Bart Ehrman on the Historical Jesus

[Belz...]

You just dumped a link and just left!! That is the end of the matter?? That is completely unacceptable.

I assume this means you didn't follow the link ?

 

[Craig B]

... It has been shown over and over that Irenaeus could not have known of Acts of the Apostles and the PaULINE Corpus when he argued Jesus was crucified c 50 CE and at the age of FIFTY.

Nothing of the kind. It has been explained to you numerous times where Irenaeus obtained his "fifty" and why.

In the Pauline writings PAUL supposedl preached Christ Crucified in the time of King Aretas c 37-41 CE.

You are surely not saying Paul couldn't have done that in those years, because someone else a century and a half later says something about the chronology inconsistent with what can be inferred from Paul's notice of Aretas? You'd rather believe that the whole corpus was wantonly and arbitrarily made up out of nothing at all, around the later date, by unknown persons possessing superhuman powers of literary invention, and inspired by unknown motives. Jean Hardouin's suggestions were not much more extravagant.

 

[Belz...]

This tendency to belligerence is typical, I think may be said, of dejudge and of the others who agree with his views. This gives some credence to the hypothesis that the recent upsurge in this kind of mythicism is a reaction to terrorist and other outrages perpetrated in the name of religion. If there was no Jesus there would be no Christianity. There should be no Christianity, therefore there was no Jesus. That seems to be the reasoning

I can confirm that the appeal the MJ side had for me was definitely based on that reasoning, before I snapped out of it.

 

[tsig]

I can confirm that the appeal the MJ side had for me was definitely based on that reasoning, before I snapped out of it.

Not everyone arrives at a destination by the same route.

Your story sounds a lot like a "witness testimony".

I was a Myther till I saw the light.

 

[Belz...]

Not everyone arrives at a destination by the same route.

Your story sounds a lot like a "witness testimony".

I was a Myther till I saw the light.

Point taken. But I was simply lending credence to Craig's theory by confirming that at least one poster here fit within it at some point in the recent past (like, last year recent.)

 

[tsig]

Point taken. But I was simply lending credence to Craig's theory by confirming that at least one poster here fit within it at some point in the recent past (like, last year recent.)

Fair enough, we all tend to view our viewpoint as the only valid viewpoint and that someone could only disagree with our obvious truths out of malice.

I think most atheists spend about as much time discussing an HJ as they do discussing bigfoot.

 

[H'ethetheth]

Point taken. But I was simply lending credence to Craig's theory by confirming that at least one poster here fit within it at some point in the recent past (like, last year recent.)

Then I shall neutralize your confirmation: I had never thought about the question of the existence of Jesus (other than in the "Life of Brian" kind of way), until Robert M. Price started his Bible Geek series on the infidel guy podcast, explaining how little we can actually say about Jesus. Since then I've listened to and read more by Price and have become thoroughly agnostic on the question.
The characterization of historical Jesus deniers as sour-grapes-anti-theists is lazy, and is a nice way to handwave any arguments for a mythical Jesus away.

Apparently there are these people, but they are people who formed their opinion irrationally. These are not the people you should be debating on this subject, so could we stick to arguments in stead of ad-hominem speculation?

 

[zugzwang]

Craig B wrote:

This tendency to belligerence is typical, I think may be said, of dejudge and of the others who agree with his views. This gives some credence to the hypothesis that the recent upsurge in this kind of mythicism is a reaction to terrorist and other outrages perpetrated in the name of religion. If there was no Jesus there would be no Christianity. There should be no Christianity, therefore there was no Jesus. That seems to be the reasoning, so anyone who says that there may well have been a Jesus is not an ally in the fight against the crimes of religious bigots. It's as if the HJ theory was morally wrong, not merely intellectually unsound, in their opinion.

That's interesting, especially your point about HJ being morally wrong. I have encountered a few mythicists who seemed outraged (and even enraged), by the idea of HJ; and I supposed at the time, that they linked it to Christian belief. Thus, as you say, deny Jesus, and you deny Christianity.

You also get the phenomenon of HJ supporters being labelled as closet Christians - why else would an atheist be interested in it? This used to happen on RatSkep quite a lot, until most of the HJ people got bored and moved off. In fact, I'm pretty sure that the mods on RatSkep brought in a special measure to stop these accusations of theism!

 

[Craig B]

Then I shall neutralize your confirmation: I had never thought about the question of the existence of Jesus (other than in the "Life of Brian" kind of way), until Robert M. Price started his Bible Geek series on the infidel guy podcast, explaining how little we can actually say about Jesus. Since then I've listened to and read more by Price and have become thoroughly agnostic on the question.

Most Jesus Myth theories are perfectly respectable intellectually, I accept. I am by no means dismissing all their proponents. I was specifically referring to the vehemence of some of these theorists, and looking for a possible hypothesis to explain this. Specifically I wrote

This gives some credence to the hypothesis that the recent upsurge in this kind of mythicism is a reaction to terrorist and other outrages perpetrated in the name of religion.

Not that all mythicists belong to this category; far from it. And that I regard these theories as worthy of close examination and detailed analysis, I hope is evident from my contribution to these threads.

 

[Belz...]

Then I shall neutralize your confirmation:

How do you neutralise my confirmation ? I'm simply providing an anecdotal data point to show that it's possible that some posters here have the same viewpoint that I used to have.

Apparently there are these people, but they are people who formed their opinion irrationally.

Well, yeah, that's the whole point.

 

[Craig B]

You cannot answer the questions!!! Which part of the NT is history? Which book or Epistle is history? ... Why are you promoting the NT as history ... ?

Surely no comment is required on that gross distortion of the HJ standpoint.

 

[IanS]

What's funny is that in your attempt to do that, you are blindly believing the text of the Bible, somehow thinking that all events in there are linked. Remove one, and you remove all else. This is as extreme and silly as stating that removing all supernatural elements from the story gives us a historical Jesus, and is just as unhelpful.

So you are saying (see highlight) that only ONE event in the Biblical writing would need to be removed to leave all the rest of it perfectly believable?

Pick one event which you want to remove, and then lets see you defend what is left as reasonably likely to be true.

 

[TimCallahan]

Interestingly enough, Ignatius of Antioch seems to have quoted the Pauline epistles (quoted from the site, bolding added):

Ignatius of Antioch, who wrote c. 110, appears to have quoted from Romans, 1 Corinthians, Ephesians, Colossians, and 1 Thessalonians, suggesting that these works, at least, existed by the time Ignatius wrote his works.[59] Ignatius does not appear to have quoted from 2 Thessalonians . . . .

 

[Belz...]

So you are saying (see highlight) that only ONE event in the Biblical writing would need to be removed to leave all the rest of it perfectly believable?

No and I have no idea how you could interpret my post as saying that, unless you were deliberately trying to spin my words to mean something else.

Giving you the benefit of the doubt, I mean exactly what I said: that you must throw out the baby with the bathwater. The point is that there may be a baby in there, even if the water is incredibly murky.

 

[Brainache]

So you are saying (see highlight) that only ONE event in the Biblical writing would need to be removed to leave all the rest of it perfectly believable?

Pick one event which you want to remove, and then lets see you defend what is left as reasonably likely to be true.

You have to show that your arguments have merit. Lying is never going to work.

Are you asserting that Paul invented Jesus?

Someone else invented Jesus?

That we can't know?

What?

Details please.

 

[Stone]

I can confirm that the appeal the MJ side had for me was definitely based on that reasoning, before I snapped out of it.

Please, what made you snap out of it? -- No, I'm sincerely interested. This is not intended as a gotcha question at all.

Thanks much,

Stone

 

[Stone]

Craig B wrote:

This tendency to belligerence is typical, I think may be said, of dejudge and of the others who agree with his views. This gives some credence to the hypothesis that the recent upsurge in this kind of mythicism is a reaction to terrorist and other outrages perpetrated in the name of religion. If there was no Jesus there would be no Christianity. There should be no Christianity, therefore there was no Jesus. That seems to be the reasoning, so anyone who says that there may well have been a Jesus is not an ally in the fight against the crimes of religious bigots. It's as if the HJ theory was morally wrong, not merely intellectually unsound, in their opinion.

That's interesting, especially your point about HJ being morally wrong. I have encountered a few mythicists who seemed outraged (and even enraged), by the idea of HJ; and I supposed at the time, that they linked it to Christian belief. Thus, as you say, deny Jesus, and you deny Christianity.

You also get the phenomenon of HJ supporters being labelled as closet Christians - why else would an atheist be interested in it? This used to happen on RatSkep quite a lot, until most of the HJ people got bored and moved off. In fact, I'm pretty sure that the mods on RatSkep brought in a special measure to stop these accusations of theism!

-- accusations that have unfortunately not stopped and in fact have been allowed to happen more and more, possibly because the mods are just too swamped to be able to enforce their "deliberate misrepresentation" clause, Appendix 1, 1.2.m, consistently.

Stone

 

[IanS]

No and I have no idea how you could interpret my post as saying that, unless you were deliberately trying to spin my words to mean something else.

Giving you the benefit of the doubt, I mean exactly what I said: that you must throw out the baby with the bathwater. The point is that there may be a baby in there, even if the water is incredibly murky.

If you have a witness who is so untrustworthy as that, where they continuously present entirely dishonest claims about their central figure, then after a few such lies the witness loses all credibility as an honest source. In the biblical writing there are not just a few such dishonest lies. The entire thing is packed with those fabrications from start to finish.

If you are looking for reliable evidence of Jesus, then it has to be something other than a work of continuous fabricated fictions like the bible.

 

[Brainache]

If you have a witness who is so untrustworthy as that, where they continuously present entirely dishonest claims about their central figure, then after a few such lies the witness loses all credibility as an honest source. In the biblical writing there are not just a few such dishonest lies. The entire thing is packed with those fabrications from start to finish.

If you are looking for reliable evidence of Jesus, then it has to be something other than a work of continuous fabricated fictions like the bible.

Can you give us an example of Ancient writing which doesn't contain what you call "dishonest lies"?

 

[Craig B]

... The entire thing is packed with those fabrications from start to finish.

There is a pattern to the occurrence of the fabrications, as has been pointed out innumerable times. They are not distributed at random. Scholars have made good use of this phenomenon in attempts, which cannot be regarded as arbitrary or outrageous, to discern what, if any, is the underlying truth of the gospel accounts.

That there is indeed an underlying authentic historical core is the belief of most scholarly commentators.