Re: Religion and philosophy
Posted: Mon Feb 12, 2018 5:40 am
Not really compelling. A number of researchers, in both history and Biblical Studies, have taken up the mythicist mission. In many cases they have significantly revised the orthodoxy-based version of the historiography, and that is all to the good. I generally support a variety of views being explored, for just that reason.Robert Tulip wrote:Unfortunately, the historicist works that have tried to rebut mythicist arguments have been embarrassingly weak, no more than polemic, lacking in scholarly quality. We are in the midst of a paradigm shift in Biblical Studies, where the logic of evidence points to the most compelling explanation being that Jesus Christ was a fictional myth.Harry Marks wrote:more careful and less speculative work … point away from the mythicist hypothesis.
But I am still waiting for evidence of mythicism being predictive for an internally consistent version of the historiography that does not take absence of evidence as evidence of absence as axiomatic.
Most telling is that the mythicist version stumbles over the same problem they allege "proves" that historicism makes no sense, namely the absence of historical evidence of their putative mythicist process. What they find instead are "traces" all of which have more logical explanations, and when these traces are doubted, they claim that it is all due to the coverup by Christendom. Sorry, I am not buying. If the mythicist version is true, then looking for evidence should turn some up. I am willing to wait and see.
They are crucial to some, but there are plenty of scholars with no investment in apologetics who don't find them persuasive.Robert Tulip wrote: Just as Newton's theories are inadequate for managing satellites or measuring galaxies, the historicist assumption that Jesus existed fails to explain crucial anomalies, that are all far better explained by the invention hypothesis.
Unfortunately the main weakness of the inventionist line of analysis is one that mythicists always seem to have trouble getting their head around: they see any use of supernatural imagery as proof that the whole thing is invention from start to finish, like Isis and Osiris or Demeter and Persephone. This despite discussion by mythicists themselves of elaboration using supernatural stories for figures as diverse as Emperor Augustus, Siddhartha Gautama, and Pythagoras. (Did you know that there are no independent attestations of the life of the Buddha? My gosh, who does that sound like? Did you know that early documents about his life attest to miracles? My gosh, who does that sound like?)Robert Tulip wrote:The total absence of any mention of Jesus of Nazareth independent of the Gospel of Mark is one telling weakness for a person who was supposedly famous and influential. And Mark’s Gospel itself is so thoroughly magical and symbolic that considered by itself it reads far more as parable than history,
It seems that mythicists find it impossible to put themselves in an ancient mindset, before science, journalism and even, really, history, as to how stories of the supernatural were actually used.
It's most likely true that Mark is a work of theater, replete with inventions meant to make symbolic points. Again, that was a more-or-less standard approach, especially when the reference points were already taking on mythical significance. I consider it possible that the Reign of God (which is the foundation theology for the Synoptics, contrary to the apparent mythicist belief that Redemption from Sin by Jesus' death and resurrection was the foundational idea of all Christianity) as contrast with Empire was an invention of some writer like Mark, but that doesn't fit the evidence as well as simply noting that it is a plausible insight for one or more of the numerous putative Messiahs of Judaism in that age.
The idea that Mark inventing it is plausible but Jesus seeing it is not is just lacking in common sense. It is turning historiography on its head by arguing that someone we have evidence of (in the form of a document) can be real while someone a movement claims to be based on must be fictional because the supernatural claims by his followers are not evidenced in external sources.
It may be that Jesus' origin in Nazareth was an invention, although I have seen arguments that Nazareth was not "absent" before the claimed time but just absent from formal representations such as maps. Like Jesus, it was insignificant at the time.
Look, it is obvious to most scholars that people believed absurd things when those absurdities reinforce the right ideas and values. They still do. Just because the cultural context includes belief in absurdities does not mean we cannot think with any clarity about how those particular beliefs come to be expressed and passed on.Robert Tulip wrote:Your putative “cultural context” is as absurd as the claim of the Queen of Hearts to Alice in Wonderland that she could believe six impossible things before breakfast. It was precisely the impossibility of the physical resurrection miracle that made it so confronting for the real cultural context, enabling Christianity to construct its imaginary alternative universe where the laws of causality did not apply. Normal people rejected that Christian logic, but they were overruled, and the result was the Dark Ages, with its hostility to science and learning.
My point was simply that the resurrection the Jews of the time believed in (and certainly not all of them) was not one that was symbolic alone. I am quite willing to believe there were Gnostics around who thought about it differently, but there are plenty of Jewish texts from outside Christianity which were not suppressed and which support ideas of resurrection as literal.Robert Tulip wrote:No, it is not. The more parsimonious scientific explanation is that the originators of this impossible claim knew that it should be understood symbolically as a parable, but the literal story had such emotional political resonance that the original symbolic interpretation was suppressed as Gnostic Heresy.Harry Marks wrote:it is more economical, more Occam-ish, to recognize that people believed the dead were going to get out of their graves and walk around, as Matthew portrayed
When you look for a perspective to be predictive, it is not enough for it to "predict" things we have already learned. That helps make it "explanatory" but not predictive. I am waiting for the first piece of evidence that mythicism predicts will be found if we go looking for such evidence.
Looking at the culture of the time has helped make sense of the evidence in ways that orthodoxy resists. So far, to my awareness at least, there are no predictive successes for historicism either (successes on the order of Schliemann's archaeological investigations for evidence of a historical basis for such "myths" as Troy and the Minotaur. [Edit to add: I later remembered that Knossos was Evans' investigation, not Schliemann's]) But based on the explanatory fit, I will put my money on historicism until either one proves out.
I am afraid when I have looked at such "evidence" it always turns out to be "a better fit with the obviously superior mythicist narrative," not "facts that show the process in action." It is possible that there was a lot of influence from proto-Gnosticism on Christianity, but those influences don't give us any way of tracing an origin to myths.Robert Tulip wrote:That unquestioned assumption falsely portrayed Gnosticism as emerging from orthodox literalism as a corruption, whereas the evidence indicates the evolutionary causality occurred in the opposite direction. Orthodoxy was the corrupted variant that took over from a Gnostic original teaching.
The high theology of the New Testament is mostly later retrojection based on Augustine and other early fathers. Passages such as the ones you underline from Philippians and Colossians are poetical, not explanations of a process. Influence is not evidence of origin: we can see influence from Philo, but there is no evidence Philo was part of some secret Gnostic process - he was a straightforward scholar who saw ideas that were persuasive and so were likely to be taken up by others.Robert Tulip wrote:The high theology of the New Testament indicates close connection to wisdom teachings, whereas the literal tradition is just a lowest common denominator, a modus vivendi, a dogma suited to the imperial demands post Constantine for political uniformity of belief as a basis for strategic unity and stability and security.
So, an example of a predictive success would be if there were a broad range of Nazarene beliefs that turned out to be present in Christianity but absent from rabbinical Judaism. I am unaware of any evidence of such a predictive success.Robert Tulip wrote:The non-existence of Nazareth until a century after Jesus is one glaring anomaly, easily explained as a result of the Nazarenes existing as a secret mystery school, and so giving their name to Jesus the Nazarene. Such anomalies make the Gospel account impossible except as myth.
As an aside, there is a lovely book on this subject called "The Badass Librarians of Timbuktu". I recommend it to anyone.Robert Tulip wrote:Such retention of teachings generally involves active effort, but when a text is illegal, such effort becomes difficult.
So the Imperial edicts named the Gnostic texts? I was merely claiming that we know of the texts because hidden copies were retained.Robert Tulip wrote:You are getting the logic wrong here Harry. We know there was suppression of the Gnostic texts because the Roman Emperors issued edicts that required it, and then enforced them vigorously, as did their successors.Harry Marks wrote: It may be that some process eliminated "the truth" from the evidence, as we have evidence of in the redaction of sources in the OT. It does seem clear that there was suppression of the Gnostic texts, but we know this because at least one community did not wish to see them eliminated from the record, and buried manuscripts at Nag Hammadi.
Another example of a prediction that has not been made, much less confirmed, is if such edicts of suppression included mention of documents using the notion that originally Jesus was just a myth. "But that's not how it works", I can hear mythicists saying. Eventually they will get around to spelling out how they think the historiography behind their argument from censorship actually does work. But that would be serious scholarship and all we have so far is visionary peering into the mists and some fringe historians picking up on it as a way to brand themselves.
There is a nice piece of scholarship done by John Dominic Crossan, published in "The Birth of Christianity" about the reliability of oral transmission. It turns out to be better than we probably thought, but also to have biases like those used in linguistic research to trace connections between languages (see "The Horse, The Wheel and Language")Robert Tulip wrote:Our modern assumption tends to be that writing is key, but in historical terms writing is a recent innovation. Ancient religion was largely oral, secret and initiatory.