Nailed: Ten Christian Myths that show Jesus never existed

[Craig B]

have you a piece of evidence you'd like discussed - this would be a good time to clue me in!

Very droll. Perhaps dejudge can help out.

 

[proudfootz]

No harm taken.
My post was was a foolish and thoughtless attempt at lightheartedness.
At the end of the day, Robin Lane Fox's published comment about a vengeful flower fairy has nothing to do with our discussion here.

I thought it was John Lithgow.....

 

[proudfootz]

Very droll. Perhaps dejudge can help out.

Sure, if you think dejudge can present you case for you.

 

[Craig B]

Sure, if you think dejudge can present you case for you.

He has a remarkable capacity to present a case by constant repetition of simple declarative statements.

 

[eight bits]

pakeha

No harm taken.
My post was was a foolish and thoughtless attempt at lightheartedness.
At the end of the day, Robin Lane Fox's published comment about a vengeful flower fairy has nothing to do with our discussion here.

I saw what you did there .

Whatever the relevance here, I was able to recycle your report in the "Mohammed's flat earth" thread, elsewhere on this board. My thanks. then, for posting.

On the meta-point to which you were responding, biographical information about somebody being quoted is on-topic and relevant if the quoted material is. How much weight to give somebody's day job, or whether they think Tiresias was right to change, or to change back, or both, is up to the reader. Since some readers will give the information some weight, it may be worth the bandwidth to include it, IMO.

 

[pakeha]

I thought it was John Lithgow.....

A spooky good call, that was.

 

[pakeha]

...Whatever the relevance here, I was able to recycle your report in the "Mohammed's flat earth" thread, elsewhere on this board. My thanks. then, for posting.

No worries, eight bits; we exist only to serve.

On the meta-point to which you were responding, biographical information about somebody being quoted is on-topic and relevant if the quoted material is. How much weight to give somebody's day job, or whether they think Tiresias was right to change, or to change back, or both, is up to the reader . Since some readers will give the information some weight, it may be worth the bandwidth to include it, IMO.

Nice one, the hilited bit.
Hmm. I hesitated about quoting a gardening blogger about another of Robin's rather peculiarly inappropriate (pace, Brainache) outbursts.

..A pasting from Robin Lane Fox is like a thrashing with a wet lettuce, a back-handed complement playfully received. But quite why he drags in “actress Rosario Dawson, full-frontally naked from head to toe” into a review of a gardening book, I completely fail to appreciate; for God's sake you old goat, leave your sexual fantasies out of reviews of our book – perleeze.

There's more about Robin, who's an eminent garden critic here:
noels-garden.blogspot.com.es/2013/05/why-does-robin-lane-fox-have-to-drag.html

For example

...Robin Lane Fox is one of those treasures of British life, a long-standing, opinionated and conservative commentator on gardening. He is one of a kind – the 'crusty old fart', who we do particularly well in Britain, annoying, but in the end, rather lovable. The sort who hang around in gentleman's clubs in London or senior common rooms in exclusive Oxford colleges, with an intravenous drip of vintage port into their veins, fulminating at every opportunity about the silly mistakes of the young, the idiocy of letting women into the club, blah, blah, blah and blah. ...

It's a puzzle.
I was browsing the reviewss at Amazon on his book, The Unauthorised Version here
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Unauthorize...FTO_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1396777469&sr=1-5

I have the impression from reading what the more qualified commented he's writing outside of his own fields (Alexander the Great and gardening) and wonder if RLF is really the best example of a secular scholar writing about an HJ we have at the moment.

 

[Brainache]

No worries, eight bits; we exist only to serve.





Nice one, the hilited bit.
Hmm. I hesitated about quoting a gardening blogger about another of Robin's rather peculiarly inappropriate (pace, Brainache) outbursts.

..A pasting from Robin Lane Fox is like a thrashing with a wet lettuce, a back-handed complement playfully received. But quite why he drags in “actress Rosario Dawson, full-frontally naked from head to toe” into a review of a gardening book, I completely fail to appreciate; for God's sake you old goat, leave your sexual fantasies out of reviews of our book – perleeze.

There's more about Robin, who's an eminent garden critic here:
noels-garden.blogspot.com.es/2013/05/why-does-robin-lane-fox-have-to-drag.html

For example

...Robin Lane Fox is one of those treasures of British life, a long-standing, opinionated and conservative commentator on gardening. He is one of a kind – the 'crusty old fart', who we do particularly well in Britain, annoying, but in the end, rather lovable. The sort who hang around in gentleman's clubs in London or senior common rooms in exclusive Oxford colleges, with an intravenous drip of vintage port into their veins, fulminating at every opportunity about the silly mistakes of the young, the idiocy of letting women into the club, blah, blah, blah and blah. ...

It's a puzzle.
I was browsing the reviewss at Amazon on his book, The Unauthorised Version here
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Unauthorize...FTO_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1396777469&sr=1-5

I have the impression from reading what the more qualified commented he's writing outside of his own fields (Alexander the Great and gardening) and wonder if RLF is really the best example of a secular scholar writing about an HJ we have at the moment.

I only brought him up because I thought people were getting sick of me talking about Robert Eisenman.

Pick another Historian of the Ancient world, anyone will do, no one teaches the MJ, as far as I know.

 

[pakeha]

I only brought him up because I thought people were getting sick of me talking about Robert Eisenman.

Pick another Historian of the Ancient world, anyone will do, no one teaches the MJ, as far as I know.

Sorry, Brainache.
It was just cruel fate that led you to mention our Robin. I have one of his books, by the way.

 

[proudfootz]

He has a remarkable capacity to present a case by constant repetition of simple declarative statements.

Great!

That will be a big help in making your views clear.

 

[proudfootz]

No worries, eight bits; we exist only to serve.


Nice one, the hilited bit.
Hmm. I hesitated about quoting a gardening blogger about another of Robin's rather peculiarly inappropriate (pace, Brainache) outbursts.

..A pasting from Robin Lane Fox is like a thrashing with a wet lettuce, a back-handed complement playfully received. But quite why he drags in “actress Rosario Dawson, full-frontally naked from head to toe” into a review of a gardening book, I completely fail to appreciate; for God's sake you old goat, leave your sexual fantasies out of reviews of our book – perleeze.

There's more about Robin, who's an eminent garden critic here:


For example

...Robin Lane Fox is one of those treasures of British life, a long-standing, opinionated and conservative commentator on gardening. He is one of a kind – the 'crusty old fart', who we do particularly well in Britain, annoying, but in the end, rather lovable. The sort who hang around in gentleman's clubs in London or senior common rooms in exclusive Oxford colleges, with an intravenous drip of vintage port into their veins, fulminating at every opportunity about the silly mistakes of the young, the idiocy of letting women into the club, blah, blah, blah and blah. ...

It's a puzzle.
I was browsing the reviews at Amazon on his book, The Unauthorised Version here

I have the impression from reading what the more qualified commented he's writing outside of his own fields (Alexander the Great and gardening) and wonder if RLF is really the best example of a secular scholar writing about an HJ we have at the moment.

Until someone can summarize his arguments he is only a name and we have no idea whether his views are part of the mysterious 'consensus'.

 

[proudfootz]

Who (other than Christian fundamentalists) makes anything like the above claims? They are not representative of the scholarly arguments that Jesus likely existed as an historical figure in the early 1st Century. In fact, every scholar I've read on the subject, who thinks that he probably did exist, would dispute every single one of those ten claims.

Going back through the thread, as there are supposed to be some great HJ and MJ arguments here.

This is from Page Two.

I agree that these ten 'myths' Fitzgerald is talking about are things typical of christian believers and is not aimed at the rarefied world of the Ivory Tower.

Fitzgerald is a popularizer of information known to the academic world.

But, I also agree that even if it's true that these things believed by rank and file christians are myths it doesn't necessarily follow that there was no man Jesus behind the Christ myth.

 

[pakeha]

Until someone can summarize his arguments he is only a name and we have no idea whether his views are part of the mysterious 'consensus'.

True.
Volunteers?

 

[proudfootz]

True.
Volunteers?

In the meantime we can examine some of Fitzgerald's remarks he's made in conjunction with his book.

It's been linked to already, but Fitzgerald has responded to critics of his book and after making it clear that the main thrust of it is indeed intended to engage with things believed by rank and file christians (the vast majority of those who have any thoughts at all about a Jesus) he also has some conclusions relevant to that minority who believe there was a Jesus but he was merely a man, no more and no less.

And still, that’s not to say I don’t have anything to weigh in on the Historical Jesus! O’Neill [blogger and critic] should know that the “Historical Jesus” he touts as being the real Jesus is on no firmer evidentiary ground than the “Jesus of Faith,” something I do focus on in my upcoming book Jesus: Mything in Action. In fact, there is no single “Historical Jesus.” There are scads of various hypothetical and contradictory historical “reconstructions” of him - and none of them based on anything remotely like what an objective observer would consider reliable evidence. This wide variety of secular Jesuses and the problematic historical sources for all of them are symptomatic of the very predicament that prompted me to write Nailed in the first place. But more on that in my guest post on Freethought Blog, “Will The Real Jesus Please Stand Up?”

The scarcity of evidence is well known on either side of the debate, and of course to the often-excluded middle. This is why the existence of a man behind the myth is best expressed as a possibility rather than a certainty.

Just to expand on this a little: what is the crying need to take a firm position on this topic? In the face of the lack of dispositive evidence there would seem to be plenty of reason to remain agnostic about the historicity of the Jesus.

To return to Fitzgerald, who in another post explains that there is no 'historical Jesus' upon whom the scholars who propose there was one agree upon:

Albert Schweitzer in his From Reimarus to Wrede: A History of Research on the Life of Jesus (1906), was already discovering that every scholar claiming to have uncovered the “real” Jesus seemed to have found a mirror instead; each investigator found Jesus was a placeholder for whatever values they held dear. Over a century later, the situation has not improved – quite the contrary. To say there is still no consensus on who Jesus was is an understatement. A quick survey ([Robert M] Price presents excellent examples in his Deconstructing Jesus, Prometheus, 2000, pp. 12-17) shows we have quite an embarrassment of Jesi:

The longer scholars look into the topic it seems the more the options widen, so instead of coming to a consensus it would appear the field is constantly splitting off new and mutually contradictory hypotheses the way christianity constantly spins off new sects with their own interpretations of received texts.

Perhaps this is just a case of too many scholars working over too little material for too long. If your job depends on publishing, as those of academics sometimes are, you have to say something even if you haven't anything new to say. But obviously, the best way to distinguish oneself in an overcrowded field is to say something new. I think this best accounts for why we get a new crop of 'historical Jesuses' every year.

 

[dejudge]

The scarcity of evidence is well known on either side of the debate, and of course to the often-excluded middle. This is why the existence of a man behind the myth is best expressed as a possibility rather than a certainty.

There is no known existing evidence for an HJ.

There is never real evidence of a Myth.

There is a scarcity of evidence for the hundreds of myths like Adam, Eve, the God of the Jews, the Angel Gabriel, Satan the Devil, the Holy Ghost, Apollo, Romulus, the angel Moroni and Asclepius.

What evidence would one expect to find for a character that was Born of a Holy Ghost?

It is most fascinating that no actual evidence for the hundreds of myth characters have ever been found yet lack of evidence becomes a problem to argue for a mythological Jesus.

Lack of evidence of historicity has ALWAYS been the evidence for a Myth.

Scarcity of evidence of historicity has ALWAYS been the evidence for a Myth.

Jesus of Nazareth qualifies to be considered a Myth--There is NO historical evidence.

It is a fallacy that scarcity of evidence impedes the argument for Myth Jesus. The MJ argument can only thrive on scarcity of historical evidence.

 

[Brainache]

In the meantime we can examine some of Fitzgerald's remarks he's made in conjunction with his book.

It's been linked to already, but Fitzgerald has responded to critics of his book and after making it clear that the main thrust of it is indeed intended to engage with things believed by rank and file christians (the vast majority of those who have any thoughts at all about a Jesus) he also has some conclusions relevant to that minority who believe there was a Jesus but he was merely a man, no more and no less.



The scarcity of evidence is well known on either side of the debate, and of course to the often-excluded middle. This is why the existence of a man behind the myth is best expressed as a possibility rather than a certainty.

Just to expand on this a little: what is the crying need to take a firm position on this topic? In the face of the lack of dispositive evidence there would seem to be plenty of reason to remain agnostic about the historicity of the Jesus.

To return to Fitzgerald, who in another post explains that there is no 'historical Jesus' upon whom the scholars who propose there was one agree upon:



The longer scholars look into the topic it seems the more the options widen, so instead of coming to a consensus it would appear the field is constantly splitting off new and mutually contradictory hypotheses the way christianity constantly spins off new sects with their own interpretations of received texts.

Perhaps this is just a case of too many scholars working over too little material for too long. If your job depends on publishing, as those of academics sometimes are, you have to say something even if you haven't anything new to say. But obviously, the best way to distinguish oneself in an overcrowded field is to say something new. I think this best accounts for why we get a new crop of 'historical Jesuses' every year.

Most, if not all of the people on the HJ side in this debate have made it clear that this is not about certainty. There can be no such thing in Ancient History. Some people, like Bart Ehrman, claim that the HJ is as certain as anything else in Ancient History, but that isn't to say it is 100% certain.

You'll also find that the various re-constructions of HJ by apologists are irrelevant to the question of whether or not there was a Jewish Preacher at the start of Christianity.

Historians will bicker over which sayings may be authentic, or where he preached etc, but they all (yeah yeah, except Carrier) agree that he was a man who walked on the earth and talked about Jewish God stuff.

Just because apologists get carried away with their visions of their own personal Jesus, doesn't mean there wasn't a human being at the start.

The concept of the "Celestial Jesus" that Carrier talks about, doesn't fit with everything else we know about second temple Judaism. He needs to produce evidence that people worshipped this disembodied notion of "Salvation", as opposed to following the teachings of a Nazoraean preacher.

 

[proudfootz]

Most, if not all of the people on the HJ side in this debate have made it clear that this is not about certainty. There can be no such thing in Ancient History. Some people, like Bart Ehrman, claim that the HJ is as certain as anything else in Ancient History, but that isn't to say it is 100% certain.

I quite agree that 'certainty' should not be an issue, like evolution, or the Holocaust, or the existence of Julius Caesar. However when scholars such as Ehrman start comparing people who doubt the uncertain historical Jesus he propounds to creationists, or to Holocaust deniers, it would seem he's taking a much stronger stand than 'this is possible' warrants.

You'll also find that the various re-constructions of HJ by apologists are irrelevant to the question of whether or not there was a Jewish Preacher at the start of Christianity.

I find it highly relevant as each hypothesis must stand on its own feet.

Historians will bicker over which sayings may be authentic, or where he preached etc, but they all (yeah yeah, except Carrier) agree that he was a man who walked on the earth and talked about Jewish God stuff.

Those who agree there was a man agree there was a man. Where the rubber meets the road is on what grounds and by what arguments they arrive at such a conclusion.

Just because apologists get carried away with their visions of their own personal Jesus, doesn't mean there wasn't a human being at the start.

Of course not - just as attempts to show flaws in any given MJ argument doesn't mean there was a human being at the start.

The concept of the "Celestial Jesus" that Carrier talks about, doesn't fit with everything else we know about second temple Judaism. He needs to produce evidence that people worshipped this disembodied notion of "Salvation", as opposed to following the teachings of a Nazoraean preacher.

This is an interesting claim. Is there any reason to think this is true?

Specifically what does Carrier claim and what precise knowledge of 2nd Temple Judaism does it not fit with?

 

[proudfootz]

In order to explain just what it was that Paul and other early Christians believed, the mythicists are forced to manufacture unknown proto-Christians who build up an unattested myth . . . about an unspecified supernatural entity that at an indefinite time was sent by God into the world as a man to save mankind and was crucified… [presenting us with] a piece of private mythology that I find incredible beyond anything in the Gospels.

R J Hoffmann

Quoted from the Hoffmann piece.

A response soon after it was cited:

You find that sort of passage (highlighted) impressive? That passage is not only manifestly dishonest, but also just an undisguised religious rant.

- firstly “mythicists” (whoever they are supposed to be) are not “forced to manufacture unknown proto-Christians who build up an unattested myth” - no sceptic needs to say anything at all about any comments in Paul’s letters concerning any earlier groups of believers who Paul says he had once persecuted before his conversion. Why would any sceptic need to say anything at all about that? Jews in that region had clearly believed in the coming of a “Christ” ie the “Messiah” (not necessarily anyone named Jesus) for many centuries before Paul - that much was universal belief from their OT. So earlier believers in a messiah (“ie a Christ”) included every single Jew in that region.

Nor are any sceptics “forced to manufacture unknown proto-Christians who build up an unattested myth … about an unspecified supernatural entity that at an indefinite time was sent by God into the world as a man to save mankind and was crucified…” - no sceptic has to do any such thing. It is Paul’s letters, not any mythicist or sceptics, that say Paul believed in a supernatural messiah named Yehoshua who was later crucified … that came from Paul 2000 years ago, not from any “mythicists” today. And afaik, no such earlier proto-Christian groups ever wrote to say they believed in anyone named Jesus anyway, and nor did they write saying anything about any crucifixion … all of that all comes from Paul’s letters.

And then that quote has the cheek to say the above is an example of “mythicists presenting us with a piece of private mythology that I find incredible beyond anything in the Gospels”. But as I just explained, none of that comes from any mytihicists of recent centuries, it all comes from 2000 years ago in Paul’s letters and from as far back as 500BC in Jewish belief in their OT.

So that sort of passage highlighted above, which Craig finds so compelling and inspiring, is actually just a totally dishonest religious rant against so called “mythicists” who the author does not like on account of them disagreeing with his bible beliefs in Jesus, and pointing out that all of these beliefs actually come from the highly unreliable writing of supernatural beliefs in letters of Paul and the gospels.

Am I interested in reading yet more links to pages of stuff like that? After all the hundreds of pages we have already had here with evasion after evasion and never a single shred of any reliable independent honest evidence of Jesus …. No, not really.

I also find it highly amusing Hoffmannn finds the idea of someone writing a story about someone walking on water or raising the dead to be more incredible than such things actually happening!

You've just got to love these 'secular historians' and the camels they swallow.

 

[Brainache]

Quoted from the Hoffmann piece.

A response soon after it was cited:




I also find it highly amusing Hoffmannn finds the idea of someone writing a story about someone walking on water or raising the dead to be more incredible than such things actually happening!

You've just got to love these 'secular historians' and the camels they swallow.

Did you stop reading half way through the introduction?

Any time you feel up to addressing the actual Scholarship, you are free to do so.

Or, you can continue to make arguments like that for us all to giggle at.

Your choice.

 

[proudfootz]

Did you stop reading half way through the introduction?

Any time you feel up to addressing the actual Scholarship, you are free to do so.

Or, you can continue to make arguments like that for us all to giggle at.

Your choice.

I can do both!

Meanwhile I look forward to your reading of Dr Carrier's scholarship.

It's good we're both here to keep the thread on track, isn't it?