If No New Information, Data, Material Emerges About Christianity What's There to Write About?

[Secret Alias]

I can see the argument that the study of early Christianity was 'stuck' in religious concepts/faith and needed to be 'updated' into a science. I can see that we haven't sufficiently considered whether Jesus was a real historical person. But is there really so many points of view that haven't been properly considered before that we need to churn out new papers/discussions or is there a point at which most things are 'settled' or close enough to being settled that we can close the book on what is known/can be known?

I know that in the humanities there are endless debates about books, authors, historical figures etc. But do people expect to have radical new perspectives without radical new discoveries?

[Leucius Charinus]

“The only thing new in the world is the history you don't know.” — Harry S Truman

[perseusomega9]

This is why I laugh when some consensus gatekeeping cyclopians liken mythicism to creationism while pretending their own endeavors have the rigours of material science engineering.

[Charles Wilson]

The Hasmoneans.
The Priesthood. ESPECIALLY the Priesthood (NOT THE CORRUPT HIGH PRIEST APPARATUS.). Which introduces Calendars. Which introduces the Mishmarot Priesthood.

Christianity was new AND imposed from the outside. The surrounding population reacts as their Culture is extinguished. Human Sacrifice is given as a Central Tenet in this New Religion, the Thesis in opposition to which is something that helped identify the Jewish Culture (to themselves) as Superior to the surrounding Pagans.

The Rulers (Physically related but culturally Hellenistic, to be sure...) have been replaced by these who are Unclean. "Better to be Herod's pig than Herod's son..."

There's a lot to study but the study begins from a position not from the study of a savior-god but from the absorption of a smaller (alien) Culture by a larger and expansionist Empire. We can study the "Church Fathers" certainly but that is a relative dead end. They know what happened and wrote "under orders" or "as if under orders".

I'm not Hegelian but there's a lot of help there.

As always, SA, Best to you,

CW

[Leucius Charinus]

This is why I laugh when some consensus gatekeeping cyclopians liken mythicism to creationism while pretending their own endeavors have the rigours of material science engineering.

"When I began my physical studies [in Munich in 1874] and sought advice from my venerable teacher Philipp von Jolly...he portrayed to me physics as a highly developed, almost fully matured science...Possibly in one or another nook there would perhaps be a dust particle or a small bubble to be examined and classified, but the system as a whole stood there fairly secured, and theoretical physics approached visibly that degree of perfection which, for example, geometry has had already for centuries."

Max Planck - a 1924 lecture

[Leucius Charinus]

The Nag Hammadi codices probably represent the largest discovery of ancient and supposedly Christian related literature ever made. The church fathers may have reacted to these texts but they almost certainly did not author or preserve them. Perhaps if you made a study of this stuff rather than Irenaeus you'd have something new to tell us.

[gryan]

I know that in the humanities there are endless debates about books, authors, historical figures etc. But do people expect to have radical new perspectives without radical new discoveries?

Yes

[Secret Alias]

When I look at professors (I can't call them 'colleagues' by any stretch of the imagination) on Facebook they have to act like their research is so interesting and ground-breaking. I guess I am a bad judge of what's relevant but it all seems so ... contrived. Like the atheist scholars think that by killing God that we will have this renaissance. But really? Who cares about 'things to do with God' when God doesn't exist? And the way many of them de-mystify the study of religion is by assuming the mundaneness of everything. So Jesus is a real man who performed magic. Or he was a Jew. Or he was anything boring and uninteresting because quite frankly THEY are boring and uninteresting. It's like re-creating the world in the image of a boring pedantic professor and we all know how much the average person loves teachers.

[Leucius Charinus]

Or perhaps Jesus was none of those things and that when the professors peer down into Albert Schweitzer's well they each see their own image peering back

[rgprice]

I think there is a lot to still understand about the material we have in hand. So many old perspectives still hold sway and I don't think anyone has really figured out the history of the Hellenistic and early Roman era yet.

In the book I'm working on, which will undoubtedly be too long, I'm trying to cover a good bit of Hellenistic, Roman and Jewish history while explaining varieties of theological interpretations of Jewish, Greek and Roman religions of the period, the practices of Greek and Roman prophets, and various aspects of the Roman book markets and the production of prophetic literature and how all of this contributed to a multitude of misunderstandings of the period, of which the Jesus story and the development of Christian literature is just a piece of a much larger puzzle.

Ultimately it gets an understanding of widespread misinformation in the Roman world and how it shaped people's perceptions of reality, leading a great number of misconceptions and beliefs in things that never happened. So, its quite an expansive book that tries to take look at teh situation from a much different vantage point than any other works on the subject I've seen.