If No New Information, Data, Material Emerges About Christianity What's There to Write About?

[lsayre]

When I look at professors (I can't call them 'colleagues' by any stretch of the imagination) on Facebook they have to act like their research is so interesting and ground-breaking. I guess I am a bad judge of what's relevant but it all seems so ... contrived. Like the atheist scholars think that by killing God that we will have this renaissance. But really? Who cares about 'things to do with God' when God doesn't exist? And the way many of them de-mystify the study of religion is by assuming the mundaneness of everything. So Jesus is a real man who performed magic. Or he was a Jew. Or he was anything boring and uninteresting because quite frankly THEY are boring and uninteresting. It's like re-creating the world in the image of a boring pedantic professor and we all know how much the average person loves teachers.

Or was he a man of war?

[John T]

But do people expect to have radical new perspectives without radical new discoveries?

But what difference would it make?

"Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it."..George Santayana 1905.

The radical discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls is largely ignored by the mythcists because it doesn't fit their narrative.


Don't believe me? What would they say if a burial cave in Jerusalem was found, opened, and contained official documents about the trial of Jesus? Would Carrier et al. admit they were wrong then?

Of course not!

On the other side of the same coin how would Christians react with the same documents that showed Jesus was nothing more than a rebellious leader of a cult?

Got it now?

[Leucius Charinus]

Or was he a man of war?

(1) Pay tax to Caesar;
(2) Give Caesar whatever TF he asks for;
(3) In all Judea it is the centurion who has greatest faith;
(4) Go the extra mile carrying the soldiers pack;
(5) Be compliant and turn the other cheek;
(6) Support the Roman military industrial complex and go out and buy a sword (or two);
(7) Greek "episkopos" (bishop) also means "spy";
(8) NT is the product of the Roman empire - an empire forged on war;
(9) Pray for the Romans - "your enemies" (lions, coliseum);
(10) Caesar Augustus, the son of god - his gospel announced his Roman military kingdom;
(11) "People should be subject to the government - which is appointed by God;
(12) "Obey these agents of God on earth" [Romans 13];
(13) CHI RHO on Greek inscriptions - abbreviation of ἑκατόνταρχος ‎(centurion);
(14) Tetrarchy - Leadership of Four Gospels, Paul and the Forward Scout Epistles

That's the problem. Jesus can be anything to anyone who peers into Albert's Well using the eyes of Biblical Textual Criticism. It's all there in the NT. Whatever you want to see within the rules and theory space of textual criticism. You can even cite the "Church Fathers" when you get the right kind of education and/or perhaps an official Professional license.

Now that textual criticism has wandered off into the realms of a non historical Jesus we must return to understand the nature of Albert Schweitzer's well. On the money, someone said that the NT apocryphal literature (includes the Nag Hammadi Library) is a textual critic's nightmare. Let that sink in.

Or was he a man of apocryphal tales?


"know thyself"
"nothing to excess"
"certainty brings insanity"




https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_thyself

[Ulan]

I can see the argument that the study of early Christianity was 'stuck' in religious concepts/faith and needed to be 'updated' into a science. I can see that we haven't sufficiently considered whether Jesus was a real historical person. But is there really so many points of view that haven't been properly considered before that we need to churn out new papers/discussions or is there a point at which most things are 'settled' or close enough to being settled that we can close the book on what is known/can be known?

I know that in the humanities there are endless debates about books, authors, historical figures etc. But do people expect to have radical new perspectives without radical new discoveries?

It's probably human nature that we want to know. It's the reason why religion exists in the first place, aside from its social functions: to give answers where there aren't any, to fill in the void.

In a sense, the question regarding historicity is "settled" in the uncomfortable position that we don't know, and there's a good chance we will never know. As you say, without any ground-breaking new discoveries, there's no way to decide between Christianity having started with a movement that was born from the followers of some Jewish preacher who was subsequently made into a god or a movement that just told stories about a Jewish preacher as interpretation of Old Testament prophecies. How would anyone be able to distinguish this? NT scholarship today, at least that one responsible for teaching new Lutheran or Catholic priests where I live, distinguishes the kerygmatic Jesus, the Jesus of the NT books, from a historical one. All we know is the former. The rest is just speculation.

It's ironic that, whoever forged the Testimonium Flavianum, did this in a way that brings us into this situation. In the case he did that to "improve" on an existing Josephan passage about Jesus and didn't invent it whole cloth, he basically destroyed the sole deciding historical source that doesn't just prove that the Christian movement existed. In the end, that's the situation we are left in.

[Secret Alias]

Well put. Thank you. Love your input whoever you are.