The Jesus Myth, and it's failures
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Crossbow
Seeking Honesty and Sanity
Well, by using common sense, one can determine what parts of the Gospels are fabrications.
Then, one by corroborating other things in Gospels with other data sources, then one may be able to determine what parts of the Gospels are true.
And for the things that do not fit into either case, then one will have to be satisfied that one cannot know if it is fabrication or true.
Crossbow
Seeking Honesty and Sanity
I already did just that, however you have continually ignored that data.
However, if this issue so very to you then please post explain why it is so terribly important to you that no one was living in Nazareth during the first century.
As for me, I do not consider it to be of an real import that no one has yet discovered conclusive evidence which shows that people were living in Nazareth during the first century. After all, I expect that evidence would be rather difficult and expensive to discover for just about any small village that was around about 2000 years ago. Furthermore, due to the large number of other archaeology projects going on and very limited funding, then I expect that it would be very difficult to raise the money needed for such an effort since most in the field would consider such evidence to be of little real value.
Indeed! It would be interesting to do something like that.
However, since you have so often demonstrated that you cannot grasp basic facts, then it is pointless for me to present you with additional facts because I do not expect you to be able to grasp them either.
Indeed again! I did not get the joke.
While I am sure that you consider your humor to be quite obvious, I did not find it so.
calebprime
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A quick Google didn't bring up the answer I was looking for: Who did the Romans crucify, and why? A partial answer seems to be that they crucified slaves often. So the people they crucified didn't need to be especially important.
I don't want to be part of the testy exchange going on, but I do want to question this apparently simple answer.
That is, the whole "historical Jesus" research project is anything but common sense.
For example, supposing that Dr. Richard Carrier is correct in identifying formal structures that have been used in designing Mark's gospel -- formal structures that would be unlikely to occur in a bald historical account, but which are the result of deliberate design?
Would that tend to indicate that all the events in the Gospel are completely untrue, or were some of them true but fitted (or "shoehorned") into an elaborate formal structure?
(The structure being of the abcdeedcba "arch" or "bookends" type.)
www.youtube.com/watch?v=X59gMzXcby4
A general question that is neither intended to be answered literally, nor is it rhetorical:
What events in the Gospels can be corroborated by other events?
davefoc
Philosopher
Really, could you show us how this works? Could you show us which parts of gMark common sense leads you to believe are true and why you think so?
I don't believe you can accomplish what you think you can with common sense. gMark looks exactly like a work of fiction. It contains dialog for which no source is provided and a plausible source isn't obvious. Almost everything that Jesus does has an element of the super hero built into it either because of his powers or his all knowing ways. The narrative surrounding the crucifixion is implausible. How would your use of common sense applied to gMark allow you to divine real facts while this same process would not allow you to divine real facts in Robin Hood? If your answer is that you know Robin Hood is fictional because of the external evidence then what is the external evidence that allows you to know that parts of gMark are true?
davefoc
Philosopher
I wrote my response to Crossbow before I saw Calebprime's post. It seems like we are roughly on the same page here and if Crossbow would prefer to respond to just one of the posts it would be fine with me if he responded to just Crossbow.
I thought the video below did a better job of making the case that the Gospels are written in the style of myth than the video linked to by Calebprime and the recording is of a little higher quality.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2e7uhaed594
I thought the video below did a better job of making the case that the Gospels are written in the style of myth than the video linked to by Calebprime and the recording is of a little higher quality.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2e7uhaed594
Crossbow
Seeking Honesty and Sanity
Thanks much. I will try to answer your questions a best as I can without being testy.
First, I cannot speak to the 'historical Jesus' item that you mentioned since I do not know anything about it.
Second, I cannot speak to the 'Dr Carrier' issue that you mentioned either, since I do not know anything about that issue either.
Third, since the Gospels were written well after the death of Jesus by people who had very little, if any, personal contact with Jesus, then there are parts of the Gospels which are flat-out wrong. Things like the virgin birth, coming back from the dead, and so on. I mentioned these facts in an earlier posting which you may have missed.
Fourth, in spite of the numerous flaws with the Gospels, never the less, there are things in the Gospels which can be corroborated. A few that come to mind are:
the conjunction of stars/planets which occurred at, or near, the birth of Jesus,
that there was person named Jesus,
that there was a King Herod of Judea,
the Roman occupation of Judea,
that there were a number of people at the time of Jesus who claimed to be the messiah who did things like faith healing, exorcisms, magic tricks, and so on,
the Romans did crucify people, in fact at least a thousand people, in Judea,
and I am sure that there are many other such things, but I have not done a complete inventory of them.
I hope this helps!
Crossbow
Seeking Honesty and Sanity
OK, I think that I see what you are getting at.
If so, then please refer to Post #287 in this thread and see if it addresses your question or not.
Thanks.
Crossbow
Seeking Honesty and Sanity
I stand corrected. Sorry all.
Excuse me, but what are you apologizing for?
After all, this is your first post in this thread, therefore I do not understand why you are apologizing in this thread. Accordingly, I would appreciate a bit of clarification.
Thanks.
Robrob
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This is what happens when you try and force facts to conform with your preconceived notions.
davefoc
Philosopher
Fictional works or mythological works always have some real details as part of the stories. As, I believe you would agree, finding facts in a narrative doesn't prove that other things in the narrative are true or false. Fictional works contain facts and non-fiction works contain facts. You listed the following things in the Gospels which can be corroborated:
Items 3, 4, 5, & 6 are facts that don't go to what in the gospel accounts that aren't obviously historical might be true. The Robin Hood stories usually mention King John. There was a King John but it doesn't mean there was a real Robin Hood.
Item 1 is an entirely conjectural point. After the fact, based on assumptions about the time of the birth of Jesus, various theories have been put forth about astronomical events that might provide an explanation for the star mentioned in the Gospels. Except that the earliest Gospel, gMark doesn't give us any information about when Jesus might have been born and Luke and Matthew provide information that leads to estimates separated by ten years for the birth year of Jesus. Maybe one of them was right and maybe the star of Bethlehem was an ambiguous description of some real astronomical event, but what is the evidence for that? Here's a site that argues it might have been a comet: http://ancienthistory.about.com/od/churchhistory/qt/121507JesusBirt.htm. Regardless, I think the idea that some astronomical event might correspond to the NT description offers no evidence that the star of Bethlehem was a real phenomena. If something called a star could be explained by the conjunction of planets or the appearance of a comet it is hard to imagine that there is any ten year span of history where some astronomical event wouldn't have occurred that could also explain the observation of a "star".
This only leaves item 2, "that there was person named Jesus". I wasn't quite sure what you meant by this. There were certainly many people named the Aramaic equivalent of Jesus during the life time of the hypothetical HJ (Yeshua is usually put forth as the Hebrew equivalent of Jesus). Jesus is the Latin form of a Greek name that seems to have been derived from an Aramaic or Hebrew form. If this is what you meant then there is no dispute.
If you meant item 2 to mean that you believe that there is external evidence to support the existence of the NT Jesus then what is the non-blblical evidence that provides corroboration for your view?
FWIW, I believe (even as a person that thinks an HJ existed) that the evidence for this view is very thin. Carrier did a far better job than I could have explaining why the Gospels appear to be works of fiction. The simple reading of the Gospels suggest that they are just made up stories. Carrier has gone way beyond that and showed in great detail of why the structure of the Gospels suggests they are just fiction.
Without the Gospels, especially gMark, as a source of evidence for the existence of the HJ one is left with the writings of Paul and the bits and pieces of evidence that are usually put forth to prove the existence of the HJ. A large amount of discussion has gone on over the years in these HJ threads about the supposed extra biblical evidence for an HJ and I can't summarize that sufficiently in a single post. But I will say that over the course of this year I have become convinced that it is very unlikely that any of the extra-biblical evidence constitutes reliable evidence for the existence of an HJ.
So that leaves the writings of Paul. There are many Paul theories, he lied, he was lied to, all of his writings were forged instead of about half that is generally agreed to or that the real meanings of his writings have not been understood. My own gut feel though is that there is enough truth in Paul to sustain a guess that an HJ probably existed, but the evidence for that guess is very weak. There is no reliable corroboration for the writings of Paul.
ETA: I misspoke a bit about what I meant that constitutes the bits and pieces of evidence put forth to support the existence of an HJ. I meant this not only to include the bits of extra-biblical evidence put forth but some of the internal arguments about the Gospels themselves including Q and the double and triple tradition material and that Gospels must be true because they contain information that the authors who were promoting a religion would have found awkward to include unless they were forced to because it was common knowledge of the time.
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The fact that people may have first written the gospels 50 to 100 years after the death of Jesus, is not in itself a reason to say they must be wrong. That length of time is not what forced them to write fictional nonsense about miracles and the supernatural. The reason the gospels cannot be trusted in what they say about Jesus is because what they say about him is so often physically impossible and certainly untrue.
We are only concerned with what the gospels say about Jesus. Nobody is disputing that 1st century gospel writers knew that places like Jerusalem and Galilee existed, or that there were Roman rulers (or that there were stars in the sky). The issue is whether or not the gospels are in any way true in what they claim about Jesus. It's the parts about Jesus that concern us.
I crossed out the parts that are nothing to do with Jesus (because we are not disputing the existence of Romans etc.). That only leaves you with the bald and baseless statement saying "there was a person named Jesus"!
That's no progress at all. It's a just another statement of un-evidenced belief in Jesus.
pakeha
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Well, Crossbow, what you came up with was this little gem
http://www.nazareth-israel.com/nazarteh-history
An example of the writing
This article is full of assertions but contains no data to back them up.
What I'm interested in is data on the subject.
Why does the subject of the (non)existence of Nazareth interest me?
I think it may provide a clue to how and why and when the figure of Jesus accrued the label Jesus of Nazareth.
eight bits
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davefoc
Mark made the canon without any statement of its purpose and despite critical acknowledgment that its author had fit stories and incidents into a chronological framework of his own devising. That an imposed framework would exhibit high-order regularity is evidence only for a proposition not in dispute, that the author of Mark is a human being.
Matthew's structure is plainly derivative of Mark. Luke is the earliest Gospel which states a purpose for its composition. It plainly discloses the objective of being an "orderly" narrative for use by someone already instructed in the contents of the work.
John, whose author is exceptionally skilled, is the first Gospel to state that it was written to advocate that its reader adopt a belief not already held. Especially striking is the distinctive Johanine sequence of events. John achieves an "orderly" arrangement of events without conflating order of narration with sequence of alleged actual occurrence. He is the only Gospel author who achieves this. However, admiration for that separation of art and fact may reflect minority taste. Filmmakers routinely improve the purported time course of "true events." Purists complain, but most folks seem still to prefer their facts well-told rather than scrupulously-told.
It is a staple of communications engineering that the truth of what a message asserts, or even the sender's intention of truth-telling or -avoidance, cannot in general be determined solely from the message in hand. All parties agree that there is no source for many Gospel assertions except the Gospel message. It follows that attempts to classify Gospels as "fiction" because they exhibit a feature not in dispute, that the texts were composed, are fraught.
A note on your ETA note:
Q has never been observed, so it is not evidence. It is an argument about the Gospel evidence. Demonstrating separate sources does not show the independence of the sources. Finally, only one Gospel, John, states an intention that corresponds with "the authors who were promoting a religion" in the sense of reaching non-adherents. Meanwhile, "embarrassment" consistently relies on "awkwardness" for modern-flavored arguments in service of not-necessarily-early interpretations of scripture.
Example: It is alleged to be "awkward" that Jesus was baptized by John. Putting aisde that the incident only appears in the closely dependent synoptics, what is the "awkwardness?" That the Son of God, taken literally as it was in the Third (?) Century and later, would have sins.
Where is Jesus portrayed as God's kinsman in the synoptics? How is it awkward that a leading Jewish religious figure endorses (sort of, in the synoptics) the messianic credentials of somebody utterly lacking any messianic accomplishment, and who is conspicously light in the leading-Jewish acceptance department?
In the same way that Superman comics are retrojected onto Mark with no textual support, Protestant missionary thinking is retrojected onto First Century missions. What would embarrass modern Gospel peddlers could have been good salemanship back in the day. Conversely, what impresses the living missionary as good salesmanship may formerly have been blasphemy.
I disagree that the Gospels resemble "fiction" more than any other broad genre of "personal narrative literature."
Mark made the canon without any statement of its purpose and despite critical acknowledgment that its author had fit stories and incidents into a chronological framework of his own devising. That an imposed framework would exhibit high-order regularity is evidence only for a proposition not in dispute, that the author of Mark is a human being.
Matthew's structure is plainly derivative of Mark. Luke is the earliest Gospel which states a purpose for its composition. It plainly discloses the objective of being an "orderly" narrative for use by someone already instructed in the contents of the work.
John, whose author is exceptionally skilled, is the first Gospel to state that it was written to advocate that its reader adopt a belief not already held. Especially striking is the distinctive Johanine sequence of events. John achieves an "orderly" arrangement of events without conflating order of narration with sequence of alleged actual occurrence. He is the only Gospel author who achieves this. However, admiration for that separation of art and fact may reflect minority taste. Filmmakers routinely improve the purported time course of "true events." Purists complain, but most folks seem still to prefer their facts well-told rather than scrupulously-told.
It is a staple of communications engineering that the truth of what a message asserts, or even the sender's intention of truth-telling or -avoidance, cannot in general be determined solely from the message in hand. All parties agree that there is no source for many Gospel assertions except the Gospel message. It follows that attempts to classify Gospels as "fiction" because they exhibit a feature not in dispute, that the texts were composed, are fraught.
A note on your ETA note:
Q has never been observed, so it is not evidence. It is an argument about the Gospel evidence. Demonstrating separate sources does not show the independence of the sources. Finally, only one Gospel, John, states an intention that corresponds with "the authors who were promoting a religion" in the sense of reaching non-adherents. Meanwhile, "embarrassment" consistently relies on "awkwardness" for modern-flavored arguments in service of not-necessarily-early interpretations of scripture.
Example: It is alleged to be "awkward" that Jesus was baptized by John. Putting aisde that the incident only appears in the closely dependent synoptics, what is the "awkwardness?" That the Son of God, taken literally as it was in the Third (?) Century and later, would have sins.
Where is Jesus portrayed as God's kinsman in the synoptics? How is it awkward that a leading Jewish religious figure endorses (sort of, in the synoptics) the messianic credentials of somebody utterly lacking any messianic accomplishment, and who is conspicously light in the leading-Jewish acceptance department?
In the same way that Superman comics are retrojected onto Mark with no textual support, Protestant missionary thinking is retrojected onto First Century missions. What would embarrass modern Gospel peddlers could have been good salemanship back in the day. Conversely, what impresses the living missionary as good salesmanship may formerly have been blasphemy.
smartcooky
Penultimate Amazing
Not to mention that the Gospels actually conflict with each other!
http://biblebabble.curbjaw.com/gospels.htm
Same applies to just about any fiction, for example;
In the "Op Center" series of books, Tom Clancy and his co-writers wrote about an autonomous agency called the "National Crisis Management Center" (NCMC) located in an old pilot's Ready Room near the Flight Line at Andrews Air Force base, in Maryland. The director of NCMC is Paul Hood.
► Maryland exists
► Andrews AFB exists
► Andrews AFB has a flight line (of course) and even the Ready Room at which NCMC is supposedly located, is real, and right where Clancy says it is..
However, NCMC and all its staff are entirely fictional.
We don't come to the conclusion that Paul Hood must have been a real person simply because Clancy's book mentions Maryland and Andrews AFB, and other places that we know are real, so how can we deduce that Jesus was a real person just because the gospels mention Jerusalem and the Romans?
smartcooky
Penultimate Amazing
In rather the same fashion that L. Ron Hubbard wrote "Battlefield Earth"?
eight bits
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I only saw the movie (and don't recall if I watched it all the way through). What I saw seemed to be entertainment. Maybe people who already had Scientology training would see more religious content in it than I did.
John says outright that it was written with non-adherents in mind, to persuade them to adopt the author's religious beliefs. I didn't see that in the movie, but maybe it is in the book, which I haven't read.
You said in earlier posts that you are using what you described as an “original” copy of g-Mark.
Can you give us a reference to that original copy, so that we can all see what that copy says and how it differs from what other copies say.
eight bits
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IanS
In my postings about Mark, I use of a variety of translations, occasionally supplemented by resources describing the Greek being translated. Obviously, no translation is "original." I am unsure how you could be confused about what I use, or why, if someone had made the antiquarian book find of the century, you would first hear about it here from me.
In any event, did you have some comment on the material you quoted?
No, I spoke of what survives (if anything) of the original Mark. Surviving original Mark is distinguished from canonical Mark or specific manuscript Mark's. For most practical purposes in our dicsussions, the phrase has meant a defensible candidate for being the oldest or second-oldest known written versions of the Jesus stories we discussed.
In my postings about Mark, I use of a variety of translations, occasionally supplemented by resources describing the Greek being translated. Obviously, no translation is "original." I am unsure how you could be confused about what I use, or why, if someone had made the antiquarian book find of the century, you would first hear about it here from me.
In any event, did you have some comment on the material you quoted?
Sorry, but what does the above mean? Do you mean to say you do have a different more original version of g-Mark or not?
Some version which you now say is “distinguishably” different from the “canonical version” which appears in the OT? Which “distinguishably” different version is it that you have?
Oldest amongst the four canonical gospels? What has that to do with whether or not you have available to you some “distinguishably“ different and more “original” copy of g-Mark?
Who made these translations, and from what versions of g-Mark? Are you saying you made the translations?
If you did not make these translations yourself and do not yourself have any access to 1st century fragments thought to come from the earliest copies of g-Mark, which I assume you don‘t, then what written sources are you using for your ideas on anything from g-Mark? Just list whatever book/books/other you are using, how hard is that?
Then why have you been saying that you are using some “distinguishably” different more “original” writing of g-Mark, different from the NT cannon which afaik the rest of us have been quoting from?
Are you just using all the same modern publications on g-Mark (books, copies of the bible, internet commentary etc.) that is available to all the rest of us here, or not?
I am just trying to find out from you which sources you are relying upon for your information about what was ever contained in any copies of g-Mark, and whether that is significantly different from what anyone else here is relying on as the words of g-Mark.