguing about the plausibility of Jesus's historical existence per se but which of (1) or (2) was more likely to have been believed by converts from Judaism? Could Jews have believed that the death of a historical man or "revolutionary" affected salvation for the human race like a tree falling in a forest? Could it be conceived as happening independently of a mystical mythmaker figure "making" the gospel as the thing which gives salvation by means of eye opening "revelation"? I don't think so. The salvic "thing" is the revelation given to the evangelist, his understanding of what the historical event in 21 CE "means." As such the gospel isn't principally a historical document. It is a mystical reworking of a historical event by means of the involvement of a divine angel named "Jesus" or whatever name was found on the written page of his revelation. An appeal to history is like going back in to the biography of an author and saying "this scene is based on this documented experience" of said writer. But that isn't necessarily certain because writers mingle fiction and fact indiscriminately.

I was watching Annie Hall the other night realizing that the film was about Woody Allen's relationship with Diane Keaton (Diane = (Di)Annr probably). But was that "real" romantic relationship motivated by the desire to make the film Annie Hall or vice versa? In other words was their real life romance built around their mutual desire to make a great film? As such was it ever a real romance or just a sublimated "desire" for fame and fortune etc? So too the development of the gospel.