Why didn't Jesus write anything down?

[eight bits]

I addressed this particular piece of nonsense in post #97 of the Jesus Christ? thread:

Nobody said you haven't spoken to the issue, max. Nobody questions that you disagree. What has been questioned is whether disagreeing with you is on a par with denying the Holocaust. It is not, at least not among rational people. Where you place it is your own affair.

In any case, anyone who cares to can verify simply by reading part 29, especially 29.2 through 29.4, that Epiphanius wasn't writing about anybody believing that Jesus lived at the time of Alexander Jannaeus in that poorly composed fragmentary passage which you have serially cherrypicked. To compare reporting this true and easily checked fact with Holocaust denial is odious.

 

[maximara]

Nobody said you haven't spoken to the issue, max. Nobody questions that you disagree. What has been questioned is whether disagreeing with you is on a par with denying the Holocaust. It is not, at least not among rational people. Where you place it is your own affair.

In any case, anyone who cares to can verify simply by reading part 29, especially 29.2 through 29.4, that Epiphanius wasn't writing about anybody believing that Jesus lived at the time of Alexander Jannaeus in that poorly composed fragmentary passage which you have serially cherrypicked. To compare reporting this true and easily checked fact with Holocaust denial is odious.

Again Eight you divert attention from what 29:3:3 says (Williams):

For the rulers in succession from Judah came to an end with Christ's arrival. Until he came the rulers were anointed priests, but after his birth in Bethlehem of Judea the order ended and was altered in the time of Alexander, a ruler of priestly and kingly stock.

It is on par with with Irenaeus in Demonstration (74) is "For Herod the king of the Jews and Pontius Pilate, the governor of Claudius Caesar, came together and condemned Him to be crucified."

It doesn't matter what clever little word-punctuation games one plays or what else Irenaeus says that one sentence puts Jesus crucifixion no earlier then 41 CE which is an historical impossibility. The same is true of Epiphanius with regards 29:3:3 and insisting 29:3:3 says anything else despite repeated proofs that the majority of schollars accept the passage is read that way is IMHO going beyond Holocaust denial and into the realm of Jack Chick.

For those who don't know in Flight 144 (1998) and Somebody Goofed (2002) are prime examples. In Flight 144 Chick has a character state "The Bible says that good works can't save anyone" but in Somebody Goofed Chick has a reference that simply says "**Rev 20:12-15". Well here is the King James version of that reference, with some italics and boldface added for emphasis:

And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God; and the books were opened: and another book was opened, which is the book of life: and the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works. And the sea gave up the dead which were in it; and death and hell delivered up the dead which were in them: and they were judged every man according to their works. And death and hell were cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death. And whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire." (Revelation 20:12-15)

The very passage Chick references expressly states twice that the dead will be judged according to their works. More over there are other passages (Psalm 62:12, Jeremiah 17:10, Matthew 16:27, Matthew 25:41-46, Luke 10:26-28, James 2:14, 17, 21-25, 1 Peter 1:17, Revelation 2:23) that say the same thing.

 

[Craig B]

@max

Beyond holocaust denial and into the realm of Jack Chick, eh? That's some "realm"!

 

[maximara]

@max

Beyond holocaust denial and into the realm of Jack Chick, eh? That's some "realm"!

Sure is. Chick is bad when it come to little things like logic or common sense. but he goest really bad when he doesn't even bother to update his tracks to keep step with changes in the world. For example the 2002 version of Big Daddy? still states that "It has never been against the law to teach the Bible or creation in public schools." which while it was true in 1986 when the track first came out is not longer true per Edwards v. Aguillard, 482 U.S. 578 (1987)

Back to the topic of why Jesus didn't write anything down. Even if he did, if it didn't match the beliefs of the Christianity branch that adopted what we know as the 4 gospels would it have survived?

Robert M. Price's The Pre-Nicene New Testament, Bart Ehrman's Lost Scriptures, and Robert J. Miller's The Complete Gospels. combined show that there was a ridiculous number of other Gospels before the First Council of Nicea got around to hammering an actual canonal New Testament in 325 CE. Woo is to say what was Jesus actual words and what was ideas put into his mouth by others?

Epiphanius and Epiphanius efforts to connect Philo to Christianity in general or Jesus in particular indicates there were likely some major theological and logical issues as to why Philo didn't say anything about Christianity in general or Jesus in particular.

 

[eight bits]

max

Again Eight you divert attention from what 29:3:3 says (Williams):

Yes, reading the rest of the paragraph will "divert attention" from a poorly composed fragment within it. In this case, reading the paragraph, and better yet the whole short section, resolves the eye-catching ambiguity that caused any special attention ever to be spent on what turns out to be an utterly routine statement, the routine statement which Epiphanius actually wrote there.

There is no connection whatsoever with someone else's misstatement of an easy fact. What few facts Epiphanius wrote here are correct enough. His christology, busted prophecy rescue and personal take on what is now called "replacement theology" which form the bulk of his argument aren't historical facts.

I missed the tract where Jack Chick commented upon Epiphanius' Panarion. No matter, I prefer to answer "What did Epiphanius write?" by reading Epiphanius. We all seem to be comfortable citing the modern Williams translation. That Epiphanius composed a partiuclar sentence fragment poorly is undisputed. Later scholars should and do repair the lapses of earlier scholars all the time. Echoes of the earlier laspses shouldn't but sometimes do persist in the literature for a long time afterwards.

Reading reveals that Epiphanius didn't discuss anybody believing that Jesus lived in Alexander Jannaeus's time. There's no parity between re-reading a difficult sentence fragment and denial of the Holocaust.

 

[maximara]

max



Yes, reading the rest of the paragraph will "divert attention" from a poorly composed fragment within it. In this case, reading the paragraph, and better yet the whole short section, resolves the eye-catching ambiguity that caused any special attention ever to be spent on what turns out to be an utterly routine statement, the routine statement which Epiphanius actually wrote there.

There is no connection whatsoever with someone else's misstatement of an easy fact. What few facts Epiphanius wrote here are correct enough. His christology, busted prophecy rescue and personal take on what is now called "replacement theology" which form the bulk of his argument aren't historical facts.

I missed the tract where Jack Chick commented upon Epiphanius' Panarion. No matter, I prefer to answer "What did Epiphanius write?" by reading Epiphanius. We all seem to be comfortable citing the modern Williams translation. That Epiphanius composed a partiuclar sentence fragment poorly is undisputed. Later scholars should and do repair the lapses of earlier scholars all the time. Echoes of the earlier laspses shouldn't but sometimes do persist in the literature for a long time afterwards.

Reading reveals that Epiphanius didn't discuss anybody believing that Jesus lived in Alexander Jannaeus's time. There's no parity between re-reading a difficult sentence fragment and denial of the Holocaust.

Considering the number of scholars on both sides of the Christ Myth that admit the passage most logically reads that it is on par with Holocaust denial. Case at least tried to explain the mess.

 

[eight bits]

Considering the number of scholars on both sides of the Christ Myth that admit the passage most logically reads that it is on par with Holocaust denial. Case at least tried to explain the mess.

There is no prize for explaining it, and it is a mnisucule mess. A poorly drafted sentence fragment puts the reader to the trouble of reading a few lines before the fragment and a few lines after the fragment. This is not some unprecedented situation in reading and writing, it happens all the time, and attending to the surrounding material is how such composition difficulties are often resolved.

Nothing in Epiphanius' fragment or its surrounding text has anything to do with Jesus being alive in the time of Alexander Jannaeus, neither that any such thing happened nor whether anybody believed that it happened. Instead, Epiphanius presents at some length an entirely different relationship between Alexander Jannaeus and Jesus, in which Jesus is Alexander's successor, not his contemporary, as is routine for an orthodox author.

Controversies about how different people have read a few paragraphs differently have no reasonable connection with Holocaust denial.

 

[maximara]

There is no prize for explaining it, and it is a mnisucule mess. A poorly drafted sentence fragment puts the reader to the trouble of reading a few lines before the fragment and a few lines after the fragment. This is not some unprecedented situation in reading and writing, it happens all the time, and attending to the surrounding material is how such composition difficulties are often resolved.

In Richard Carrier’s Review of Bart Ehrman’s Did Jesus Exist? one of the commentators thinks that sew a similar connection in Panarion 78:7:5. In any case it certainly is strange that even setting Epiphanius aside there appears to have been this Jewish tradition that put Jesus 110 years earlier.

How could such a thing happen to a man, that if the Gospels are to believed, was so well known?

 

[eight bits]

max

In any case it certainly is strange that even setting Epiphanius aside there appears to have been this Jewish tradition that put Jesus 110 years earlier.

Setting Epiphanius aside would be a smart move. That done, if such a Jewish tradition is at all strange, then it is much less strange than a Fourth Century Christian tradition saying it, which is what you and I have been disputing across two threads.

In Richard Carrier’s Review of Bart Ehrman’s Did Jesus Exist? one of the commentators thinks that sew a similar connection in Panarion 78:7:5.

In one of Carrier's posts against Ehrman's book,

http://freethoughtblogs.com/carrier/archives/1026/

Carrier confirms that he is using Panarion 29,

Epiphanius, in Panarion 29, says there was a sect of still-Torah-observant Christians who taught that Jesus lived and died in the time of Jannaeus,

Among his replies to the comments there, Carrier confirms that he was looking specifically at 29: 3.3. So we are, as the saying goes, all on the same page.

I can't find anything about Panarion 78 in comments under a Carrier post against Ehrman. Perhaps you could give a specific link to and quote from what you are looking at. Meanwhile, The only hit for ehrman carrier "panarion 78" on Google is:

http://vridar.wordpress.com/2012/04/20/richard-carriers-on-bart-ehrmans-did-jesus-exist/

which isn't Carrier's review, but Neil Godfrey's (?) discussion of it. One of the commentors there says,

I think Epiphanius connects Jesus to Alexander Jannaeus also in Panarion 78:7:5.

In 78: 7.5 (if we've got the same passage) Epiphanius writes that Joseph's father was "Jacob surnamed Panther." A name like "Panther" also appears in some tales of other Jesuses, attributed to Jewish sources, supposedly mentioned by Eusebius as Jewish accusations against Christians (Prophetic Extracts III, 10, but I know of no English translation of that work, and did not confirm the citation).

There's nothing in Panarion 78: 7.5 about any Christians believing a Jewish other-Jesus story, and Epiphanius himself plainly doesn't believe that Mary ever had sex. Epiphanius' "Panther," portrayed as the father of Jesus' elderly stepfather, could well have been a contemporary of Alexander Jannaeus, and so that would be a "connection" between Alexander and Jesus, but an intergenerational connection, with Jesus coming decades after Alexander.

So, there is nothing here that contradicts what has already been said several times. To wit:

Epiphanius didn't discuss Jesus living in the time of Alexander Jannaeus, nor did he discuss anybody believing that. There is no rational comparison between asserting what can be read in a repeatedly cited scholarly source, published by your very own favorite, "Brill Academic Pub," and denial of the Holocaust.

 

[maximara]

Epiphanius didn't discuss Jesus living in the time of Alexander Jannaeus, nor did he discuss anybody believing that. There is no rational comparison between asserting what can be read in a repeatedly cited scholarly source, published by your very own favorite, "Brill Academic Pub," and denial of the Holocaust.

"The Talmud makes Jesus the disciple of Rabbi Jeschua ben Perechiah and has him crucified in 83 BCE , when Alexander crucified so many pharisees The Toleboth Jechu incorporated these long-lived traditions, Epiphanius reports them too." (Beilby, James K.; Paul R. Eddy (2011) The Historical Jesus: Five Views InterVarsity Press pg 80)

InterVarsity Press is a Christian publishing company that also publishes university books. In fact, The Historical Jesus: Five Views is under their Spectrum Series which is under their IVP Academic division.

So you have the academic division of a Christian publisher published this century accepting this interpretation of Epiphanius 29:3:3. More over the reference for this goes back to Mead so they consider him valid even though his work is so old.

As I said before claiming that the passage says anything else IMHO is going beyond Holocaust denial and into the realm of Jack Chick.

 

[HansMustermann]

Max, look, no secondary source EVER is going to be more authoritative than the primary source, provided, of course, that the primary source exists.

Now if the Panarion had gone missing somehow in the last decades, and all we had were those people asserting what it said, we WOULD have a case where we must reconstruct what the primary source said from the secondary sources. And it would be normal too. After all, we do the same for the sources about Alexander Macedon.

However, the Panarion didn't disappear. There is no reason why we'd be bound to just trust the secondary sources (Carrier included) about what it says, when we have the original text to tell us that.

I also realize that providing a citation and moving on is normal business in any domain. So I'm not going to call you a CT-er or question your scholarship.

However, again, people can be wrong. And the wrong conclusion of person A, can be cited by person B, who is then cited by C, who is then cited by D, and so on. There are some egregious cases of horribly wrong factoids that have been cited to the point of being a 'well known fact', yet they weren't even mistakes, but just made up.

But there is no rational reason to think that such a chain makes anything true. Again, we're not in The Hunting Of The Snark. Something doesn't become true if it's been said three times. Regardless of how many people repeat the same thing, it can still be wrong.

Since you do such BS as comparing dissenting opinions to holocaust denial, let me tell you what the holocaust has: primary sources that actually support it. Lots of them. Contemporary too. It's not just being repeated by a dozen guys that makes it true.

Ultimately the question is whether a conclusion can be actually supported, not how many people repeat something that isn't supported by the actual text.

So kindly cut it out with the self-flattering BS and actually show where in the text does the good bishop of Salamis say that any sect believed that, and/or how do you reconcile it with his chronology that clearly puts Jesus's birth in 8 BC or so.

 

[eight bits]

max

"The Talmud makes Jesus the disciple of Rabbi Jeschua ben Perechiah and has him crucified in 83 BCE , when Alexander crucified so many pharisees The Toleboth Jechu incorporated these long-lived traditions, Epiphanius reports them too."

We are making progress. You now describe Epiphanius only as reporting "these long-lived traditions," which are presented as thoroughly Jewish in the passage you provided. So, the quoted matter tells us not that Epiphanius believed any such thing, and not that Epiphanius reported a Fourth Century Christian sect who believed any such thing.

Which, as you will recall from the other thread, is where I came in.

 

[maximara]

Max, look, no secondary source EVER is going to be more authoritative than the primary source, provided, of course, that the primary source exists.

Now if the Panarion had gone missing somehow in the last decades, and all we had were those people asserting what it said, we WOULD have a case where we must reconstruct what the primary source said from the secondary sources. And it would be normal too. After all, we do the same for the sources about Alexander Macedon.

However, the Panarion didn't disappear. There is no reason why we'd be bound to just trust the secondary sources (Carrier included) about what it says, when we have the original text to tell us that.

I also realize that providing a citation and moving on is normal business in any domain. So I'm not going to call you a CT-er or question your scholarship.

However, again, people can be wrong. And the wrong conclusion of person A, can be cited by person B, who is then cited by C, who is then cited by D, and so on. There are some egregious cases of horribly wrong factoids that have been cited to the point of being a 'well known fact', yet they weren't even mistakes, but just made up.

But there is no rational reason to think that such a chain makes anything true. Again, we're not in The Hunting Of The Snark. Something doesn't become true if it's been said three times. Regardless of how many people repeat the same thing, it can still be wrong.

Since you do such BS as comparing dissenting opinions to holocaust denial, let me tell you what the holocaust has: primary sources that actually support it. Lots of them. Contemporary too. It's not just being repeated by a dozen guys that makes it true.

Ultimately the question is whether a conclusion can be actually supported, not how many people repeat something that isn't supported by the actual text.

So kindly cut it out with the self-flattering BS and actually show where in the text does the good bishop of Salamis say that any sect believed that, and/or how do you reconcile it with his chronology that clearly puts Jesus's birth in 8 BC or so.

It is not my BS but Epiphanius'. As for being a "CT-er" as I have pointed out before that all depends on how you define it.

"But the sociological fashion reflected in the rise of Formgeschichte lends colour to Christ-myth theories and indeed to all theories which regard Jesus as an historical but insignificant figure." (Wood, Herbert George (1934) Christianity and the nature of history MacMillan (New York, Cambridge, [Eng.]: The University Press pg 40)

"(John) Robertson is prepared to concede the possibility of an historical Jesus, perhaps more than one, having contributed something to the Gospel story. 'A teacher or teachers named Jesus, or several differently named teachers called Messiahs " (of whom many are on record) may have uttered some of the sayings in the Gospels. (...)

The myth theory is not concerned to deny such a possibility (of there being a flesh and blood Jesus being behind the Gospels story). What the (Christ) myth theory denies is that Christianity can be traced to a personal founder who taught as reported in the Gospels and was put to death in the circumstances there recorded." (Robertson, Archibald (1946) Jesus: Myth Or History)

Remember that in 2004 Biblical Scholar I. Howard Marshall explains the term "historical Jesus" itself has two meanings: that Jesus existed, rather than being a totally fictional creation like King Lear or Dr. Who, or that the Gospels accounts give a reasonable account of historical events, rather than being unverifiable legends such as those surrounding King Arthur.

Because of this slipperiness in the meaning of "historical Jesus", Marshall states "We shall land in considerable confusion if we embark on an inquiry about the historical Jesus if we do not pause to ask ourselves exactly what we are talking about." (Marshall, Ian Howard. I Believe in the Historical Jesus. Regent College Publishing, 2004, p. 27-29.)

While Remsberg and to less extent his contemporary Drews made the distinction between the Jesus of the Bible and Christianity (Jesus of Bethlehem) and a possible Jesus of history (Jesus of Nazareth) many modern Christ Myth theories fail to make that distinction and as a result they get snarled up in the tar baby of Jesus of Bethlehem and Jesus of Nazareth being one and the same.

Dan Barker in his (2006) Losing Faith in Faith pg 372 is one of the few modern Christ Mytherswho does keep the two separate.

As I jokingly said before a Jesus who was born c 12 BCE in the small town of Cana, who preached a few words of wisdom to small crowds of no more than 10 people at a time, and died due to being run over by a chariot at the age of 50 would still be "Non historical" if you used Marshall's second definition and it falls under Robertson's definition of the Christ Myth theory.

"This view (Christ Myth theory) states that the story of Jesus is a piece of mythology, possessing no more substantial claims to historical fact than the old Greek or Norse stories of gods and heroes..." (International Standard Bible Encyclopedia: E-J 1982 by Geoffrey W. Bromiley) I again point to "Davy Crockett and the Frozen Dawn" as a story of Davy Crockett that "is a piece of mythology, possessing no more substantial claims to historical fact than the old Greek or Norse stories of gods and heroes..." I again ask how do we go from "the story of" to "man doesn't exist"?

If you are going to throw around the term CT at least understand what it actually means.

 

[rcfieldz]

time...

To the OP...So how many other books from that time do you own?

 

[maximara]

To the OP...So how many other books from that time do you own?

I'm not sure what you are going for with this question. If we could trust Luke then Jesus himself was literate (Luke 4:16-30) and from what we know the book of the prophet Esaias that he read was likely in Greek not Hebrew.

This still leaves the issue of why no one, Apostle or follower, wrote down what Jesus said or did during his lifetime. Paul gives us next to nothing regarding the life of Jesus and we have to wait to about 70 CE minimum before Mark came out and we are not even sure of that date.

 

[bruto]

To the OP...So how many other books from that time do you own?

NO originals of course, but plenty of reprinted material, thanks in part to the preservation efforts of Arabs such as Avicenna. There was a very strong literary tradition in Rome and in Greece before that, and if you've studied Latin in school, philosophy, drama, or poetry in any detail you've almost certainly read a good deal of material from that time, including complete plays, poems, histories and philosophical works of authors whose lives are well documented and cross referenced. This does not mean Jesus did not exist, of course, since plenty of people who did have disappeared from the record, but it should be abundantly obvious without having to ask the question here that there is a lot of surviving work from that time and long before by authors whose existence is not in doubt.

 

[maximara]

max



We are making progress. You now describe Epiphanius only as reporting "these long-lived traditions," which are presented as thoroughly Jewish in the passage you provided. So, the quoted matter tells us not that Epiphanius believed any such thing, and not that Epiphanius reported a Fourth Century Christian sect who believed any such thing.

Which, as you will recall from the other thread, is where I came in.

Sigh. I stated back in post #166 of the Jesus Christ? thread "Mead, Blavatsky, and all the rest do NOT say Epiphanius believed that Jesus lived during the time Alexander Jannaeus--only that he stated this point.

Claiming otherwise would be much like trying to say Albert Schweitzer's

"The Jesus of Nazareth who came forward publicly as the Messiah, who preached the ethic of the Kingdom of God, who founded the Kingdom of Heaven upon earth, and died to give His work its final consecration, never had any existence. He is a figure designed by rationalism, endowed with life by liberalism, and clothed by modern theology in an historical garb." (The Quest of the Historical Jesus, 1910 translation)

meant Schweitzer supported the Jesus didn't exist part of the Christ Myth theory when in reality he was pointing out so little is known of the actual man that Jesus has become an effective Tabula rasa--a blank slate on to which the researcher puts their own views--a point Price has agreed with.

The point is NOT whether Epiphanius believed that Jesus lived during the time Alexander Jannaeus but if what would become the Gospel Jesus existence was an actual historical fact why would there be any group of people putting him a full century early?"


More over the section in The Historical Jesus: Five Views is by Price whose position I previously spelled out:

"More astonishing still is the widespread Jewish and Jewish-Christian tradition, attested in Epiphanius, the Talmud, and the Toledoth Jeschu (dependent on second-century Jewish-Christian gospel), that Jesus was born about 100 BCE and was crucified under Alexander Jannaeus! " Price, Robert (2003) Incredible Shrinking Son of Man pg 40)

As I asked before in that thread if Jesus' life was so well known why was this 100 BC origin floating around in the 4th century and reiterated some time in the 6th to 9th? To date all we have gotten as counter arguments is Jack Chick like ramblings about the passage not being read that way, Epiphanius not believing that, that Epiphanius didn't report this, and so on none of which seem to jive with reality all IMHO to avoid the real issue of why such a tradition would exist in the first place.

 

[eight bits]

max

Sigh.

I notice that you sigh often. If you have a respiratory problem, then you really ought to see a physician about it.

Epiphanius not believing that, that Epiphanius didn't report this, and so on none of which seem to jive with reality all IMHO to avoid the real issue of why such a tradition would exist in the first place.

You brought up what Epiphanius wrote. It is a question of fact, and we have discussed it at immoderate length, without progress.

I couldn't care less what you now think the "real issue" is. The facts are that Epiphanius didn't write about anybody believing that Jesus lived under Alexander Jannaeus, and a reader of Epiphanius pointing this out cannot be rationally placed on a par with Holocaust denial.

 

[maximara]

max



I notice that you sigh often. If you have a respiratory problem, then you really ought to see a physician about it.



You brought up what Epiphanius wrote. It is a question of fact, and we have discussed it at immoderate length, without progress.

I couldn't care less what you now think the "real issue" is. The facts are that Epiphanius didn't write about anybody believing that Jesus lived under Alexander Jannaeus, and a reader of Epiphanius pointing this out cannot be rationally placed on a par with Holocaust denial.

There are no "facts" that that Epiphanius didn't write about anybody believing that Jesus lived under Alexander Jannaeus only an opinion.

Claiming that something doesn't say what any reasonable reading suggests it does say especially when there is so much saying the passage is read that way going back at least a century if not longer is IMHO going past Holocaust denial and entering into Jack Chick's realm.

Sure there is some clever handwaving on par with the efforts to reconcile Matthew and Luke (Case in 1912 does IMHO the best job of actually trying to sort out the mess) but at the end of the day the fact of the matter is the Williams version of the passage clearly states:

For the rulers in succession from Judah came to an end with Christ's arrival. Until he came the rulers were anointed priests, but after his birth in Bethlehem of Judea the order ended and was altered in the time of Alexander, a ruler of priestly and kingly stock.

"In fact, Wells is discussing a theory defended by others, and based in actual sources: Epiphanius, in Panarion 29, says there was a sect of still-Torah-observant Christians who taught that Jesus lived and died in the time of Jannaeus, and all the Jewish sources on Christianity that we have (from the Talmud to the Toledot Yeshu) report no other view than that Jesus lived during the time of Jannaeus." (Carrier)


No matter how you slice it Epiphanius' 29:3:3 is as much a FUBAR as Irenaeus' Demonstration (74) passage nearly two centuries earlier and since we know that two other sources (the Talmud, and the Toledoth Jeschu) dated to the time Epiphanius wrote this Occam's razor points to this being an idea he picked up and used without fully understanding the temporal snarl it produced.

 

[Craig B]

@maximara

It is bad enough to accuse people of being equivalent to holocaust deniers because they read an obscure passage differently from you (other clearer passages from the pen of the same author contradict your reading) but what can you possibly mean by

going past Holocaust denial and entering into Jack Chick's realm

? By going "past" Holocaust denial, does one cease to perpetrate it? Or does one continue to do so, with the further addition of some even worse act? Also, apart from being inhabited by Jack Chick, what is the nature of this ultra-Holocaust-denial "realm"? IYHO, of course.