Part of the problem here is that we are not just talking about Christian apologetics when examining the Jesus Myth. Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apologetics states that “Apologetics (from Greek ἀπολογία, "speaking in defense") is the discipline of defending a position (often religious) through the systematic use of information.”DWill wrote:What are Christian apologetics?
'Often religious' is not 'always religious.' Carrier presents a critique of the belief that Jesus existed, therefore by definition a defence against Carrier's critique is an apologetic for the Historical Jesus, but not necessarily a Christian apologetic or a defence of Christianity. Flann has cited Tim O’Neill, who it appears is an apologist for Jesus but not for Christianity. I am somewhat the reverse, since I consider myself an apologist for a transformed scientific Christianity, but not for Jesus.
No. Crossan and Borg and Spong are strong defenders of liberal Christianity, and apologists for Jesus, yet do not believe any of those evangelical tenets. Undoubtedly, fundamentalist Christians seek to define Christianity as requiring such beliefs, but recently we discussed the case of Gretta Vosper, who calls herself a Christian but does not believe in God. Fundies have no right to say Vosper is not a Christian, especially since many might consider her ethics superior to theirs. This is obviously bewildering to conservatives, and yet it is reasonable to say that liberal faith, in its efforts to reconcile faith and reason, is seeking to promote an evolved Christianity to make it relevant and believable. The liberal focus on the social gospel, on Christ as an example of speaking truth to power, cannot be simply excluded a priori as Unchristian.DWill wrote:Do they not centrally involve such claims as the special divine characteristics of Jesus, the absolute reliability of the Gospels, the assuredness that Jesus died for our sins and rose to be reunited with his father?
But that opinion is fundamental to all the rest in terms of conventional faith. The tradition has been so secure in its dogma as to accept the HJ as an unquestioned assumption. But if that assumption is false, then the whole house of cards built upon it comes tumbling down. As Jesus Christ Himself was reported to say, a house built upon sand will fall. Evangelical faith is a house built on the sandy ground of false literal belief.DWill wrote: Not even at the end of that list would come, "oh, yes, that he really existed."
Far from it. My point is that the defence of HJ belief against mythicist arguments is of its nature apologetic. That is not a redefinition, as the wikipedia definition makes clear. Whether the apology stands up is a question of logic and evidence.DWill wrote:You yourself have redefined apologetics in order to assert that that single element is more or less sufficient to qualify one as a believer.
Carrier argues that minimal historicity involves none of the metaphysical claims of fundamentalist theology. Minimal historicity qualifies one as a believer in Jesus Christ, but not as a believer in Christianity. Obviously these two beliefs have been intermingled and confused, but the mythicist debate separates them.
No, I am saying Ehrman is an apologist for the claim that Jesus Christ was the founder of Christianity, not for the broader beliefs of Christianity as a religion. His emotional sympathy for his Baptist roots is an interesting topic for psychoanalysis, but does not make Ehrman a Christian apologist.DWill wrote: Ehrman's reactionary stance (in your view) causes you to consign him to a group with whose principles he is in fact in marked conflict.
It is not about labels, but rather defining the poles of the debate. If you try to use information to justify the claim that Jesus existed, that is apologetics by definition, even though it is not apologetics for broader Christian claims. Carrier restricts the argument to this narrow minimal question.DWill wrote: The larger question here is why it makes so much difference to stick a label on him or on anyone.
Yes, that is the nature of logic. When asked a question about what you believe, your answer can be yes, no or maybe. But crucially, only yes qualifies you as believing. If you are unsure if Jesus Christ existed, you cannot be said to believe Jesus Christ existed in any apologetic sense.DWill wrote:You seem to think of belief as a binary thing, either there or not.
You are bringing red herrings into the discussion. The question here is the status of the belief in the existence of Jesus Christ. Ehrman expresses this belief in clear and simple terms by comparing those who question this belief to Nazis, to illustrate the opprobrium and contempt he holds for any claims to scholarly uncertainty on this historical question.DWill wrote: Just through observation, and without the benefit of neuroscience, we can see that belief is a word that covers a range of mental states, and that often belief is expressed with different degrees of certainty.
Saying you believe Jesus existed is not at all like saying you believe Hillary Clinton will become President, but rather like saying you believe the earth orbits the sun.
No, you are again engaged in rhetorical exaggeration. Faith and reason are intermixed. It is reasonable for people to accept a social consensus when they have not investigated the evidence for themselves, although such uncertain belief does involve trust or faith in the reliability of relevant authorities. The same applies with science where people accept scientific claims that they do not understand. Where the HJ question becomes a problem is when people of faith misrepresent the debate and deliberately distort the evidence, claiming a certainty that in fact is contradicted by evidence.DWill wrote: you indicate that even the slightest 'historicity' regarding Jesus must come from the realm of faith not reason, deciding the matter in advance, as Flann said.
So in this case your equivocation would mean you are unsure if you have a right to pursue happiness. That reminds me of David Hume's famous skepticism about whether there was a necessary connection between a cause and an effect, or whether we could be sure the sun will rise tomorrow. The signatories of the US Declaration of Independence had a far simpler view on their beliefs in the rights to life and liberty. Similarly, equivocation on the existence of Jesus would contrast with the simple anathema expressed by Ehrman.DWill wrote: I could not answer yes or no to this question of my right to pursue happiness. I would need to qualify my answer, just as we often qualify our beliefs.
Yes, he joined you in your misreading of my remark that “Holding Jesus to have some minimal historicity does make one an apologist.” My remark obviously means ‘apologist for minimal historicity’, not ‘apologist for the full box and dice of magical Christian worship’. Believing Jesus was real does not automatically mean you believe he rose from the dead. It is a shame that such analytical distinctions seem to pass Flann by. That is what happens when believers define their own terms to support an ideological agenda.DWill wrote:Flann did not misunderstand what I meant by the laughter remark.Disinterested scholars should define apologetics, not Christian believers.
The wiki definition of apologetics as “the systematic use of information to defend a position” is perfectly sufficient for this argument. It is not an issue of fine detail, but of marshalling broad claims to support a belief in the HJ. As I explained above, Carrier presents minimal HJ belief as conceptually separate from Christian apologetics. The waters are muddied by the Christian apologists who enter the debate so vigorously to sow confusion.DWill wrote: Can you cite a disinterested scholar who has defined apologetics down to the fine details needed to prove your point? I'd be very surprised if one even wanted to touch the subject, because it's not a matter for scholarship in the first place.
So it is very telling that Ehrman felt the need to resort to such unscholarly emotional language to defend his belief in Jesus. If Jesus really existed there would be no need for such rhetoric on Ehrman’s part.DWill wrote: Didn't I say that the "greatest figure" remark was inconsistent with his past and current work? It's even directly contradictory to it.
I have said in this thread that people used the authority of Ehrman’s otherwise excellent historical research to falsely claim that the same standards of evidence applies to his claims about Jesus. It doesn’t. I am not using his ‘greatest figure’ piety as an ad hominem criticism of Ehrman's otherwise excellent historical scholarship, just as an illustration to help understand that his specific HJ arguments are weak.DWill wrote: But I strain to understand what you're saying about how this expression of piousness should affect how we see his work. That he can't be trusted, or that he must be wrong about everything?
You are right, it is more than 30 years since I read The Gnostic Gospels, although I have a copy and have looked at parts of it more recently. It was really The Gnostic Paul and her remarks about Gnostics "seeing Christ within" which made me think she avoided HJ comments, but as you say they are there in The Gnostic Gospels.DWill wrote: It seemed unusual to me for someone to go from non-HJ to HJ but not to faith, so I looked into The Gnostic Gospels. You must must not have been so focused on mythicism when you first read the book. The strong historicism is there; see pp. 7-8. She says, for example, "But what we know as historical fact is that certain disciples--notably Peter--claimed that the resurrection happened." This, obviously, is not her saying that the resurrection happened, but you can see the clear historicism.
No, I am saying that that is the argument presented rigorously and at length by Richard Carrier in OHJ, and that I find his arguments compelling. I am not begging the question here at all, I am pointing out that this debate is the equivalent of creation versus evolution, with a very solid evidence based case for Christ as pure myth. We simply would not have the data we have if Jesus existed.DWill wrote: By stipulating that anyone who thinks that Jesus could have existed is doing so against reason, you've already decided the outcome.
My problem with this material is that I see arguments such as Carrier’s trashed by idiots who prevent reasoned dialogue. It makes me angry when Carrier is presenting important factual and ethical material that people such as Ehrman are blind to. Flexibility in this debate should mean recognition that religion is essential to human life and has to evolve to be compatible with reason. It should not mean pandering to ignorant medieval delusions about supernatural entities existing, except as a purely allegorical veneration for traditional language as a beautiful historical artifact.DWill wrote: holding back and indicating some flexibility would be more effective.
A religion with logic and evidence as its highest values would be a very good thing.DWill wrote: Woe be to science if it gets a religion.
No I did not.DWill wrote:I could be forgiven for thinking that you have just called Ehrman a fundy tub-thumper.
Ehrman reminds me of the church in Laodicea described in Rev 3 as lukewarm. I found his attacks on astral interpretations of the Bible to be unforgivably stupid.DWill wrote:Try to forget your dislike of him and have a look at the topics he covers in his new book. Is that a fundamentalist writing or a godless heathen? http://www.bartdehrman.com/jesus-before-the-gospels/
On such a topic precision is important. I said he compared mythicists to Nazis, which is very different from equating them. He implies that denial of the Jewish holocaust and denial of the existence of Jesus Christ have equivalent evidentiary standing, which is an appallingly censorious, stupid and incorrect thing to say. Recall Harrison’s comments about anchoring. The point of Ehrman mentioning Holocaust Denial is to set up an anchoring rhetoric that excludes Carrier from the bounds of reasoned debate, a scurrilous tactic on Ehrman’s part.DWill wrote: He's not equating mythicists with Nazis; indeed, that wouldn't make any sense at all.
Yes, and “self-evident” here is a pure faith statement when it comes to Jesus Christ.DWill wrote: He's saying the two claims are equal in terms of self-evident falsity, which does appear to be his own "taking too far."
A key theme in OHJ is that our historical knowledge and prevalent assumptions about the early church reflects the intervening dominant attitudes of later periods. The edicts of Theodosius in 380 required that anyone caught in possession of heretical literature be executed by the state. With varying levels of zeal, that Theodosian policy applied throughout Christendom for more than a thousand years. As such, Christianity has a very selective view of its past, a history written by the victors. Carrier, and mythicists more broadly, are now trying to consciously correct for the assumptions of Christendom, such as the pervasive tendency to read later Gospel ideas into Paul’s early epistles.DWill wrote: The early Church is usually agreed to be the institution before 325. The edicts you refer to were issued in 380. Look, even before 325 there was an awful lot of heresy-hunting going on, as well as what could be called an orthodox establishment. No doubt this was hardball. It's important not to assume, though, that full-fledged persecution was happening, if you are assuming that.
Your term “Hardball” is a useful euphemism for the factional battles of the early church. This was not a game, but rather a winner-take-all religious war about truth and power. My sense is that the early Gnostics stood more for truth while the orthodox stood for power. The HJ trope proved immensely powerful politically in explaining to the masses that the Roman Gods had lost the mandate of heaven, to use the Chinese dynastic idea. But complex Gnostic ideas of a merely spiritual Christ were only relevant to a tiny educated elite, lacking the radical simplicity and relevance and political traction of the Gospels.
As ever in a fight over truth and power, the better material organization won the battle for state control, while the side holding to the deeper spiritual truth is yet to win the war. My own view is that this victory looks at history over the extremely long Biblical framework of a thousand years as a day. Against this eschatological view of the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, we can look forward to a coming time when this old myth comes to be interpreted in purely scientific terms as the dawn of the Age of Aquarius. This is happening through the astromythicist understanding that the vision of the early church was that Christ would be imagined as Avatar of the Age of Pisces, and its vision that the Gospel message could come to rule the world in the Age of Aquarius.
This cosmic interpretation aligns exactly with Carrier’s arguments that HJ belief was a late corruption, a degenerate distortion of the original high spiritual wisdom of the Christ Myth. The cosmic interpretation of Christianity against the stellar markers of zodiac ages also aligns with Carrier's his central observation that the Christ Myth originated as purely celestial, and was only later placed into the imaginary historical setting of Jesus of Nazareth.
That interview certainly is very interesting, by Miguel Connor of AeonByte Radio. He is the most interesting interviewer on religion that I have heard.DWill wrote: I saw an interesting interview with Pagels in which she is asked a question about persecution of gnostics.
It shows clearly that as you say, Pagels certainly does believe in the Historical Jesus. What I found most interesting in it was her comment that “there are very strong presuppositions that we bring with us when people study the beginning of Christianity.”
It is normal and natural to presuppose that Jesus really existed because nearly all of Christian theology and history assumes that as a starting point. But when people are asked to consider their own assumptions they naturally become defensive because they assume their assumption is based on evidence rather than faith alone. So when Carrier challenges this core presupposition on the basis of logic and evidence there is a natural bristling reaction, especially from people with an advanced condition of Christian belief. They assume Carrier must be crazy, that surely the evidence for Jesus is there.
Pagels says in this interview that the unifying theme in Gnosticism is "a conviction about the divine that is within." That is precisely what was rejected by the church as heresy on the basis of the dogma that Christ was a special revelation, a unique objective presence of God in the world, distinct from personal experience, and requiring church priestly mediation to encounter.
So when the Gnostics elevate personal experience it seems they are questioning the dogma of the special revelation in Christ, in a way that aligns to mythicism. And in her Paul book, Pagels’ key theme as also discussed by Carrier is the two level theory of the secret allegory and literal public teachings. My reading is that the secret teaching is that Jesus is spiritual idea, while the public teaching is that Jesus was historical man. It was surprising to me to see that Pagels does not think that way.
Miguel Connor: "In popular culture there’s this romanticized vision of the Catholic Church hunting down Gnostics in the second and third centuries and destroying them. But we really don’t have any evidence. It’s more like they probably just faded away.
Elaine Pagels: Well nothing like that. In fact I assumed when I first wrote that Irenaeus had said they were bad, and so they did just kind of fade away, but the fact is: where did we find these texts? We found them in Egypt in the fourth century-fourth century!-being read, we now think, in a monastery. So if they’re being read in a monastery in the fourth century, they didn’t fade away. People were reading this stuff intensely and with great interest, and they were only stamped out with huge difficulty by Athanasius at the end of the fourth century when he told them to get rid of these other books in his letter of 367. But Christians were reading this material intensely as devotional literature. We can now see that." http://realitysandwich.com/96150/gnosti ... ne_pagels/