Socrates never existed: analogies with Jesus

[Giuseppe]

I see that what is more close to a 'mythicist' position on Socrates has been advanced seriously by a scholar;

Olof Gigon: Sokrates, sein Bild in Dichtung und Geschichte

Fortunately it has been translated in Italian and so I can read it.

It seems (while I write I have not yet the book) that the historicity strictu senso of the man is not denied, but the his presumed "influence" is emptied so totally that he could be One, No One and One Hundred Thousand (to quote Pirandello).

[rgprice]

There are huge differences between Jesus and Socrates that allow a much stronger position to be taken against Jesus than Socrates.

1) There is extremely low diversity across accounts of the "life" of Jesus. Every account says almost exactly the same thing, word for word, and this is true even of non-canonical accounts. This indicates that all accounts stem from a single source.
There is more diversity in accounts of Socrates, indicating actually independent accounts.
2) Every account of the "life" of Jesus is strongly "aligned" with Jewish scriptures showing that the narratives of the account of his life are in fact derived from the Jewish scriptures. That Jesus was viewed as having "fulfilled hundreds of prophecies" indicates that the account of his life is a designed story related to prophecies.
Accounts of the life of Socrates have nothing to do with prophecies.

A much more apt comparison to Jesus is Orpheus or the Sibyls, or Publius and Bouplagos from The Book of Wonders.

David Potter's summary of the story:

After receiving the Delphic oracle, the Romans were withdrawing toward Naupactus when an officer names Publius fell into a prophetic fit and predicted that the Romans would suffer disaster on their way home from the conquest of Asia. When asked to explain what this meant, Publius described, in reasonable detail, what would occur during the rest of the war with Antiochus. He also said that the returning army would be attacked by Thracians and lose some of its booty. He then fell into another prophetic fit and predicted, in verse, the destruction of Rome at the hands of an invading army; then, speaking in prose, that a large red wolf would come to devour him, thus proving that he had spoken the truth. The wolf duly arrived and ate Publius, leaving only the head, which once against bust into prophetic song, telling the Romans that Athena hated them, and that she would destroy Italy and drag its people off into slavery. The account ends with the statement that “hearing these words, they [the Romans] were deeply upset and established a temple and altar of Apollo Lyceus Where the head had lain and got onto their ships and each one went to his own land. All these things that Publius predicted have come true.”

A passage from the story:

After he had uttered this he fell silent, and proceeding outside the camp he climbed up a certain oak tree. The crowd followed, and he called to them: ‘Romans and other soldiers, it falls to me to die and be devoured by a huge red wolf on this very day, but as for you, know that everything I have said is going to happen to you: take the imminent appearance of the beast and my own destruction as proof that I have spoken by divine intimation.’
Saying this, he told them to stand aside and not to prevent the approach of the beast, saying that it would not be to their benefit to drive it away. The crowd followed his bidding, and presently the wolf came. When Publius saw it, he came down from the oak tree and fell upon his back, whereupon the wolf ripped him open and devoured him while everyone looked on. Having consumed his body except for his head it turned away to the mountain. When the crowd now approached, wishing to take up the remains and give them a proper burial, the head, which lay on the ground, proclaimed these verses:

You cannot find a classicist who will argue that this account is based on real events.

Classicist J. R. Morgan notes,

close analysis of the passage demonstrates that the whole thing is a farrago put together by a redactor during the Mithridatic War, adapting and combining narrative and prophetic material from several earlier contexts. From the perspective of 88 B.C. the piece is clear propaganda of resistance to Rome, using earlier oracles to demonstrate its own validity but also pointing to future defeats for the Romans which never in fact occurred.

[Giuseppe]

i have found a real "Socrates mythicist" in this classicist, Eugene Dupreel:

https://archive.org/details/DupreelLaLegendeDeSocrates

In this article, Dupreel is accused to be a "Socrates mythicist" because, as a Catholic teaching in a Catholic stronghold, he would have hated the exalted "rival of Christ", i.e. Socrates, at the point to deny his existence.