That course looks tempting. Wish it were free, but I guess I'm spoiled. Probably need to wait until it's a less active season for me.

DWill wrote:That course looks tempting. Wish it were free, but I guess I'm spoiled. Probably need to wait until it's a less active season for me.

It really does. And its got great reviews. The professor is quite good. He gives enormous historical context. Almost to the point of overkill. His Alexander the Great course had mega context.. it was not a cursory endeavor

DWill wrote:Just to say, Robert, having finally read Ehrman's book, that it presents an historian's rationale for the historical existence of Jesus. The point can't be emphasized enough, that when the techniques of modern historical inquiry are applied, it looks as though there was a Jesus as the basis of the myths that emerged to constitute Christianity.

Hi DWill, I have also read Ehrman’s book, and I came away with a totally opposite conclusion from you. As Richard Carrier comprehensively proves in his contribution to the collection of rebuttal essays that I linked in the post to which you responded, Ehrman does not in fact apply modern historical techniques. Your assertion that he does so is a faith statement on your part. The reality, as Carrier proves in On The Historical Jesus, is that the far most plausible explanation for the available historical evidence is that Jesus Christ was invented. My view is that Frank Zindler provides the most compelling explanation of this invention in the comments I quoted from him.

DWill wrote:Ehrman's case is multi-pronged and comprehensive, whereas I believe that you mythicists lean on single factors and do not have the experience, specialization, or training to make comprehensive judgments. It is just as important to be sure that historical discipline is followed as it to be certain that scientific method is employed in any investigation.

Again this is a rhetorical faith statement on your part which is easily refuted in the collection of essays against Ehrman. The so-called “prongs” of Ehrman’s case all turn out on examination to be worthless, late, reliant on Christian faith assertions, fraudulent, distorted, and made by Christian apologists to do far more work than any objective analysis could support.

You need a steely faith to ignore the simple historical facts, such as that the Jesus texts in Josephus were obviously not written until the fourth century.

DWill wrote: There has never been a school of thought positing a fictional Jesus until relatively modern times. This in itself doesn't mean that mythicists can't have discovered something unnoticed, but it does present a high bar for you all that your arguments haven't been able to surmount.

That assertion that mythicism is modern is just rubbish. The second letter of John in the New Testament refers directly to the Docetic school which held that Jesus was imaginary, condemning it in lurid terms as the anti-Christ. This Bible text calls explicitly for the suppression of the school of thought that Jesus was fictional. This political statement provided a strong basis for the later successful efforts of the church to paint heresy as idiotic falsehood. In fact the reality was that these so-called heretical teachings were the historical truth, albeit a truth that did not serve the objective of making Christianity a universal belief system suitable for the prevailing social context.

DWill wrote: The importance of the did-Jesus-exist question is that history becomes significantly rewritten and, I would say, distorted, under the mythicist view that Jesus was not conceived or viewed as having lived. Neither you, I, or Bart Ehrman believes in Jesus Christ; we all would say that the Jesus we can read about is in many respects mythic. The crucial difference is my belief that he was held as a historical reality.

Your “belief” here is a matter of faith, which can be contested by the standard methods of scientific historiography, including the analysis of available evidence. Zindler makes a really crucial point which I quoted above and repeat: “it is easier and more parsimonious to reconstruct an evolutionary sequence leading from a Docetic mystery cult with Gnostic affinities than from an historical Jesus to Gnosticism.” This invocation of the elegant Ockhamite scientific principle of parsimony here in terms of a plausible evolutionary sequence is not something that true believers in the Historical Jesus can simply brush aside on the grounds that Zindler is merely the long term editor of the American Atheist magazine.

DWill wrote: The simplest explanation for this is that he actually lived, but even regardless of that, it's the assumption that he lived, by the people of the time, that really matters. I'd be glad to discuss the book with anyone who has read it.

This “assumption” that you cite has precisely zero evidence in its support that is independent of the romance story in the Gospel of Mark, a story which is in the same historical romance genre lampooned by Cervantes in Don Quixote as utterly true in all respects.

When all the real evidence goes back to Saint Mark, a single author who had motive, means and opportunity for invention, the status becomes like an imaginary future debate on whether Tolkien’s fantasy, or other similar stories including Hercules, King Arthur, Robin Hood, William Tell, the man of La Mancha, Paul Bunyan, Luke Skywalker, Superman, Harry Potter, etc, are based on real historical individuals. In all these case, like Jesus, any drawing on real historical examples is solely incidental to the core myth making agenda.

It's remarkable that you can point to a measly verse from 2 John, one that does not even say what you claim, and call it proof of a Jesus-fiction school. Yet, when Paul makes many clear references to a Jesus who had lived, these are insufficient to show that Paul believed he had lived, and most importantly to him, died. With the Church's obsessive accounting of all the heresies that needed to be put down, it beggars belief that it would have missed the granddaddy of them all.

Well, if you still have this book and have the time and would like to explain how Ehrman fails, I'll listen and give my own views.

DWill wrote:It's remarkable that you can point to a measly verse from 2 John, one that does not even say what you claim, and call it proof of a Jesus-fiction school.

Not just a verse, but a series of clear statements from both 1 John and 2 John. Let’s go through the most egregious, to try to get a feel for the bullying culture that Ehrman is defending:

1 John
4:1-3: “1Dear friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world. 2This is how you can recognize the Spirit of God: Every spirit that acknowledges that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, 3but every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you have heard is coming and even now is already in the world.”

• Here John says the test of whether a prophet is true or false is whether they acknowledge that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh. The implication is that the allegedly false prophets are Docetic - claiming that Jesus is only spirit and not flesh, ie that Jesus only seemed to come in the flesh. These Docetists, condemned as heretics, teach that those who argue for the flesh Christ are deluded.

4:6 “We are from God, and whoever knows God listens to us; but whoever is not from God does not listen to us. This is how we recognize the Spirit of truth and the spirit of falsehood.

• Instead of using factual evidence about Jesus to justify his bullying, John simply asserts that the flesh camp is on God’s side. They never do use facts because there are none.

4:20 “Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar.”

• Considered together with the preceding anti-Docetic lines, the implication is that Docetists are liars because they disagree that there is any basis for the assertion of the Historical Jesus

5:6 “This is the one who came by water and blood—Jesus Christ.

• Baptism and the cross.

5:10 “Whoever believes in the Son of God accepts this testimony. Whoever does not believe God has made him out to be a liar”

• A key anti-Docetic line. Unless you believe the saving blood of Christ was physically shed on the cross you are calling God a liar. The blood was real and not imaginary. The NIV headlines this section “Faith in the Incarnate Son of God”. It is designed to clarify the distinction between orthodox Christians who believed in the embodied Christ as the core of faith and those who held that Christ was fictional.
• This theme of the reality of the incarnation and the error of Docetism is ramped up in one of the earliest church letters, from Ignatius of Antioch to the church in Smyrna generally dated to 110 AD. http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0109.htm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_to_the_Smyrnaeans Ignatius reinforces John’s point with violent murderous language about heretics, establishing the militaristic obedience cult of the bishop which was the selective adaptation that enabled Christianity to triumph over other messianic sects.

2 John
1:6 : “this is love: that we walk in obedience”

• An extraordinary assertion! Here the political twisting of language to serve the interest of the hierarchy of the church begins. Love is not obedience. The problem John’s clique saw with Gnostic Docetism was that it failed to serve the militaristic agenda of conformity.

1:7: “many deceivers, who do not acknowledge Jesus Christ as coming in the flesh, have gone out into the world. Any such person is the deceiver and the antichrist.”

• The only reason to insert “in the flesh” in this verse is to insinuate that these Satanic “deceivers” preach some other Christ, ie one who only came in the spirit, ie a myth. This, like Ignatius’ later language, is clear proof of the early existence of a Jesus-fiction school.

1:10: “If anyone comes to you and does not bring this teaching, do not take them into your house or welcome them.”

• The teaching in question is that Jesus Christ came in the flesh. As this hate speech and the letter from Ignatius illustrate, the early church was not loving towards such people

1:11: “Anyone who welcomes them shares in their wicked work.

• So, if a Christian so much as speaks to a person who thinks that Jesus was not real, they are defined by the Bible as “wicked”. Nice.

DWill wrote: Yet, when Paul makes many clear references to a Jesus who had lived, these are insufficient to show that Paul believed he had lived, and most importantly to him, died.

No, no clear references. Two obscure ambiguous references, one to the fact that the story of Jesus emerged among the Jews (Rom 1:3) and the other an allegorical statement that he was ‘born of a woman’, even though no biographical details of this Jesus are ever cited apart from a dislocated death and alleged resurrection. All Paul’s ideas come from scripture and the spirit, not from Jesus. Wanting does not make it so.

DWill wrote:With the Church's obsessive accounting of all the heresies that needed to be put down, it beggars belief that it would have missed the granddaddy of them all.

No, the church did not miss this “granddaddy” but made it a main focus of the first heresiologist Ignatius of Antioch. I recommend reading his Letter to Symrna, it is not entirely dissimilar in tone to Ehrman’s diatribe.

I wonder whether other mythicists might just concede this one. It would seem to be a smart move, and it wouldn't be fatal to their case. It wasn't until the 1800s, after all, that anyone thought to examine the historical accuracy of the Bible, and doing so changed forever how we view its reliability. Claiming that Jesus himself is an unreliable fiction is a further step. (You're welcome.)

Docetism isn't the out that you and others seem to think it is. It refers to a belief about the nature of Jesus, that he appeared to be of the flesh as he lived on earth, but was really pure spirit. There is nowhere a statement that a figure people called Jesus and interacted with had never existed. You have to use the name "Jesus" and pronouns for him just to say what docetism was.

For Marcion, a docetist, Jesus was supremely important, since Marcion divorced his Christianity from any link to the Old Testament or that god.

I do not see anything in what you've said about this, Robert, that can be called valid evidence that the existence of Jesus was ever disputed until fairly recent times.

One of the main contentions of mythicists is that Paul's saying quite little about the life and teaching of Jesus indicates that he isn't talking a real person at all, but a spiritual vision. Well, he certainly mentions this vision a lot--over 200 times writing "Jesus," not to mention more mentions of "Christ" and "the Lord." He at several places makes a special point of Jesus' mortality, his in-the-flesh presence, and this makes it even harder to accept that Paul doesn't have in mind a historical person.

But no question, it is odd that in all of his preachings to his flocks, Paul doesn't resort to more examples and teachings from the person who founded the religion Paul is championing. How to account for this, while at the same time maintaining that Paul is clearly talking about a person?

On this matter I found the reasoning in the Irreducible Complexity blog to be pretty tight, and the writer's got me leaning in his favor.

https://irrco.wordpress.com/2010/11/11/paul-on-jesus/

ant wrote:I'm not quite half way through professor Ehrman's new book. It is a good read so far and I encourage anyone interested in the topic to purchase a copy of it.

Here is a related article.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bart-d-eh ... 49544.html

Short of mythicist's desire to obtain Christ's birth certificate, they will never believe otherwise.

Yes, "Jesus" (The Greek Tranliteration of his actual Hebrew name, which was Yeshu'a) did exist, but just like the existence of God, you either believe He exists or you don't. I find it pointless to argue a position either way, when the other is simply not going to be inclined to agree.

Dr. Manifest

Here is my review, written in 2012 at http://freethoughtnation.com/forums/vie ... 829#p25829

In Did Jesus Exist?, author Bart Ehrman uses interest in the work of Acharya S as his prime shibboleth, his test for whether anyone can be taken seriously. Erhman introduces Acharya as a mythicist who does “not offer anything resembling scholarship in support of their view and instead presents the unsuspecting reading public with sensationalist claims that are so extravagant, so wrongheaded and so poorly substantiated that it is no wonder that scholars do not take them seriously.” (p33) He says her first book The Christ Conspiracy is “filled with so many factual errors and outlandish assertions that it is hard to believe that the author is serious.”

Ehrman is completely wrong in this assessment, which is backfiring on him badly. His prime exhibit of an ‘outlandish assertion’ is Murdock’s claim which he summarizes as saying that “Christianity started out as an astrotheological religion in which Jesus was transformed into a historical Jew… The Bible itself is an astrotheological text with hidden meanings that need to be unpacked by understanding their astrological symbolism.” (p35) In peremptory disposal of this argument, Ehrman says “there are no astrological phenomena associated with Jesus in any of our earliest traditions.”

To my reading, this basic error regarding astrotheology is the most interesting piece of cultural politics in Ehrman’s highly political book. Not only is astrology very much central to the ancient manufacture of the Christ myth, but the continued suppression of discussion of this manufacture remains a major failing in the coherence of Christian theology, and therefore a key weakness in Christian epistemology and ethics.

Having announced his crusade against astrology, Ehrman goes on to clumsily attack Acharya’s scholarship by suggesting that various debatable claims are settled, and that criticism of this orthodoxy is not permitted. On top of this highly aggressive error, he uses his inquisitorial mistakes to declare that Acharya should not be read, implying the need for some new holy index of forbidden books. For a writer aiming for an intelligent audience, this unexpected Spanish Inquisition is a big overplay by Ehrman.

He wrongly argues that Acharya is misinformed about the dating of the Gospels and the canon, and ignores her point that modern views of the New Testament as an early unchanging source are just wrong. Earlier writers such as Justin did not have access to the New Testament as later settled, a process that took some time, and the canon even remained in dispute at the Reformation, so Acharya’s comments on these topics are perfectly legitimate. Ehrman ignores Acharya's point about why the original texts do not survive, namely that they probably contained text that was not convenient for the church. Instead, he nitpicks that “there is not a scintilla of evidence to suggest that they… were destroyed after [Nicaea in 325AD]” because “they were probably simply used so much they wore out.” This threadbare argument simply ignores the entire observation that the origin of the church is very murky, and the leaders probably had good reason to destroy earlier texts to advance their institutional control. Surely early texts would have been preserved if the church had actually venerated them?

More question-begging nitpicking follows: Ehrman suggests “Acharya has evidently never read the writings of Paul. As we will see, he does quote sayings of Jesus.” But does Paul actually attribute those sayings to Jesus, other than the highly contentious and mythological "Lord's Supper"? That is what is at issue, and what Ehrman ignores. Ehrman’s basic mistake about Acharya’s description of a statue in the Vatican has been abundantly displayed as he has eaten crow over his sloppy error. Finally, from his bullet point list of reasons to ignore Acharya, he finds one small real mistake about dating of the life of Augustine. If these are the best mistakes Ehrman can come up with he really is clutching at straws. Certainly these debatable questions are flimsy foundations for the fatwa Ehrman builds upon them.

What is the real agenda here? As Ehrman explains, it is Acharya’s defence of astrotheology that he finds most heretical. As I share Acharya’s views on astrotheology, I feel that despite his calumny, Ehrman has done us a service by opening up public debate on whether in fact Christianity makes most sense as a carnalized cosmic myth in which astrology is central.

Acharya describes Jesus Christ as the Avatar of the Age of Pisces. This in itself is enough to cause mainstream theologians to go into apoplectic spasms and start preparing their new Index of forbidden books. The problem here is that the Christian mainstream has a strong emotional attachment to the idea of supernatural intervention, and a hostility to research that provides natural explanations for supernatural myths. Discussion of zodiac ages and precession of the equinox is a primary example of this irrational syndrome within mainstream theology.

Zodiac ages are simply observable scientific periods that provide the long term structure for terrestrial time, caused by the wobble of earth’s axis. They provide the long term framework of time for much ancient mythology, including the Bible. But for the Ehrmans of this world, any talk of the zodiac is irrational astrology, and must be condemned as New Age.

So Acharya’s sin in the Gospel according to Saint Bart is that her writings are New Age. For Ehrman it seems this is enough for his inquisition. He ignores the simple scientific fact that the equinox is reaching the end of the sign of Pisces and the beginning of the sign of Aquarius, so that our planet will soon shift from the Age of Pisces to the Age of Aquarius, just as it shifted from the Age of Aries to the Age of Pisces at the time of Christ, crossing the first fish in 21 AD. He also ignores how this knowledge was a central impetus in the manufacture of the Christ myth.

The shift from the Age of Aries to the Age of Pisces corresponds precisely to the idea of Jesus Christ as the alpha and omega. Ancient astrology saw this moment as a shift between two Great Years, or cycles of twelve ages, from the last age of the previous Great Year to the first age of the new Great Year. So the founding description of Jesus Christ as alpha and omega is pure astrology. Ehrman is profoundly ignorant if he disputes this observation.

Further, the New Testament embeds this vision of zodiac ages in the miracle that occurs most frequently in its writings. The loaves and fishes, appearing six times in total in the New Testament, are the signs of Virgo (the bread) and Pisces (the fishes) which have occupied the equinox axis from the time of Christ until now. The miraculous abundance from nothing is simply a parable about cosmic attunement for a New Age. Ehrman might like to ponder why Jesus lambasts the disciples for their failure to understand this miracle in Mark 8. It is because the miracle is primarily an astronomical allegory.

The original authors of the Christ Myth must have encountered intense popular resistance to understanding the incarnation of Christ as primarily spiritual and cosmic. It seems the historical fiction resonated so much more easily. That is how myths arise – people hear what they want to hear and disregard the rest. Even today, the literal historical myth of Jesus Christ has widespread popular resonance, such that authors like Bart Ehrman feel that a slapdash condemnation of scholarly analysis in this field is sufficient to address it.

Acharya S is in fact a scholar, much as Ehrman may wish to deny and exclude her scholarship. This whole debate is about cultural politics of paradigm change. A new paradigm, seeing Christ as a cosmic myth, is gradually emerging. The old literal paradigm has shifted from its default position of ignoring new work to ridiculing it. What we are finding is that the ridicule is backfiring, because astrotheology is scholarly, rigorous and accurate, and can readily refute all the simplistic arguments presented by Ehrman. Thanks Bart for bringing the debate into the public domain.

DWill wrote:For Marcion, a docetist, Jesus was supremely important

where did you get the idea Marcion was a docetist from?