Nick Peters wrote:stephan happy huller wrote:Well Nick, I want to make clear that there is very little about early Christianity that I am certain about anything other than the general worthlessness of modern Christians. Faith is based on habit and an inherited prejudice. When it manifests itself in serious thinkers it should be questioned if not held in contempt. It is not worthy of respect.
Oh it's so nice to start off on a good note. Well I'm first off wondering what your definition of faith is. Is it a definition the ancients would have or the modern changing of it?
The fact you seem so certain about Jesus and his historicity is interesting.
No. It's just in line with modern scholarship. Liberal, conservative, atheist, Christian, Jew, etc. Scholarship does not debate that Jesus existed.
It is interesting
here. Most modern scholarship actual shuts up about the historicity of Jesus. For example, I had to deal with a couple of archaeologists who worked an important site in Syria a while back and they both held the view that you couldn't trust anything that came from biblical scholars. I had at the time expressed my interest in the DSS and you could see them thinking "oh-oh, looney alert". It wasn't me: it was the subject, dominated by biblical studies. You can't talk about "modern scholarship" as though one should be impressed from afar here. We have to face the fact that the vast majority of biblical scholars exempt themselves from objectivity by being adherents of the faith whose literature they study.
It is of little significance that Liberal, conservative, atheist, Christian, Jew, etc. toe the scholarly line. They are generally in no position to meaningfully do other.
Nick Peters wrote: I don't subscribe to the 'Jesus myth' hypothesis (whatever that is) because I mistrust groups and moreover feel that a lot of the people who attach themselves to this hypothesis do so as part of an effort to prove Jesus doesn't exist.
The Christ-myth hypothesis is the idea that there is NO historical Jesus. It is not saying Jesus existed but did not do miracles or was not the messiah or did not rise from the dead. It is saying that He did not exist at all.
Sorry, Nick, but you are confusing generic brand Jesus mythicism with the 'Jesus myth' hypothesis. The latter is the view that the Jesus religion is founded on a complex mythos, for example, the views of Earl Doherty who advocated that the earliest believers held to the notion that Jesus was crucified in the lowest of the heavens. The generic brand Jesus mythicism is not mythicism per se, but the simple view that Jesus did not exist. Consiracy theories concerning a Roman invention of the Jesus religion also hold that Jesus did not exist, but they are not mythicism. True mythicism may imply Jesus did not exist, but that is not its focus. It's interest is the myth seen to be at the heart of the cult.
Nick Peters wrote: I think we have to be agnostic about the whole matter of who or what Jesus was.
Why? Why can't we use historiography and find out who He was?
First we have to establish existence. I personally am agnostic on the subject. The past is full of entities whose existence has not been established, but cannot be excluded. If you strip away all the later traditions from Arthur, can you say whether he existed or not? History is full of black holes from which little or no certain evidence can be derived. A tradition based on a figure may or may not be derived from a real figure. If the indications of that tradition leads you into a black hole then you have no way of corroborating the veracity of the tradition.
Nick Peters wrote: I am not convinced that the earliest Christians venerated him as a man born of a woman. That this view existed in early times is clear but I am not sure that it was the original one. But again I am not certain nor do I think any certainty is possible about who or what Jesus was.
Let's be clear. Are you referring to the virgin birth since everyone technically is born of a woman.
I'm pretty certain he is not talking of the virgin birth, but the possibility of Jesus having in the mythos come down from heaven as Marcion indicates. Tertullian spends a lot of time looking at the implications of Marcion's gospel having Jesus come down to Capernaum. (See Contra Marcion, ref will be dredged up if needed.) It would seem that Marcion's Jesus wasn't born of a woman.
Nick Peters wrote: Could the whole thing have been a myth? I don't know. It seems more likely to me that there must have been a historical person at the heart of the Christian tradition. But probability isn't certainty.
I recommend just reading the best scholarship you can find on the issue. Those who profess the Christ-myth as supposed NT scholars do not hold academic positions, they have no tenure, and that claim does not pass peer-review.
I recommend that you start thinking that some people here have read "the best scholarship you can find on the issue" and have found it not as hot as you might hope. We don't advocate the position that Jesus did not exist (though some people on this forum seem to hold that view), but that using stringent historical methodology does not yield a historical Jesus. He may or may not have been real, but the evidence is insufficient. Scholarship in the field has to stop being blindly maximalist and re-find what it can of an objective approach to the subject.
We come from a historical context in which the existence of Jesus was accepted a priori and a humonguous apologetic apparatus has defended Jesus over nearly two millenia. The context we have inherited didn't need history until a bit over 200 years ago, but the impact of humanism followed by the enlightenment has forced christian religious studies to quickly adapt to wearing historical trappings. Obviously christian scholars found Jesus historical. It was just a short step back from the credent position, but we cannot accept an inherited Jesus. We cannot accept on a literal basis a body of literature preserved by christian scribes, whose efforts in the distant past include the production of non-historical works, of pseudonymous works including several by Paul, of interplations such as the ending of Mark, the adulterous woman in John, the trinitarian lemma in 1 John 5, the Testimonium Flavianum and who knows what else. The task of anyone advocating a historical Jesus requires substantive evidence and so far all those scholars who advocate a historical Jesus have failed to do anything other than literary criticism and applied hermeneutics.