RJH January-September of 2013 Part 1

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The Historically Inconvenient Jesus
by rjosephhoffmann

In my last brief post I offered a few reasons why I think Jesus was an historical
 figure. I’ve been pilloried since by the same gaggle of mythtics who normally begin to cackle and crow every time someone reiterates the perfectly obvious suggestion that their cause is nothing more than a cobbling together of mutually contradictory premises, the full weight of which don’t amount to an argument.
For example, the mythtics like to remind us that the gospels are unreliable as history. That’s a bit like arguing that advertising is unreliable as science.
I don’t know too many New Testament scholars who would argue that the gospels are good history, and some (me among them) who would say that for the most part the gospels are totally useless as history. The gospels were written as propaganda by a religious cult. That impugns them as history, even at a time—the last decades of the first great Roman imperial century—when history wasn’t especially committed to recording what really happened in a dispassionate and disinterested way.
Once upon a time, not so long ago, it was thought that if you got rid of all the mythical and legendary bits of the gospels and dug down far enough, you’d end up with a body, or at least an empty tomb. Not everyone believed that, including some of the scions who advocated the process. In an article a few years ago I compared it to the much more modern embarrassment of excavating the body of John Henry Newman when the Church’s cause for sainthood required his exhumation.
Unfortunately, there was literally nothing left of poor Newman except a few damp scraps of his priestly garments—no bones to impose on the foreheads of cancer victims to seal the deal for the required second miracle. I also noted that the proof for Newman is nonetheless overwhelming: photographs, writings, family, the testimonies of friends who loved him and enemies who hated him. Newman’s empty tomb is no argument for no Newman. He is a good example of how absence of evidence is not always evidence of absence.
But the empty tomb of Jesus is a different sort of empty. To beg the question (that is, to assume his “causality” for a moment) his memory evoked a different kind of reaction. He wrote nothing. He said little that could be construed as original or memorable, so that almost everything attributed to him could have
 come from other sources. We can point to a dozen “mystery” religions whose heroes had at best a shadowy existence, but probably none at all. And even though the dying/rising god cults differed pointedly from each other and from Christianity, it is pretty clear that Christianity after the time of St Paul fit the description of a salvation cult pretty well. It is hard to imagine Christianity surviving and spreading on the basis of Jesus’ teaching alone. That’s why Paul boasts that everything hinges on the resurrection of Jesus. I wrote a generation ago that “It was Jesus’ death, not his life, that saved him from obscurity” (Jesus Outside the Gospels) but in fact it was Jesus’ death dehistoricized and religionized by Paul and the resurrection traditions that really did the trick.
Given that there is (a) no reason to trust the gospels; (b) no external testimony to the existence of Jesus (I’ve never thought that the so-called “pagan” reports were worth considering in detail; at most they can be considered evidence of the cult, not a founder); (c) no independent Christian source that is not tainted by the missionary objectives of the cult and (d) no Jewish account that has not been invented or tainted by Christian interpolators, what is the purpose of holding out for an historical Jesus?
Simply put, it is the three “C”s: conditions, context, and coordinates. The political and religious conditions of the time of Jesus plausibly give us characters like Jesus. This is a tautology that has to be confronted. It is possible of course that Jesus was Joshua, that Jesus was Theudas, that Jesus was Judas the Galilean, that Jesus (at a chronological stretch) was bar Kochba, or that he was one of the “others coming in my name” that he is said to refer to in the gospels. But the gospels present a fortiori evidence that there was another figure, Jesus of Nazareth, who also meets the prescribed conditions, and that figure cannot be argued away through analogy. That is to say, why would an analogous figure be preferable to the figure described in the ancient texts? What criterion or canon do we use to defend that preference?
Second, context: We know that the general context of the gospels—the historical and cultural environment of the times and events as described–is right, though the writers makes mistakes, get dates wrong, misconstrue events, names and processes they’re not familiar with, and like other Hellenistic writers make things up they can’t possibly be around to have heard or witnessed.
In fact, it might seem at first flush a huge boost to the mythtic side that the gospels seem to pivot on the unheard, the incorrect and the incredible. But at no point does the context of the gospels sacrifice the centrality of its historical figure—not even when he acts as a healer, wonder-worker and magician—all of
 which “professions” were recognized in the ancient world.
No doubt the mythtics will chortle and point to walking on water and ascending into heaven as violations of the “historical.” And what I have to say in reply won’t satisfy their objection: these legendary accretions are minimal, late and built on Hellenistic literary models that glorified military commanders and emperors. The Julio-Claudian period (45 BCE-68 CE) was famous for the apotheosis tradition, as we know not just from literary but from numismatic evidence. Enrollment with the gods, as Bowerstock has shown (1984) was practically demanded by the people and continued in popularity until the time of Septimus Severus in 185 CE. In the last case, an eagle was set free from the emperor’s funeral pyre to prove his ascent into heaven. The great man cult and the cult of Christ are parallels, another one of those cases where the contextual analogy favors historicity rather than the opposite.
But think of it this way: you decorate a Christmas tree, sometimes to the point where the tree becomes simply the mode for displaying the ornaments and lights. The tree is still there, branches and all. Hellenistic history works the same way.
When I read comparisons to the λειτουργεί of Heracles or the doings of Coyote on mythtic sites, I frankly have to shake my head in bewilderment. Is the point of this guessing to create an anthology of absurd, historically disconnected improbables?
The context of Jesus is clearly the context of first century Palestinian Judaism, mediated through the work of Hellenistic reporters, themselves Christian—members of the cult of Christ, the Jesus believers. The clues to understanding what people thought about him—even when they got it wrong or deliberately exaggerated what they knew or heard—does not give us a drama like ravings of the Hercules Oetaeus or the mysteries of Mithras or Persephone.
I have to say that when it comes to this single feature of mythicism I detect a singular intellectual deafness and lack of historical discrimination unlike anything we can imagine even in the worst mainstream scholarship.
If Jesus has a “parallel” worth considering, it was charted long ago–by the Christians themselves–in the tales about the Neo-Pythagorean teacher Apollonius of Tyana (15-100 CE) who suffered a similar legendizing fate at the hands of his sole biographer, Philostratus. But even with that, Apollonius largely survives his biographer as a plausible figure because of his context. The Apollonius inscription “apologizes” that his tomb, while it received his body did not contain it, since “heaven received him so that he might wipe away the pains of men.”
As with the case of political and cultural conditions, context cannot be thrown to one side as an inconvenience: for an argument against Jesus to work, the mythtics need to show how he violates rather than conforms to his historical environment. Instead, mythtics introduce totally alien contexts as templates for the understanding of a figure who doesn’t require foreign myths for an efficient explanation of his historical location.
Lastly, coordinates. I said in my previous post that Jesus can be situated between the end of the first century BCE and the end of the middle of the second century CE. His description comports with two events: rebellion against the temple cult by dissident elements, like Josephus’ “fourth sect,” and the ill-fated, last gasp effort of bar Kochba to redeem the lost city and its cult. A Jesus outside this specific matrix would make no sense—a sui generis apocalyptic preacher in an age of prosperity and contentment?
It is precisely because we can pinpoint the essential dates, figures, movements, factions and effects that Jesus does make sense: he parses. He does not come off as atypical, until such time as Paul makes him a transcendent, supra-historical figure sent to redeem the sins of the world. Paul is a figure of cultic significance who knows little about the man he is preaching, and even boasts that it doesn’t matter to him that he doesn’t (2 Cor. 5.16 ).
As to Jesus, the three c’s apply to Paul: He is the essential flim-flam man in an age of religious propaganda.
Mythtics however are fond of pointing to the “assured” result of Paul’s literary priority over the gospels. Repeatedly they return to the Christ-myth notion that a heavenly man was fleshed out as an historical figure.
But in my view there is no convincing argument that establishes that priority, and the disconnect between the two literary strands, gospel and epistle, is so sharp that it is impossible to conclude that a figment invented by Paul could have served as the literary model for the Jesus of a gospel like Mark’s. I hope in my forthcoming book to make clear how the connection was finally achieved–it’s not a simple story–but looked at from the standpoint of the history of the question I do not believe that the doctrine of Paul’s “priority” is a secure one. It is abundantly clear that Paul was aware of an historical figure and consciously set about to redefine him in supra-historical terms.
I think the fatal flaw for the mythtics is that they feel the need to go so far afield for answers that are much closer to home. I’ll save that salvo for a later time. At the end, let me just wonder out loud why it is that an historical Jesus is so problematical for the adepts of this group? What, to be blunt, is the problem?
An argument for historicity is not an argument for the divinity of Jesus—at least the kind of argument I am making. It is simply a way of making the best sense of the evidence. If the point is more metaphysical than that–there was no historical Jesus so Jesus cannot have been the son of God, or God himself–then I’d suggest that this discussion not belong to history but to polemic.
In a previous post from 2012, I reiterated the (deficient) S. J. Case-case against mythicism, reminding them that all it will take for them to succeed is a coherent, parsimonious and internally logical interpretation that makes better sense of what we’ve got than the prevailing view. What we normally get from mythtics instead is banshee shrieks and ad hominem howls when their unsightly smorgasbord of a “theory” is assailed.
But it should be assailed until and unless they can make it better, and until their attention can be diverted from Orpheus, Hercules, and Coyote to the time, place and chronology that has a bearing on the topic.
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Published: January 5, 2013
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41 Responses to “The Historically Inconvenient Jesus”

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The Historically Inconvenient Jesus | ChristianBookBarn.com says:
 January 5, 2013 at 6:34 am
[...] Recommended Article FROM http://rjosephhoffmann.wordpress.com/2013/01/05/the-historically-inconvenient-jesus/ [...]
Reply

» Hoffmann on “The Historically Inconvenient Jesus” TaborBlog says:
 January 5, 2013 at 9:10 am
[...] an interesting post up this morning that takes the “mythicists” to task titled “The Historically Inconvenient Jesus.” Broadly this term refers to those who deny that the Jesus behind the Gospels and Paul even [...]
Reply

 stevenbollinger
 January 5, 2013 at 10:50 am
“What, to be blunt, is the problem?”
I have a few problems here. I wish to emphasize that I present them as my own problems and not those of “the mythicists,” a group I didn’t realize existed a year ago, and with which I briefly identified only because I hadn’t realized that there was an entire group who had serious doubts about Jesus’ historicity. The only one of them I still find impressive is Wells. (Not that I agree with everything he says, not by any means.) But obviously, and as Wells has pointed out, the fact that a proposition has been poorly-argued many times says nothing about the soundness of the proposition per se.
Also, some of my objections to the general state of scholarly investigation of Jesus obviously don’t apply to you, nor to every single other specialist in Christian origins currently or formerly employed by a university. You’ve made some of the same objections in this blog and in other things you’ve written. If the shoe doesn’t fit, just don’t wear it, and don’t assume that I’m accusing you.
My most common objection as I gaze in awe at these controversies is to a prematurely-closed mind, something, sadly, all too often to be seen among the mythicists and among the academics. Like many other laypeople, in the late ’90′s I was blown away by the PBS series “From Jesus to Christ.” But there was also a detail was bothered me. The very first words of the voice-over narration were “We know[...]” We know he was born at such a such time, we know he lived here and here, we know he was put to death under Pilate’s orders, a short list of things like that. Not “We are fairly certain[...]” or “We can say with great confidence that[..]” or even “It is almost entire certain that[...]” No: “We know[...]” I taped the show and watched it over and over again, making sure I hadn’t mis-heard that introduction, and also making sure that there wasn’t one single academic talking head in the whole thing who so much as mentioned that anyone had ever had the slightest doubt that Jesus existed. PBS also didn’t post my comment about this among the many viewers’ comments they posted.
I also wonder how hard the academics are trying to make the case for historicity. I wondered at some length about that here: http://thewrongmonkey.blogspot.com/2012/12/are-biblical-scholars-partly-
 to-blame.html
Certainly, the mythicists outdo the academics when it comes to banshee shrieks, but ad hominem howls are in no way lacking on either side. Which is one of the reasons I currently am not cheering for either side.
It’s obvious that the academics are far, far ahead in their competence in the languages of the primary texts and in their familiarity with the ancient history of Judaism and early Christianity and the cultures surrounding them, and with the history of the secondary materials. It’s your job, it’d be surprising if you weren’t far ahead. It’s also obvious, although far less tangible and much, much harder to prove, that there is an historicist bias among the academics. Just as the mythicists want it to be the case that Jesus is wholly an invention, so academics want it to be the case that there really is a pony in there somewhere. People who simply want to know the truth of the matter no matter what it might be, who want to follow the evidence no matter where it might lead, are sadly rare on either side.
Now, to turn from problems I have with Biblical scholars generally to one small problem I have with what you’ve written above:
“it is impossible to conclude that a figment invented by Paul could have served as the literary model for the Jesus of a gospel like Mark’s”
In my humble opinion, few words are so over-used as “impossible.”
“I hope in my forthcoming book to make clear how the connection was finally achieved–it’s not a simple story–but looked at from the standpoint of the history of the question I do not believe that the doctrine of Paul’s “priority” is a secure one. It is abundantly clear that Paul was aware of an historical figure and consciously set about to redefine him in supra-historical terms.”
None of that is at all clear to me yet. But I’ll certainly read your book.
Reply

 vinnyjh57
 January 5, 2013 at 11:42 pm
In my humble opinion, few words are so over-used as “impossible.”
Amen. In my humble opinion, there is no story so goofy that someone could not have invented it nor one so goofy that enough people could not have believed it.
Reply
 

 stevenbollinger
 January 5, 2013 at 10:54 am
The link I put in my previous comment appears to be broken, i hope you don’t mind if I try again: http://thewrongmonkey.blogspot.com/2012/12/are-biblical-scholars-partly-to-blame.html
Reply

 steph
 January 5, 2013 at 7:36 pm
It fixes itself when comment is approved ;-)
Reply

 stevenbollinger
 January 6, 2013 at 10:13 am
Actually, it didn’t fix itself in this case in my longer comment, because I broke it myself. (Because I have very clumsy fingers. I’ll never play the guitar at all well.) But the link in my second attempt works.


 steph
 January 6, 2013 at 6:01 pm
Both links work steve. Try them. They work for me. I play cello – it allows a greater finger span… or requires one. ;-)


 Mark Erickson
 January 7, 2013 at 10:23 am
It still doesn’t work. Click this to see: http://thewrongmonkey.blogspot.com/2012/12/are-biblical-scholars-partly-


 stevenbollinger
 January 7, 2013 at 10:55 am
I’ve tried the link in the first comment several times, I tried it again just now as you asked, and it still leads to a page with the message:
“Sorry, the page you were looking for in this blog does not exist.”


 steph
 January 7, 2013 at 5:33 pm
OK Steven. It’s a mystery. Perhaps it’s something in the fresh air here or the hot summer sun. It must like your blog. :-)

 
 

Christianity Before Paul says:
 January 5, 2013 at 11:43 am
[...] Hoffmann has an interesting post up this morning that takes the “mythicists” to task titled “The Historically Inconvenient Jesus.” Broadly this term refers to those who deny that the Jesus behind the Gospels and Paul even [...]
Reply

 Jens Knudsen (Sili)
 January 5, 2013 at 5:49 pm
Looking forward to the book. I enjoyed finding your work on Marcion in my uni library (I couldn’t afford to buy it, myself).
Reply

 SocraticGadfly
 January 5, 2013 at 8:56 pm
Sorry, but another weak argument, starting with Hoffmann excluding teh middle of those of us who believe the question of historicity is worthy of study without necessary rejecting it outright, but not defending it, either.
Beyond that, here’s just a couple of specific problems.
1. Why is it “hard to imagine” a Christianity based on teachings only, rather than a salvation history? Buddhism, like Christianity, traces its origin to a single alleged founder (whether historic or not, like Christianity). But, Buddhism is based indeed on just the teaching of the Buddha.
Beyond that, the question of the nature of Jesus’ mission is a separate issue from his historicity. A Q/Gospel of Thomas Jesus is just as historical, or ahistorical, as an empty tomb one.
2. The claim that the gospel writers got context right even though they made many mistakes about specifics? I could say that, in Old Testament studies, about the Yahwist and the patriarchs. Depends on how wide you want to draw the lasso of margin of error.
More thoughts here: http://wordsofsocraticgadfly.blogspot.com/2013/01/joe-hoffmann-again-overstates-case-for.html
Reply

 steph
 January 6, 2013 at 4:36 am
Sorry, Steve. You claim to have “more than enough academic and personal education in New Testament, and enough in philosophy…” Have you the proper tools to deal with the evidence? To do history, you have to understand the sources you’re working on. And to do history is not to do philosophy. The post, if you read the previous post, is only based on an outline of a forthcoming book. The conditions for the existence of Jesus necessarily produce people of like description, so to choose an analogous over a known figure is non-parsimonious and tautologies are eo ipso true statements. Logic has its role to play in all scholarship, but the liberal use of deductive fallacies is just misapplied. It’s blatant shortcutting and shows neither ingenuity nor a basic understanding of the ponderous way historical reasoning works. The view that somehow philosophy can arbitrate questions of historicity, when historicity itself is susceptible of manifold definitions seems to prevail in arguments against historicity. By these standards a great many ancient figures might not have lived because their tombs are unknown and their monuments are transmitted by their advocates. The fundamental flaw with your critique is that you seem unaware of the anachronisms that colour your thinking, both in terms of the kinds of sources you read and the methods that you use to interpret them. Sometimes it seems as if such reductionist thinking reflects an inherent dislike of the idea of God, religion, or Jesus very much so it is easier to reject the whole package and then to challenge the logic and motives anyone who says that the three things are quite distinct from each other.
Reply

 SocraticGadfly
 January 6, 2013 at 11:58 am
Actually, I do know enough, Steff. And Joseph’s post, and response to it, doesn’t require that much knowledge. As I said, it actually “fails” in large part on weak analogies and weak logic. (Last I checked, logic was part of philosophy, too.)
That said, I didn’t say that it failed only on logical grounds (if that’s not enough). Your arguments in favor of his claims fairly well parallel those I’ve see hurled against the “minimalists” on the Old Testament side of biblical scholarship. They’ve generally been well refuted there, too.
That said, there is another philosophical angle, and that’s the question of in whose court the matter of proof lies when evidence is tenuous. And it doesn’t all lie in the court of those who question the historicity of Jesus.
Anyway, I’ve been down this road before. I’m far from the only person, and indeed not the only non “mythicist” to question Hoffmann’s reasoning. (Other people do on this blog, though, not in as much detail and as specific to Hoffmann, so far, on this post, as me.)
I’ve also said more than once before, as do the ahistoricists, that it’s quite arguable Paul knew zero of a historical Jesus. His “born of a woman” can easily be read as nothing more than an “anti-docetist” claim and nothing else. And, it probably should be read as nothing more than that, and I think Hoffmann knows that himself. From there, its easy to see how Paul’s particular accretion of a pagan custom, the Eucharist, tweaked for Judaism, could have accreted. It’s also easy to see how a misreading of the middle voice of apodidomi (hey, Steff, there’s scholarship!) could have been misread as a passive, and then, the growth of “tradition” required an agent for that passive voice, and hence the invention of a mythic Judas, and we go on from there.
(I’ve mentioned this particular bit on other posts of Hoffmann’s and he’s never adequately refuted it.)
So, sorry, there’s a good scholarly keystone for how “Pauline priority” could fit will with the development of myths about a historic Jesus.
Whether it did or not is still an open question. But it IS an open question of legitimate academic discussion, not, contra Hoffmann, something to be rudely dismissed in narrowmindedness, or in personal pique because many mythicists also happen to be Gnu Atheists.
Anyway, I’ve said enough. Darwin had his bulldog in Huxley and Hoffmann has his, and I’ve been snapped at before.


 steph
 January 6, 2013 at 5:58 pm
Despite your high degree of self confidence, you have not demonstrated any competence with source material or shown the necessary meticulous application of method. It’s not about ‘knowing’ something of Greek (in any case which was only the language of the final edition so to speak and proper appreciation and understanding of that requires a high level of competence in the use and technique of that period) or the scholarship (which ‘scholarship’? what skills of discernment?) Of course you not the only mythicist to attack the reasoning of Hoffmann or any other historian putting forward a case for historicity. The point is what we expect from them all indiscriminately, rather than comprehending and interacting with arguments and evidence, is the same tired trigger happy rhetoric that reads right past anything that might defeat your case, then hops merrily back to square one as though no damage has been done. Furthermore it doesn’t demonstrate any critical distinction between the types of argument and evidence used by Hoffmann and that of Pagels, Bock, Blitherington, Dunn, Le Donne or Stanton.
 As with the Newman analogy you have completely missed the point. There was no comparison between two things as if they were an example of things we don’t know, not proving anything. It’s a shame you made assumptions and opening fire without identifying a target. In your eager relishing of the discovery of ‘howlers’ (your expression) you haven’t even found a squeaker. Do you really fail to grasp the one airtight argument in the piece, that the conditions for the existence of Jesus necessarily produce people of like description, so to choose an analogous over a known figure is non-parsimonious and tautologies are eo ipso true statements. No, you do not have the historical tools and you avoid all the relevant historical source material or interact methodically with arguments and evidence, preferring trigger happy attacks, claiming ‘possibilities’ and making assumptions. No, that’s not scholarship steve. Incidentally, why the victim complex steve?

 

 stevenbollinger
 January 6, 2013 at 10:02 am
“starting with Hoffmann excluding teh middle of those of us who believe the question of historicity is worthy of study without necessary rejecting it outright, but not defending it, either”
Hoffmann is talking about a certain group of mythicists. If the shoe doesn’t fit in your case, I would suggest not wearing it.
And although Hoffmann certainly does present an historicist view, in the last two paragraphs he explicitly allows for the possibility that a mythicist case which is more convincing could be made. Could be but hasn’t been yet, in his opinion:
“all it will take for [mythicists] to succeed is a coherent, parsimonious and internally logical interpretation that makes better sense of what we’ve got than the prevailing view”
Which is certainly different from some of his colleagues who flatly declare the case to be closed.
Reply

 steph
 January 7, 2013 at 4:41 am
Steven Bollinger: none of Joe’s colleagues on our Process “flatly declare the case to be closed”. If that were the case, there would be no point in having a ‘Process’. However we still wait for the mythicists to produce either a convincing case for the story of Jesus to be concocted, either out of thin air or as an amalgam of competing myths, not many of which look very much like the Jesus story at all, or refute some of the better arguments and evidence addressing historical aspects that we have so far. As the author has put it, the mere compilation of analogies has always been the quicksand into which mythicism disappears. It is their attempt to prove–entirely circumstantially–that if something besides Jesus was there to be used it was used. One dying and rising god is like every other rising god. One salvation story fragments into a dozen salvation stories, one of which is the gospel.
Critical scholarship makes progress by engaging with new arguments and evidence which include those which contradict previous proposals made.


 stevenbollinger
 January 7, 2013 at 11:03 am
steph: by “colleagues” I did not mean the Jesus Process, but the entire field of New Testament studies. I’m sorry I didn’t say that more clearly. And I entirely agree with you and Hoffmann about the very sorry state of the case put forward by most mythicists.


 steph
 January 7, 2013 at 5:52 pm
“Entire” is an overstatement in today’s universities (excluding theological seminaries), but I do appreciate your impression, particularly given the largely conservative and much publicised field of historical Jesus research and its popular publications.

 
 

TalkHistoricity Wiki and Other Mythicism-Related News says:
 January 5, 2013 at 10:15 pm
[...] in the blogosphere, Joseph Hoffmann explains why he is persuaded that there was a historical Jesus of Nazareth. James Tabor also commented on [...]
Reply

 Ian
 January 6, 2013 at 5:37 am
“this discussion not belong to history but to polemic.”
From what I’ve seen, the recent reinvention of this argument *has* entirely been conducted in the realm of polemic, it is not a debate happening among historians.
That it only belongs there seems to me to be pretty clear, unless someone steps forwards able and willing to make the case in historical detail.
Reply

Views on Mythicism | Irreducible Complexity says:
 January 6, 2013 at 6:51 am
[...] Mythicist arguments (the idea that there is no historical figure behind Jesus)[1]. And a flurry of posts and counter-posts among the usual suspects on the [...]
Reply

 Brettongarcia
 January 6, 2013 at 8:18 am
The fact that the story of Jesus fits the cultural “context” of what we know of 30 AD Galilee and Jerusalem for instance, does not prove it is about a true person; the story could have been simply, an historical fiction.
Today you can see many movies where some fictional figure like Spiderman for instance, flys though a recognizable New York City, say. Through a setting loaded with oodles of contextual details. Details that would confirm a very real environment, for a c. 2010 Spiderman. But those details are simply there in part, in reflection of the date and place of manufacture. The manufacture of after all, a fictional product.
New York City WAS real; that doesn’t prove that Spiderman was.
Likewise? Jerusalem is real; but not necessarily the Jesus we saw placed in it.
Any writer could also of course have invented a character who seems like – borrows from – dozens of real figures. So that? The character seems recognizably a figure of his time. But?
I like Superman and Santa and Jesus too. They seem so real. But? So do many characters in historical fiction.
Reply

 steph
 January 6, 2013 at 7:29 pm
Oh yes Brett – you’re onto it. Remember Doctor Doolittle? You forgot Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse. They’re all so REAL eh. Yeah right……… as opposed to an apocalyptic Jewish prophet/teacher living in the first century who spoke a language familiar to those around him and was killed in a way trouble makers were in those times. He neither fell out of the sky or rose up miraculously after he died. Just a man who became significant after he died and storytelling evolved.
Reply
 

 brettongarcia
 January 6, 2013 at 8:42 am
The fact that the story of Jesus fits the cultural “context” of what we know of 30 AD Galilee and Jerusalem for instance, does not prove it is about a true person; the story could have been simply, an historical fiction.
Today you can see many movies where some fictional figure like Spiderman for instance, flys though a recognizable New York City, say. Through a setting loaded with oodles of contextual details. Details that would confirm a very real environment, for a c. 2010 Spiderman. But those details are simply there in part, in reflection of the date and place of manufacture. The manufacture of after all, a fictional product.
New York City WAS real; that doesn’t prove that Spiderman was.
Likewise? Jerusalem is real; but not necessarily the Jesus we saw placed in it.
Any writer could also of course, have invented a character who seems like – borrows from – dozens of real figures. So that? The character seems recognizably himself, a figure of his time. But?
I like Superman and Spiderman too. They seem so real. But? So do many characters … in historical fiction.
Why would anyone invent him? For the moral instruction of children.
Why make one up? A made-up person can be far more perfect than an actual one.
Why would we ourselves prefer a similar, but less magical composite? Because we know that believing in fictional characters that walk on water, is bad for us.
Was the moment pinpointed so narrowly in the needs addressed? For 2,000 years people have needed this kind of message it seems.
So?
Reply

 steph
 January 6, 2013 at 7:35 pm
Like all good mythicist rhetoric, in your trigger happy firing, you don’t need to distinguish targets – just shoot the whole lot! They’re all exactly the same…. analogies are by definition, sadly, all false especially in this case. But they’re so FUNNY.
Reply
 

 Walter Muller
 January 6, 2013 at 10:53 am
I think Hoffman has a point that Jesus do have historical value. Except for what is written in the Bible there exist other material, and enough material to come to the conclusion that such a person might have existed. According to The Nag Hammadi Library such a person lived, died, and “appeared” in “spirit” and not in the “flesh” to friends after he died. This in itself is not proof, but it is a clear indication that no physical ascent to heaven took place, and that it is quite possible that the Talpiot find could in all likelyhood be the family grave of such a person.
Should this find ever be confirmed, which in my mind it never will be, it could mean the end of Christianity. For that reason and that reason only this find will probably never be confirmed even though it might be a true artefact.
Reply

 steph
 January 6, 2013 at 6:18 pm
While we will shed many more tears yet for the still prevalent majority of American ‘Christianity’, I think conservative Christianity elsewhere has seen finer days. already. Religion and ideas evolve, without supernatural beliefs and ideas which conflict with scientific and historical arguments and evidence. ‘Secular Christianity’ or Christianity without God (or other divine figures) is a growing phenomenon in the western commonwealth. It originated in the Antipodes where the foundations of society lie in their nineteenth century Free Thought immigrants. For ‘Christianity’, so named, ‘reason’ need not necessarily spell it’s end but lead it’s evolution.
Reply
 

 Mark Erickson
 January 7, 2013 at 10:58 am
“Do you really fail to grasp the one airtight argument in the piece, that the conditions for the existence of Jesus necessarily produce people of like description, so to choose an analogous over a known figure is non-parsimonious and tautologies are eo ipso true statements.”
I fail to grasp this argument, seriously. Can you explain it better?
Reply

 steph
 January 7, 2013 at 6:26 pm
It’s clearer in the post I think. However I’ll try to clarify what I wrote: The political and religious conditions of the time of Jesus plausibly give us characters like Jesus. (And the political and religious conditions of today plausibly give us characters like you). The conditions for the existence of Jesus necessarily produce people of like description, so to choose an analogous over a known figure is easy – and excessive selection of aspects of the Jesus traditions and finding them in other people (such as those with dying and rising myths attached, virgin birth myths, teacher prophet types etc) will necessarily result in continuous and pointless parallels – parallelomania – and all will be perceived as plausible and therefore ‘true’. This is a tautology that has to be confronted. It is possible of course that Jesus was Joshua, that Jesus was Theudas, that Jesus was Judas the Galilean, that Jesus (at a chronological stretch) was bar Kochba, or that he was one of the “others coming in my name” that he is said to refer to in the gospels, etc etc. But the gospels present a fortiori evidence that there was another figure, Jesus of Nazareth, who also meets the prescribed conditions, and that figure cannot be argued away through analogy. That is to say, why would an analogous figure be preferable to the figure described in the ancient texts?
Reply

 Mark Erickson
 January 8, 2013 at 10:33 am
You barely tossed the words in the post into a new salad – one that is just as unpalatable. From the post: “The political and religious conditions of the time of Jesus plausibly give us characters like Jesus.This is a tautology that must be confronted.” I agree. But confronting that tautology means not using the background conditions of the time to argue for HJ.


 rjosephhoffmann
 January 8, 2013 at 6:02 pm
@ Mark Erickson: That’s nonsense. Where do you get this axiom: the poltical conditions of the time of late republican Rome give us characters like Antony and Caesar. Not characters like Sargom, Elijah or Darth Vadar. if then I have literary artifacts that conform to those condtions and contexts, how should they not be facors in establoishing the historicity of it. It’s basic historical process–the 1000 pound premise mythtics routiney dance past in their quest for improbable substitutes and “parallels” that explain the sources.


 rjosephhoffmann
 January 10, 2013 at 2:27 am
Although I have sometimes enjoyed the flubbers over at the Vridar site, the latest one is the very best. Neil Godfrey lectures on my use of the word “tautology” but uses a definition from rhetoric, where the word meant (among the rhetors) repetition for emphasis, often unneeded. (Help is available at http://grammar.about.com/od/tz/g/tautolterm.htm) Why in the world would I ask people to confront a rhetorical device from classical rhetoric when I am talking about a case of predication, i.e., we can predicate existence of Jesus on the basis the at least three criteria for that existence being present and alternative explanations being absent. In propositional logic, since Wittgenstein, a tautology is defined as a propositional formula that is true under any possible Boolean valuation of its variables. A key property of tautologies is that an effective method exists for testing whether a given formula is always satisfied (or, equivalently, whether its negation is unsatisfiable). Presumably to say that “Jesus probably existed because the conditions under which he might have existed are satisfied by x, y, and z. I don’t mind being accused of oversimplification, but please, get the terms straight before you play the game (and go the trouble of providing meaningless graphics and–more–analogies–this time grannie’s apples.


 steph
 January 8, 2013 at 5:13 pm
What on earth would be the point of eliminating the conditions behind the texts when they avoid the tautology. You’ve missed the whole point of examining source material historically. By eliminating conditions, context etc, you are allowing tautology – encouraging parallelomania.


 Mark Erickson
 January 8, 2013 at 11:11 pm
RJH – your last comment makes sense, but I don’t see how you would separate historical facts from historical fictions in your example. I’m obviously not getting something, and you and steph are obviously not explaining it very well. But I appreciate the response all the same.
Although you should stop babbling about parallels all the time. You’ve obviously got parellelomania.


 steph
 January 10, 2013 at 6:08 am
Mark Erickson,
I’m “much obliged” to you Erickson, for commenting over at the Vridar. It explains your lack of comprehension here. There is no ‘special meaning’ of tautology Erickson. You just don’t know what it means or how it is being used. However now that’s cleared up, you ought to know your French before you pretend you’re clever with it. Perhaps you’ve always had cottonwool in your ears. You should stop babbling in languages you don’t understand. You’ve obviously got verbal diarreah.
I suppose the “ball is in the mythicists’ court” so to speak but they can’t get it over the net yet. There hasn’t been a single constructive reply to the challenge – not one. No reply to the three C’s (nor demonstration of any real comprehension of them), nor to the question of parallelomania (or analoguitis) or anything. The mythicists are trying to shake an argument out of the sheets by holding it at the edges and hoping there’s something in the middle. But all they can do as usual is to resort to ad hominem nonsense that has nothing to do with the substance of the case.

 

 steph
 January 7, 2013 at 6:30 pm
Perhaps also read the following post – A Barely Historical Jesus:
http://rjosephhoffmann.wordpress.com/2013/01/07/a-barely-historical-jesus/
Reply
 

 justin bieber supra shoes
 January 10, 2013 at 12:19 am
Generally I do not read article on blogs, but I would like to
 say that this write-up very forced me to try and do so! Your writing
 taste has been amazed me. Thanks, quite great article.
Reply

 John MacDonald
 January 12, 2013 at 12:11 pm
Your new book on the difference between the Christ of Paul and the Jesus of history sounds interesting. If you haven’t come across them yet, here are two recent books that make a similar argument: (1) “How Jesus Became Christian” by Barrie Wilson http://www.amazon.com/Jesus-Became-Christian-Barrie-Wilson/dp/0312361890/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1358010285&sr=8-1&keywords=barrie+wilson and (2) “Paul and Jesus” by James Tabor http://www.amazon.com/Paul-Jesus-Apostle-Transformed-Christianity/dp/1439123314/ref=pd_sim_b_1
Reply


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A Barely Historical Jesus
by rjosephhoffmann

I read a blog written by Ian at Irreducible Complexity a day or so ago that attempts a useful feat: offering a typology of Jesus mythicism ranging from something he calls Jesus minimalism to maximal mythicism, with some shades and positions in between–postive, analogical, and methodological forms of the approach. It’s a nice try (though, oddly, it seems to owe a lot to the Wiki on Jesus Mythicism) to bring some coherence to a process that he cleverly describes as trying to “nail jelly to the wall.”
Typologies are useful things, and there’s no doubt that people have different levels of confidence in the primary artifacts for knowing anything about Jesus.
It’s also true that people will come to these artifacts with different ideas of how they should be handled: with kid gloves, if your approach is overly theological or apologetic, or a sandblaster if you think the whole structure is a tissue of lies.
One of the reasons I am not yet prepared to endorse a typology is that, for the most part, the mythtics deal with the issue like my teenage daughter dealt with a soft-drink dispenser at Burger King when she was twelve: Mix ‘n blend. Who knows? It might come out ok and you’ll definitely come out with something.
New Testament scholars used to practice something that might be called “respectful realism” with regard to the gospels. They knew that what they had in front of them wasn’t purely history, but they also believed that the documents served a dual function, only one of which was (and inadvertently so) to provide historical information. That is because until relatively recently the study of the New Testament was a branch of theology, and almost everyone who practiced the craft did so in a seminary or university faculty of theology. Only in 1934 did Harvard make it possible to study religion outside the precincts of its divinity school, and to this day scholarship in the area ranges from the credulous and parochial to the critical and secular, a result never more clear than at annual meetings of the Society of Biblical Literature whose membership ranges from well-coifed preacher-men to bearded skeptics.

An early twentieth century example of the faithful-realist approach was Adolph Harnack’s essentialism in Das Wesen des Christentums; a later twentieth century example was Bultmann’s existential reprogramming called “demythologizing,” based on an important essay called “The New Testament and Mythology.” Both were essentially theological–or if you prefer, religious–in character, but they both confronted honestly the unavoidable fact that the worldview of the time of Jesus has to be discarded in the modern period.

That meant that the things that were believed and said about Jesus weren’t “true” in the ordinary sense of the word, as science had come to define truth for us. But (and this is where the Grand Division began) they might be “true” in some other sense, given a clutch of clever theologians to define it. The Bible, so the axiom went in the German faculties, was the Church’s Book. Its usefulness as secular history was secondary, limited and even negligible.
This partitioning had already come to be encapsulated in Martin Kähler’s 1892 slogan “the Christ of faith and the Jesus of history,” a slogan that seemed to suggest that no verdict on the latter would sink the former. To say, as did some radical critics who remained theologians, that Jesus did not exist, or that he did but we don’t know anything about him, did not change the reality of the Church and Christian belief: the Bible remained the Church’s book and what it proclaimed could be proclaimed without benefit of history. In retrospect, the defensiveness of this position seemed doomed from the outset, and it has usefully been called the fideism of the modern era–a salute to the more supernaturalistic fideism of the medieval world.
But the view did not die. Bultmann’s view and the agenda of his pupils was bolstered by Martin Heidegger’s philosophy, (phenomenology), and later was enlarged with the deconstructionist and postmodern approaches to narrative that followed. First and foremost, it was maintained that the New Testament is a discourse, not an artifact like–say–the Code of Hammurabi. It speaks to readers and listeners. It speaks to people who will interpret its message differently and act on it in different ways. Its meaning therefore doesn’t reside in its recitation of facts but in its overall effect and in the “dialectical distance” between the reader or listener and the text, read or spoken. Whatever remained of Jesus was safely locked away in the trendy word “proclamation” (κήρυγμα) and the nice thing about kerygma is that the New Testament uses it to talk about people who talked about Jesus (Luke 4:18-19; Romans 10:14; Matthew 3.1). Let the hermeneutical circle be unbroken. The demythologizers responded to Schweitzer’s idea that the mistake of scholarship had been to make Jesus a man of our time rather than a figure of his own time by promoting a reinterpretation of the ancient “message” that made the historically embarrassing figure optional.
Though I was trained by Bultmann’s closest pupils, I am not especially worshipful of phenomenology or its literary effects. I am even less happy with the way in which a whole generation of NT scholars was forced to dance on the head of a pin to avoid challenging the schizophrenic faith/history solution to the Jesus problem.
Very few reached the level of sophistication of my late friend and colleague Michael Goulder, but many came close: Norman Perrin, Robert Grant, Martin Dibelius, Ernst Kaesemann, Dennis Nineham, Dieter Georgi, John Fenton, Gerd Luedemann–the list is long and international. Virtually all were trained as theologians; all would have agreed that historical questions must be kept apart from theology when the questions we are asking are historical. To say that the status of a book limits us to asking certain kinds of questions about it gives us gnosticism at an intellectual level and anarchy at a methodological level. New Testament scholarship has done its bit to ensure the triumph of both. I have discussed the myth-thesis with some of the leading lights of twentieth century scholarship, and the number of times the discussion ended on the word “irrelevant” or “outdated” is distressing. To me, it remains an interesting question, even though I am fairly certain that Jesus was not a figment of a first century writer’s overactive religious imagination. My reasons for saying so have nothing to do with theology.
Unfortunately some of the loudest advocates of mythicism are making the question less interesting. They are making it less interesting partly because they deride before they read, and partly because they are committed to an obnoxious and sophomoric debating style that puts serious discussion at jeopardy. While they toss around words skimmed from logic primers and snippets of “scholarship” (largely robbed from atheist and free thought websites dealing with early Christianity), it’s clear that they are simply out to score points, which becomes far easier when you are unable to recognize when points are scored against you–a situation enhanced by an internet culture in which the last commenter always wins. No one wants the internet to be less smart. But everyone wants it to be smarter. As a group, the mythicists have proven themselves happier in the echo chamber of their own beliefs than in a world where a real interchange of ideas can happen.

What worries me in the discussion of mythicism is that the apical matter–whether Jesus existed–has been shoved into the foreground with virtually no attention to the prior history of the problem. There are occasional salutes to Schweitzer and a few radical critics like Bruno Baur and Arthur Drews, but the great movements in New Testament scholarship are ignored or uncharted, while the serious limitations of liberal and radical scholarship (Schweitzer’s conclusions, heavily infused with a zwischen den Zeiten idealism, are today regarded as church history) are not acknowledged.
The overall effect of this omission is something like trawling through the attic, finding the trunks full of Great Aunt Betsy’s clothes charming, and wondering why people don’t dress like that anymore. Begin with the conspiracy view that the Church used theology to suffocate mythicism (rather than the real course of events: theological scholarship created the question) and the rediscovery of mythicism becomes a heroic, proto-atheist achievement. If the older New Testament scholarship had a “faith-problem,” the faith problem of the new mythicism is its commitment to acknowledging only the arguments that support their conclusion. Obviously this is a definition of apologetics, not scholarship.
Mythicism didn’t collapse because it was suppressed–-it thrived as a sub-genre in early twentieth century theology, even in newspapers. It collapsed under its own weight, and its nostalgic reintroduction seems doomed to repeat the same fatal errors that killed it the first time round. In the case of Drews (d.1 935), who hated everything, especially Jews and Nietszche, the motives for being a mythicist were highly political (just as Albert Kalthoff needed the “idea” of Jesus to be, in some sense, real in order to make sense of the community). In the case of the older and dejected Strauss (d. 1874), it was to permit Christianity to live as a poem after recognizing its failure as history. Almost none of the early mythicizers were driven by atheism; almost all were left-Hegelian spiritualists and idealists who were looking for something that could take the place of the historical faiths. The sloppiest of them, Drews, was a self-promoter who enjoyed the fight.

In fact any kind of typology is inadequate as a statement of the mythtic case as it stands, or has stood, but might be useful as a statement of attitudes toward evidence.
I, for instance, am not a Jesus minimalist. I am relatively uninterested in the question of his existence, but if he existed he would be typical of his day and I am very interested in his day.

It is false to say however that the argument for Jesus’ historicity is merely circumstantial. For an argument to be circumstantial there would need to be a lack of direct evidence of an event; conclusions would be drawn entirely from the coincidence of effects and prior events.
The evidence for Jesus is much stronger than that, in spite of its deficiencies. Moreover, it has context, conditions and coordinates as defining parameters, so if Jesus typifies or meets certain criteria in these domains, the probability of his being a real person and not a cipher are greatly increased. I am startled by comparisons to Superman, Hercules, Santa Claus, and a dozen other gods and heroes, precisely because these figures fall outside the category of the typical. It is not just that their stories are incredible but that they are incredible in a way designed to emphasize their departure from an historical norm. The New Testament serves a different purpose.
So, in a nutshell, the artifacts we possess, whatever their limitations as “evidence” are not circumstantial evidence but the sort of evidence many historians would like to have in the case of other well-known figures like Pythagoras and Apollonius of Tyana.
Even if an “original” myth-maker existed who invented Jesus lock stock and barrel, it would not make the artifact-nature of these documents different; it would only mean that the story he is telling is an untrue story. It would in turn raise the question of why a messiah maker would not use more of what Arnold called the “raw miraculous” as we find it in (e.g.) the stories of Asklepios and even in tales about Diogenes and Pythagoras. Since we know from gnostcism that there were self-conscious myth-makers prepared to create a Jesus who laughed at death and scorned social attachments, why is the Jesus of the gospels, by and large, both intensely social and unarguably human? However, if the story is true, in terms of at least some of its historical assertions, then there would be no reason to be a Jesus “minimalist.” It would provide good reason to assume that other assertions are true as well. The modalities are clear: Either Jesus lived or he did not live. He taught or he did not teach. If he did not teach, and if a body of beliefs associated with that teaching and his deeds and person had not arisen, there would be no record of his having lived. Everything therefore depends on the status of the record purported to be, in part, an account of his life. If there is minimal agreement on anything, there should be agreement on that.
I am still waiting for some proof from the mythtics that the story is concocted, either out of thin air or as an amalgam of competing myths, not many of which look very much like the Jesus story at all. As comparative religionist Jonathan Z. Smith has noted concerning the “prevalence” of the dying and rising god myth, it isn’t prevalent at all; it’s “largely a misnomer based on imaginative reconstructions and exceedingly late or highly ambiguous texts.” So out of fashion is the category that modern classicists, religionists, and historians avoid it altogether, and it survives largely in the imagination of amateurs whose views are formed by outdated nineteenth century speculations. Gregory Boyd puts it succinctly when he comments that often there is either no death, no resurrection or no god in the examples used to construct each of the examples in the category, making the whole exercise a bad case of what Gerald O’Collins has called “parallelomania.” The mere compilation of analogies has always been the quicksand into which mythicism disappears. It is their attempt to prove–entirely circumstantially–that if something besides Jesus was there to be used it was used. One dying and rising god is like every other rising god. One salvation story fragments into a dozen salvation stories, one of which is the gospel.
The problem with this line of thinking, as I suggested in a post yesterday, is that simple logic and parsimony require us to use what we know before we resort to what might have been. When there is a known figure who typifies his era, preaches things typical of his time and place, and lives and dies in a context plausible for the time, what possible reason would there be –apart from pure malice–to introduce a completely foreign explanation–a Hercules or Dionysus–into the mix. Closer to home, as we know more about Jesus than we do about Theudas or Judas the Galilean, what reason do we give for preferring other identities and activity to the activity described of Jesus. Increasingly the far reaches of mythicism begin to sound more like the wingnut birtherism that declared Barack Obama was born in Kenya and the report of his birth called into a Honolulu newspaper in prescient anticipation that one day he would need the right stuff to be president.
The circle circles: Because the gospels are unreliable. Because the gospel writers were making things up. Because the early Christians needed a saviour god story after Paul (who in some circles is also made up!) to rival the stories of the other mysteries. I often quote Morton Smith’s rejoinder to George Wells, that the Jesus of the mythtics is unbelievable far beyond anything we find in the gospels. But I do want (earnestly) to understand their reasoning, because on the face of it, it seems not just paper thin but dangerous.
Until that reasoning is made clear, person to person and camp to camp, any attempt at typology is premature.
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Published: January 7, 2013
Filed Under: Uncategorized
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19 Responses to “A Barely Historical Jesus”

.
 Jens Knudsen (Sili)
 January 7, 2013 at 1:15 am

Closer to home, as we know more about Jesus than we do about Theudas or Judas the Galilean, what reason do we give for preferring his identity and activity to the activity described of Jesus.
I guess one could suggest that Judas, Theudas and The Egyptian failed to found lasting religions exactly because they were real.
Reply

 Pseudonym
 January 7, 2013 at 11:31 pm
I guess, but that would be even worse backwards reasoning. Pretty much every lasting religion (or social movement of any kind, for that matter) that has developed in modern history was founded by one or more real people.
Incidentally, one thing I haven’t seen much of in the blogosphere is the similarities between Jesus as portrayed in the gospels and other mystics. I understand the point about the disparity between the “love your enemies” teachings and depictions of conflict, but I’m not convinced on that point, for one simple reasons: a lot of the “love” teachings are perfectly in line with the teachings of other mystics throughout history who have also had run-ins with rivals and enemies. Even Confucius could be pretty hard to get along with, if the reports are true.
I’m of the opinion that mysticism is a type of personality. Being a mystic is no different from being a nerd. (I’m a nerd, so I can say this.) You can almost always spot a nerd in history, whether it’s Archimedes or Artie Shaw.
I think there was almost certainly a historical Pythagoras. Many of the stories about him are, I have no doubt, fanciful and/or mythical. But there are also plenty which sound like “real” nerd stories; so much so that there has got to be a “real” nerd in there somewhere.
Similarly, you can always spot a mystic. There’s enough in the gospels to convince me that there’s a real historical mystic in there somewhere.
Anyone who would invent Jesus would be unlikely to be able to invent such a perfectly-formed picture of a mystic unless they were a mystic themselves, or copied and adapted the life and teachings of another mystic (or several). The latter is, no doubt, what a mythicist would argue, but that just posits plurality without necessity.
Reply

 rjosephhoffmann
 January 7, 2013 at 11:59 pm
Your last comment is superb; I’ve seen it before, but not quite so terse and eloquent. And at the same time, as one of the minor transcendentalist poets of the 19th century argued, the fully-foirmed picture seems ingenuous, almost accidental, and free from contrivance, until later contrivance comes in. I suspect a mythtic would then say that this is nothing more than an aesthetic argument and that a really good writer can affect the ingenuous. But not in the ancient world: the art that hides art had not yet been discovered.


 stevenbollinger
 January 8, 2013 at 9:26 am
“Pretty much every lasting religion (or social movement of any kind, for that matter) that has developed in modern history was founded by one or more real people.”
(Relatively) few people are questioning the existence of Paul of Tarsus.


 Pseudonym
 January 9, 2013 at 11:13 pm
stephenbollinger, even fewer people think that Paul had a hand in writing the gospels.


 Pseudonym
 January 9, 2013 at 11:43 pm
One more thing. I absolutely agree with the point that “the art that hides art had not yet been discovered”.
Plenty of the ancient histories are less than perfectly reliable. But here’s the thing: We often can’t know what really happened in the ancient world, but we can almost always tell when an ancient observer, historian, or chronicler is lying to us or feeding us spin. Sometimes it’s so blatant it’s comical.


 stevenbollinger
 January 10, 2013 at 9:47 am
pseudynom, I was not aware that anyone had ever suggested that Paul had a hand in writing the Gospels. And neither am I.


 davidjohnmills
 January 10, 2013 at 7:38 pm
The ‘argument from plausibility’ is not very convincing to me, given that if he hadn’t existed, it’s nigh impossible to point to which bits of the stories wouldn’t be there. In other words, the stories could very easily be exactly the same in either case and there is, as far as I can see, no reliable method to tell the difference between a Jesus with an historical core from a Jesus without one. In any case, many if not most ‘figures’ fit in their context, whether they existed in it or not.


 rjosephhoffmann
 January 10, 2013 at 8:13 pm
But this is the whole point: are you therefore saying that an argument from implausible and unlikely distant and largely non-relevant sources provides a better explanation for the existence of the artefacts than historicity? In what other area of science outside metaphysics do we post an unknown as the better reason for the known– theology. We need warrants for your assumptions–not just could have and might have been.


 davidjohnmills
 January 11, 2013 at 5:29 am
I’m not sure what you mean. All I’m saying is that his being plausible must surely be a very weak indicator, given that so many non-historical figures are also plausible.


 davidjohnmills
 January 11, 2013 at 5:33 am
ps
I might even be tempted to query whether he is, in fact, plausible, or if he is only plausible after a great deal of winnowing.


 rjosephhoffmann
 January 11, 2013 at 5:47 am
It cannot be true that the entities suggested as likely sources for Jesus are plausible unless we think Superman is plausible. Can you name even one such alternative?


 rjosephhoffmann
 January 11, 2013 at 7:00 am
That winnowing as you call it has been going on for centuries. As there is a suggestion here that an uninterpreted Jesus is plausible. That’s the whole point. However, the direction of historical Jesus reserach has been to strip away the accretions, theology and legendary emoluments to give us a figure who is not just typical but mundane. Why would you think the argument would run the other way–that a god-man who walked on water would be typical of his time?

 
 

 stevenbollinger
 January 7, 2013 at 10:40 am
“Let the hermeneutical circle be unbroken.”
You do write some excellent one-liners.
Reply

Kinds of Mythicism says:
 January 8, 2013 at 11:29 am
[...] Joseph Hoffmann continues his blogging about mythicism, taking Ian’s post as his starting point. In the process, he emphasizes the importance of looking at the earlier history of mythicism, as part of the broader history of scholarly interest in Jesus. Earlier mythicism, like that of some today (Robert Price might fit into this category), was motivated by theological rather than atheistic concerns, as people sought a Jesus who did not need to depend on the results of historical criticism, as destructive and open to revision as they were. Here’s a sampling of some excerpts from Hoffmann’s post: [...]
Reply

 Ian
 January 8, 2013 at 11:45 am
Thanks for this, a fascinating read.
My motivation for the typology wasn’t particularly ambitious. Rather it was because I often am guilty of making assumptions about what people believe based on the labels they use. So I’ve had conversations with self-described Mythicists, who’ve turned out to be ‘Minimalists’ (in my categories), who obviously you want to have a very different conversation with than someone who thinks there is positive evidence of the myth-to-man idea.
But *always* good to be taken back and reminded of our little internet fracas in the context of what’s come before!
Reply

 Ed Jones
 January 8, 2013 at 12:41 pm
Our most certain sufficient historical evidence for knowledge of Jesus, who he was and what he said, rests “solely on the basis of the original and originating faith and witness of the apostles”. (Schubert M. Ogden). Over against this basic fact of the history of religions, one must take account of The FATEFUL HISTORICAL MISTAKE which took place in the earliest apostolic period 30 CE-65 CE at the very beginning of post-Easter Jesus traditions (taking account of the fact that this was before Christianity, before the word Christian was coined in Antioch in the 70’s) , to create the “Jesus Puzzle”. During this period there were two distinctly different movements standing in deepest adversarial relationship. The first, the Jerusalem Jesus Movement, which began (within the first weeks of post-Easter) with the key disciples returning to Jerusalem purposing to again take up the teachings of Jesus. It was from the Jesus Movement with its collections of sayings that we have our primary NT source containing this apostolic witness. This was soon followed by a Hellenists Christ myth movement interpreting the Jesus event in sense perceived terms of notions of messiah and salvific effects of Jesus’ death. Paul, first as persecutor, then converting to this group, adopted its notions, which became the source of his Christ of faith myth (the arch enemy of the Jesus movement). In taking his kerygma to the Gentile world, meeting with ready success, it became Gentile Christianity in Antioch in 70 CE, as known above all from the writings of the NT, the scriptural source for orthodox Christianity. Under these Gentile conditions some 40 years later, the writings of the NT took place, MISTAKENLY to be named the official canon, the apostolic witness to Jesus. Only since the 80’s have certain of our top NT scholars under the force of present historical methods and knowledge come to a full objective historical understanding of this mistake, not only to say none of the writings of the NT are apostolic witness to Jesus, but to understand the how and the why of this fateful mistake. This is a human mistake, one of those ultimate mistakes related to humanities pervasive difficulty with coming to terms with Ultimate Reality, the issue of God-man relationship, which bears testimony to unknowing mankind’s pervasive fallible mistake prone history – mankind’s fateful propensity to develop “eyes that cannot see”, forming “tinted glasses” which limit “vision” to sense perceived reality,
 A brief history of this fateful mistake: In this apostolic period, 30 CE – 65 CE, there were two movements each with its own interpretation of the significance of the Jesus event, marking them as standing in the strongest adversarial relationship. Chronologically the first, the Jerusalem Jesus Movement which began with the key disciples, having fled to their native Galilee, overcome with grief and utter disillusionment, emboldened by Peter’s and others vision (some form of extrasensory cognition), at high risk, returning to Jerusalem, purposing to again take up the teaching of their revered Master. This was soon followed by a group of Hellenist Jews hearing talk of Jesus rising from the dead (as the visions began to be so interpreted), with their traditions of dying and rising gods, together with Jewish animal sacrificial rites, taking up the sense perceived (not revelation) notion that the significance of Jesus was the salvific effects of his death and resurrection which abrogated the Torah. This was in effect treason for temple authorities. The Acts story (reading from a historical perspective over against authorial intent) of the stoning of Stephen, the leader of this Hellenist group, seems to reference a put-down by temple authorities of some kind of anti-Torah demonstration. Just here Paul is introduced, named as a participant holding the garments of those casting the stones. Next we have Paul telling of his “vision” on the road to Damascus, to where this Hellenist group fled, as persecutor, then converting to this group with their Christ myth beliefs. It was from this group that Paul received his Christ kerygma, to become Gentile Christianity as known above all from the writings of the New Testament, the letters of Paul, the Gospels, as well as the later writings of the New Testament, to finally become the source for orthodox Christianity. In taking his Christ kerygma to the Gentile world meeting with ready success, becoming the winners in the struggle for dominance, Paul’s followers could declare the Jerusalem Jesus Movement heresy to effectively remove it from the pages of history. Only because Matthew included the Q material, which contained the Sermon on the Mount derived from the Jesus Movement, do we have an alternative source which contains our sole original and originating faith and witness of the apostles, our most certain source of knowledge of the real Jesus. (See “Essays on the Sermon on the Mount” by Hans Dieter Betz).
Our most certain sufficient historical evidence for knowledge of Jesus, who he was and what he said, rests “solely on the basis of the original and originating faith and witness of the apostles”. (Schubert M. Ogden). Over against this basic fact of the history of religions, one must take account of The FATEFUL HISTORICAL MISTAKE which took place in the earliest apostolic period 30 CE-65 CE at the very beginning of post-Easter Jesus traditions (taking account of the fact that this was before Christianity, before the word Christian was coined in Antioch in the 70’s) , to create the “Jesus Puzzle”. During this period there were two distinctly different movements standing in deepest adversarial relationship. The first, the Jerusalem Jesus Movement, which began (within the first weeks of post-Easter) with the key disciples returning to Jerusalem purposing to again take up the teachings of Jesus. It was from the Jesus Movement with its collections of sayings that we have our primary NT source containing this apostolic witness. This was soon followed by a Hellenists Christ myth movement interpreting the Jesus event in sense perceived terms of notions of messiah and salvific effects of Jesus’ death. Paul, first as persecutor, then converting to this group, adopted its notions, which became the source of his Christ of faith myth (the arch enemy of the Jesus movement). In taking his kerygma to the Gentile world, meeting with ready success, it became Gentile Christianity in Antioch in 70 CE, as known above all from the writings of the NT, the scriptural source for orthodox Christianity. Under these Gentile conditions some 40 years later, the writings of the NT took place, MISTAKENLY to be named the official canon, the apostolic witness to Jesus. Only since the 80’s have certain of our top NT scholars under the force of present historical methods and knowledge come to a full objective historical understanding of this mistake, not only to say none of the writings of the NT are apostolic witness to Jesus, but to understand the how and the why of this fateful mistake. This is a human mistake, one of those ultimate mistakes related to humanities pervasive difficulty with coming to terms with Ultimate Reality, the issue of God-man relationship, which bears testimony to unknowing mankind’s pervasive fallible mistake prone history – mankind’s fateful propensity to develop “eyes that cannot see”, forming “tinted glasses” which limit “vision” to sense perceived reality,
 A brief history of this fateful mistake: In this apostolic period, 30 CE – 65 CE, there were two movements each with its own interpretation of the significance of the Jesus event, marking them as standing in the strongest adversarial relationship. Chronologically the first, the Jerusalem Jesus Movement which began with the key disciples, having fled to their native Galilee, overcome with grief and utter disillusionment, emboldened by Peter’s and others vision (some form of extrasensory cognition), at high risk, returning to Jerusalem, purposing to again take up the teaching of their revered Master. This was soon followed by a group of Hellenist Jews hearing talk of Jesus rising from the dead (as the visions began to be so interpreted), with their traditions of dying and rising gods, together with Jewish animal sacrificial rites, taking up the sense perceived (not revelation) notion that the significance of Jesus was the salvific effects of his death and resurrection which abrogated the Torah. This was in effect treason for temple authorities. The Acts story (reading from a historical perspective over against authorial intent) of the stoning of Stephen, the leader of this Hellenist group, seems to reference a put-down by temple authorities of some kind of anti-Torah demonstration. Just here Paul is introduced, named as a participant holding the garments of those casting the stones. Next we have Paul telling of his “vision” on the road to Damascus, to where this Hellenist group fled, as persecutor, then converting to this group with their Christ myth beliefs. It was from this group that Paul received his Christ kerygma, to become Gentile Christianity as known above all from the writings of the New Testament, the letters of Paul, the Gospels, as well as the later writings of the New Testament, to finally become the source for orthodox Christianity. In taking his Christ kerygma to the Gentile world meeting with ready success, becoming the winners in the struggle for dominance, Paul’s followers could declare the Jerusalem Jesus Movement heresy to effectively remove it from the pages of history. Only because Matthew included the Q material, which contained the Sermon on the Mount derived from the Jesus Movement, do we have an alternative source which contains our sole original and originating faith and witness of the apostles, our most certain source of knowledge of the real Jesus. (See “Essays on the Sermon on the Mount” by Hans Dieter Betz).
Reply

 Ed Jones
 January 8, 2013 at 9:57 pm
Apologies for the repetition, I have no explanation. I am not computer savvy, and Jan. being the month of becoming 94, I am not likey to improve. Age pluis a Theist identity may well account a seeming tendency to end discussions as well as absence of response.
 Aged musing.
Reply
 

 Mark Goodacre (@goodacre)
 January 9, 2013 at 10:10 pm
It’s so nice to see Michael’s picture on your blog, three years ago this week since his death.
Reply


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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient


Parsimony with that Salad?
by rjosephhoffmann

I am watching in amusement as the mythtics, in some exasperation, encounter the problem of parsimony for the first time.
The “father” of the word, William of Ockham (Occam), was a famous Franciscan logician when the two words were not considered a contradiction in terms. He actually stole the idea from Aristotle, but keep it quiet.
His tri-partite axiom is that “Pluralitas non est ponenda sine neccesitate” (Complexity should not be extended without necessity); that “Frustra fit per plura quod potest fieri per pauciora” (It is useless to posit many things that can be explained by a single thing); and ”Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem” (Things [causes] should not be multiplied beyond necessity).
Only one of these formulations (the first one) is his. It means that when you have two competing predictive theories the simpler one is the better. It has been used as far afield as philosophy and quantum physics, as with Stephen Hawking’s famous comment in Brief History of Time, “We could still imagine that there is a set of laws that determines events completely for some supernatural being, who could observe the present state of the universe without disturbing it. However, such models of the universe are not of much interest to us mortals. It seems better to employ the principle known as Occam’s razor.”
In the later history of philosophy, the principle is known as economy (Ernst Mach) and by its more common name, “parsimony.”
It is interesting that the mythtics do not see that arguments from distant analogies and might-be or might-have-beens are needlessly complex and hence violate this principle.
They repeatedly try to stick the fallacies of “straw man” and “circular reasoning” to my comments, presumably because these are favourite recourses and the only fallacies they know.
Another they might want to know is iterari assertionem, a form of wishful thinking that operates on the principle that if you say something often enough, people will think you’re right. It is notable that they do not see that a simple statement–that the gospels present material typical of their time and place and that the figure they present is a typical figure of his time and place–is a parsimonious statement accounting for the existence of the gospels. I can’t entirely blame them for this since for almost two thousand years theologians argued that Jesus violated all of these categories and that the gospels were a unique species of literature unparalleled in the Hellenistic world.
My argument is not an argument for the divinity of Jesus. It is not a conclusive argument for the historicity of Jesus. Instead, it constitutes an aporia against the argument that Jesus was not historical. It also requires any alternative theorist to present a more plausible and economical explanation of the existence of the gospels, and to defend the suggestion that they are fabrications against the parsimonious observation that they are, at least with respect to their primary subject matter, telling the truth. Such an argument, just to save time later, does not consist in the repeated assertion that stories of other gods are made up because these other stories are not gospels and don’t even look very much like the gospels.
This is not propositional truth, obviously–which is why tests like Bayes’s theorem fall flat in testing it–but truth as being a generally accepted statement of events as they were perceived by observers and reported under the conditions of their time and place. Historians have to rely on this rather modest definition of truth all the time, and much of our general theory of history is built on it, figure to figure, movement to movement, and place to place. It is not infallible, but then neither are the general theories of physics: it would be a pretty dim scientist who thinks that if he could actually witness the event of the Big Bang he would not need to make adjustments to his theory. If that is true, think of all the history that would need to be re-written if we could send historians in to record the death of Socrates, Marco Polo’s audience with the Khan, or (assuming it happened) the crucifixion.
The multiplication of analogies and difficulties violates this basic principle in the same way that metaphysical explanations of the world’s causation violate it in modern cosmology.
Of course no one is arguing that the law of parsimony is a substitute for insight, careful reasoning and the full operation of the scientific method. However, attempting to substitute the weakest form of argument–analogy–for more transparent and compelling approaches does not set the stage for meaningful discussion.
 The three C’s I have invoked, therefore, have to be addressed not by counter-propositions (and trivial, mainly useless appeals to “logic” as the mythics have come to use the word) but by evidence: The mythtics need to provide positive evidence that a character “like” Jesus (or if they prefer, one imported from another myth, Greek, Jewish, or other, adapted to use) explains the existence of the gospels and their central message more adequately than the economical view that an historical individual named Jesus, who was typical of his time, culture and background as we know it, is the source of artifacts dating very close to the time he is reckoned to have lived.
Alternatively, they need to show what events, causes, and conditions may have led first century writers, of no apparent skill, to fabricate the basic elements of their story. This may seem elementary because it is.
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Published: January 9, 2013
Filed Under: Uncategorized
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56 Responses to “Parsimony with that Salad?”

.
 ROO BOOKAROO
 January 9, 2013 at 4:04 pm
For comic relief, here is a little song of a crowing master of fallacies, that some Queensland apostle, from his neck of the woods, propagandizes as the nec plus ultra manipulation of historicity denial — with my thanks to Gilbert and Sullivan:
I am the very model of a modern Mythicist-General,
 I conjure information mythical, spiritual and theological,
 I know the books of G.A. Wells, and I quote the epistles historical
 From Paul to Revelation, in order categorical;
 I’m very well acquainted, too, with matters problematical,
 I understand parables, both the simple and allegorical,
 About the Mark conundrum I’m teeming with a lot of suppositions,
 With many cheerful facts from free-flowing divagations.
ALL:
 With many cheerful facts from free-flowing divagations.
GENERAL:
 I’m very good at mixing and diluting conclusions;
 I learnt the Greek names of ideas of delusions:
 In short, in matters terrestrial, mythological, and celestial,
 I am the very model of a modern Mythicist-General.
ALL:
 In short, in matters terrestrial, mythological, and celestial,
 He is the very model of a modern Mythicist-General..
GENERAL:
 I know our fantasy history, Enoch, Daniel and Isaiah’s ascension;
 I can solve Hebrew acrostics, I’ve a pretty taste for comparison,
 I drown in whirlpools all the crimes of historicists,
 With spinning cobwebs I can trap flying apologists;
 I can tell undoubted manuscripts from forgery and interpolation,
 I know the roaring chorus from the quibbling New Oxonion!
 Then I can recite an argument of which I’ve read the content before,
 And paraphrase subtle ideas from past scholarship galore.
ALL:
 And paraphrase subtle ideas from past scholarship galore.
GENERAL:
 Then I can write a new article in bewildering English,
 And learn cute new words to give my swampy prose polish
 In short, in matters terrestrial, mythological, and celestial,
 I am the very model of a modern Mythicist-General.
ALL:
 In short, in matters terrestrial, mythological, and celestial,
 He is the very model of a modern Mythicist-General.
GENERAL:
 In fact, when I know what is meant by “imitatio” and “variatio”,
When I can tell at sight a tsunami from a juggernaut “controversio”
When such conundrums as Persian magis at Luxor are no surprise,
 And when I know precisely what is meant by “Lazarus, arise”,
When I have learnt what progress has been made in literary borrowing,
 When I know more of gabbing rhetorics than a bartender in training–
In short, when I’ve of winning polemics a real mastery
 You’ll say a better Mythicist-General has never been so blustery.
ALL:
 You’ll say a better Mythicist-General has never been so blustery.
GENERAL:
 For my scholarly supremacy, though I’m plucky and adventury,
 Has only been consecrated as the summum of the century;
 But still, in matters terrestrial, mythological, and celestial,
 I am the very model of a modern Mythicist-General.
ALL:
 But still, in matters terrestrial, mythological, and celestial,
 He is the very model of a modern Mythicist-General.
Roo Bookaroo, Jan 9, 2013
Reply

 rjosephhoffmann
 January 9, 2013 at 4:23 pm
Not bad. Doesn’t really scan very well and you misspelled Oxonian. Otherwise, fun.
Reply
 

 Dwight Jones
 January 9, 2013 at 4:16 pm
All truth has its context, as you mention, and the gospels retell (within an oral, not written tradition, and thus with some expedience) a story that had to have some drivers in it, as such tales required if they were to gain audience attention. Such hyperbole was accepted as the context of their day, given the paucity of science and learning in that time to prove things different.
The play’s the thing, and of course it’s fanciful, or else the dramatist has not done his work – he is otherwise left with celebration and laments. It’s how the audience leaves the theatre that counts, and clearly the Jesus tale struck a chord that echoed something people wanted to hear. An account as legitimate as Hamlet, and always transparent to reason for its own sake.
Reply

 Justin
 January 9, 2013 at 4:37 pm
Good, compelling stuff Joe. Thanks – though I am sure it is a thankless task.
Reply

 vinnyjh57
 January 9, 2013 at 6:10 pm
I do not find the mythicists’ explanation for the gospels terribly persuasive either. On the other hand, I find the historicists’ explanations for the epistles equally unconvincing.
Reply

 rjosephhoffmann
 January 9, 2013 at 6:35 pm
I’m not sure what you mean by historicists’ explanations of the epistles. Is there an historical view of the epistles beyond the idea that Paul wrote some and not others? Nothing much historical rides on what he says about Jesus.
Reply

 vinnyjh57
 January 9, 2013 at 6:49 pm
The explanations for why Paul doesn’t seem to know anything about Jesus’ earthly ministry or even that he had one.


 steph
 January 9, 2013 at 7:37 pm
Whose ‘explanations’ are those which claim Paul didn’t know anything about Jesus’ teaching, Vinny? Other than Price and other prominent mythicists, that is.


 vinnyjh57
 January 9, 2013 at 8:23 pm
Yes Steph. Those are the explanations that make more sense to me than anything that the historicists have to offer concerning the scarcity of anything in Paul that corroborates those facts which historicists claim we can know with relative certainty about the historical Jesus.


 steph
 January 10, 2013 at 3:49 am
I still don’t know what you mean by historicists’ explanations of the epistles. Who are these ‘historicists’ and what are their ‘explanations’ – other than the idea that not all that is attributed to Paul was written by Paul. But regardless of any supposed arguments in favour of Paul knowing of Jesus’s ministry and those arguments for Paul knowing nothing of a historical Jesus at all, and whose arguments you find most convincing, why would Paul discuss Jesus’ ministry? He was writing short epistles to communities who probably knew about Jesus’ ministry anyway, and Paul was addressing issues and problems in those communities. It had already been claimed that Jesus had supposedly ‘risen’ from the dead and Christianity had already been ‘born’. Paul persecuted a few Christians before he was converted – after Jesus’ crucifixion. It’s slightly amusing that some mythicists need Paul to have written about Jesus’ life (about which he might well have even felt crippling guilt) for Jesus to have existed, when Jesus wasn’t the point of the letters. Paul’s letters are not ‘evidence’ for a historical Jesus but as letters are evidence of Christianity’s beginnings.


 brettongarcia
 January 10, 2013 at 8:04 am
Historicists seem willing to write off one huge chunk of the Bible after another, as non-historical; like most of Paul But then they want to assert certainty, to some small part of it. Though clearly the majority of stuff was junk; and so why not go with majority opinion, on the whole lot?
Especially when the “historical” methodologies that “prove” the tiny remnant, are laughable cases of all-too-special pleadings, deviating from real historigraphy.
Then too in any case? If Steph admits that Paul founded what came to be known as Christianity? Then doesn’t that suggest that indeed, Paul is in EVERY sense, founder of Christianity? That no “historical” Jesus was ever needed.


 rjosephhoffmann
 January 10, 2013 at 6:41 pm
@ Garcia:
 When you say ‘the Bible’ you are talking about an artificial creation, not a book whose truth or falsity can be established at a single stroke or using the same methods book to book. It entail a thousand year long evolutionary process. Even the distinction between the letters of Paul and the gospels illustrates the problems facing historians from the standpoint of methodology. So the process as you describe it, implying a kind of arbitrary selectivity, is false. I suspect this is what many mythicists inadvertently miss – just the same as many fundamentalists might miss it.


 vinnyjh57
 January 10, 2013 at 11:59 am
Steph,
I find it hard to believe that there would have been any issues or problems upon which someone would not have claimed that something Jesus said or did favored his position. For example, someone would have claimed that circumcision was required because Jesus observed the law. The less scrupulous would simply have invented sayings and attributed them to Jesus while the more scrupulous would reshaped their memories of him without realizing they were doing it.
Because of this, I think that discussions and disputes about the meaning of the things Jesus and did would have been both necessary and ubiquitous, as would have been discussions and disputes about what things Jesus actually said or did. Even though Paul did not know Jesus personally, I think that he would have been forced to deal with arguments from people who either actually knew Jesus or claimed to have known him. I find it quite puzzling that there is evidence of disputes about the authenticity of teachings attributed to Paul, but none of any about the authenticity of teachings attributed to Jesus.


 steph
 January 10, 2013 at 7:23 pm
How do you know they didn’t? And how do you know he wasn’t dealing with those arguments? We’re reading some of what Paul wrote, not with what others claimed. And Paul was more concerned with his own mission than what we have now, attributed to Jesus with a mission to the people of Israel in the gospels – some of which Paul contradicted. Why would there be evidence of anything that wasn’t even available (tradition attributed to Jesus in the gospels) or any more than traces of oral tradition, which is more likely the case. Your argument reminds me of conservative arguments claiming that Jesus wasn’t breast fed because the gospels don’t say he was.


 vinnyjh57
 January 10, 2013 at 9:07 pm
Steph,
Unfortunately, I don’t know anything about arguments and issues that arose in Paul’s communities beyond what I find in the extant letters. They are the only evidence I have. If I had additional letters and writings, I might get a very different picture of the understanding of the earthly Jesus that prevailed in those communities, but there is no way to know in which direction my understanding would move. I cannot know whether that information would push me towards historicity or away from it. As a starting point, I think I have to treat the extant letters as representative of the kinds of questions that arose in Paul communities and how those questions were resolved. If I don’t find any indication that Paul was concerned with anything other that a supernatural being who manifested himself in visions and revelations, I have to take seriously the possibility that he wasn’t.
I frankly cannot imagine any reason why anyone would ever mention whether Jesus was breast fed. On the other hand, I can think of good reasons why Paul would have had to deal with questions concerning the meaning of things that Jesus said or did during his earthly ministry.


 steph
 January 11, 2013 at 2:31 am
And as I asked you above Vinny, how do you know (or rather are you assuming) he didn’t? He wrote letters from a distance, not accounts of dialogues, to communities as you know, with instructions and answers to problems and disputes and he claims authority from the Lord (never mind wriggling out of the title used.) Some of his instruction deals with a few social issues in the gospel material attributed to Jesus, which might have been encountered in an oral developing stage. He also encountered issues to do with the new growing church that Jesus would not have had to deal with. Ultimately none of the epistles are helpful for learning anything about an historical Jesus.


 vinnyjh57
 January 11, 2013 at 7:23 am
And as I indicated above Steph, I don’t know what I don’t know. I can only draw inferences from evidence that I do have. I can certainly acknowledge the possibility that additional evidence might cause me to modify my conclusions and given the limited amount of evidence I have, I cannot claim a high degree of certainty. Nevertheless, I still think that I have to start my inquiry with inferences based on what the earliest writings contain.
Paul might have encountered some of the gospel material in an oral developing stage, but I don’t see how I can assume that he did. He only cites revelation and scripture as his sources, which I don’t think I can take at face value, but which I think makes it very difficult to attribute anything specific to other sources.
I don’t think it matters that Jesus wouldn’t have had to deal with particular issues. If Jesus had been viewed as an authoritative teacher, for any issue upon which there was a controversy, someone would have claimed that Jesus had dealt with it. Just as people forged letters in Paul’s name and Peter’s name to deal with issues that arose after their deaths, people would have attributed positions to Jesus on issues that he never would have needed to address.
I quite agree that the epistles are unhelpful for learning anything about a historical Jesus, but the issue for me is why that should be. Is it because the historical Jesus never did or said anything that was relevant to the issues dealt with in the epistles or is it because the beliefs of the writers of the epistles were based on visions and revelations of a supernatural being rather than the teachings of a recently deceased itinerant healer and teacher? I think the latter hypothesis makes more sense of what we find in the epistles, because even if the former were true, I think we would still find teachings attributed to Jesus.

 

 steph
 January 11, 2013 at 7:23 pm
It is not an assumption Vinny. It is a reference to arguments elsewhere about parallels in Paul’s letters with gospel tradition from his address to God as abba going back to Jesus, to the 1 Corinthians 7.10 on divorce. He indicates that his teachings come from the Lord and he contrasts them with his own counsel. (7.12). Paul ‘recalls’ the command that permits financial support for those that preach ‘the gospel’ eg Luke 7.10 etc etc. Other examples are documented elsewhere (see Bultmann, Allison, WD Davies, The ‘HD’ JD Dunn, Martin Hengel etcetcetc). How can he say ‘Jesus told me this’ when he didn’t know him, or ‘I read this in a gospel’ which hadn’t been written. But we don’t assume. We examine the evidence and apply historical methods to construct plausible arguments which are supported by the evidence. You say “If Jesus had been viewed as an authoritative teacher, for any issue upon which there was a controversy, someone would have claimed that Jesus had dealt with it.” Why do you assume they would always lie about authority? And how would that be obvious in Paul’s instruction anyway? The epistles are useful as evidence for the origin of Christianity which didn’t happen until after Jesus died. They aren’t about Jesus, they are about Christian communities from Paul’s perspective. Your generally healthy scepticism is looking slightly jaundiced ;-) , not only ignoring the examples but in demanding letters are written in a certain way so they become evidence for what they are not – an historical Jesus. The winners write the ‘history’ – not the losers, Vinny.
Reply

 vinnyjh57
 January 11, 2013 at 9:45 pm
Steph,
I think that there is an assumption regarding which direction the parallels flow. Paul doesn’t seem to use any language that points towards an oral tradition about a historical person as his source, whereas he does speak in terms of revelation. Paul claims that he received revelation and he talks about people in his communities receiving “words of knowledge” and “words of wisdom.” I don’t find any discussions of stories about a historical person traditions being passed on by eyewitnesses.
I don’t assume that everyone would always lie about authority, but mainstream scholarship tells me that most of the epistles in the New Testament are examples of someone fabricating teachings and ascribing them to some authoritative figure. I think that it is reasonable to expect that this would have occurred with respect to one who was thought to be the most authoritative figure of them all.
I don’t believe that I am demanding that the epistles be written in any particular way. I think that I am simply trying to make sense of the way that they are written.


 steph
 January 11, 2013 at 11:17 pm
It is not an assumption Vinny. It depends on arguments for the contexts and dates of the written material. What exactly does “language that points towards an oral tradition about a historical person as his source” look like? I don’t think you are thinking in historical context at all. Unless you believe in the reality of divine revelation, it seems rather likely it was in his mind, put there by oral tradition. Why on earth do you expect to find “discussions of stories about a historical person traditions being passed on by eyewitnesses.” in letters written by Paul, who claims authority to give advice and instruction, to early Christian communities.You make a lot of assumptions about what you think is reasonable without any historical evidence at all.


 vinnyjh57
 January 12, 2013 at 12:04 am
I expect it because the things that Jesus said or did would have been authoritative and people who could claim to have known what Jesus said or did could have bolstered their position in any dispute by citing their relationship with Jesus. Just as every Republican presidential candidate claims the legacy of Ronald Reagan and Brigham Young claimed the legacy of Joseph Smith, Paul and every one of his rivals and opponents would have wanted to claim the legacy of the earthly Jesus. I think that there is plenty of evidence of this kind of thing happening in all sorts of contexts throughout history. Attempts to claim Jesus’ legacy are what I think would reflect the existence of an oral tradition about the earthly Jesus.
Only if no one could claim to have been Jesus’ disciple during his earthly ministry would everyone have been forced to rely upon supernatural signs and revelations to support their personal claims to authority. Although I don’t believe in the reality of divine revelation, I suspect that Paul did (or at least that he recognized the effectiveness claiming that he did). Any religious leader who wants to live off of his flock can recognize the benefit of claiming that God has commanded it.


 steph
 January 12, 2013 at 2:46 am
vinny: Paul claimed authority from the Lord. You are projecting 21st century contexts onto first century Christianity. The issue of Jesus’ humanity was not an issue in Paul’s day – why on earth did he need to state an earthly Jesus, whom he had never met, when all his authority came through ‘revelation’ – which would have had far more authoritative in Paul’s day. Jesus’ humanity wasn’t an issue! Think about it Vinny. “Only if no one could claim to have been Jesus’ disciple during his earthly ministry would everyone have been forced to rely upon supernatural signs and revelations to support their personal claims to authority.” Who says? You? You want these letters to become evidence of Jesus’ life, something that wasn’t an issue in Paul’s time. As far as we know there weren’t any Jesus deniers or fundamentalists or ex fundamentalists. What else do you want to claim should contain evidence of Jesus’ life that was not Paul’s problem to solve – it (the ‘problem’) ‘didn’t exist’…


 vinnyjh57
 January 12, 2013 at 12:21 pm
Steph,
How can I know what was an issue in Paul’s time other than by reading Paul’s letters? If Paul doesn’t say anything about Jesus’ teaching and healing ministry, how can I know that Paul thought he had one? If Paul doesn’t say that Jesus had disciples and that Peter was chief among them, how can I know that this was Paul’s understanding? It’s not that I want Paul’s letters to contain more information about the historical Jesus. What I want is a clearer picture of Paul’s understanding of the historical Jesus, which such information might give me.
It is unfortunately the case that Paul’s letters constitute only one side of the conversation. I think that this is a reasonably common problem for historians and the best one can do is try to infer what the other side might have been saying based on the points that Paul felt compelled to make. It has always struck me as odd that he thought it necessary to point out that Jesus was “born of a woman” if there wasn’t some controversy about the issue. The fact that Paul, pseudo-Paul, and the writers of the Johannine and Petrine epistles didn’t need to get into the meaning of the things that Jesus said or did during his earthly ministry gives me some reason to think that it wasn’t an issue in the early church.
What I see going on in the New Testament is people forging letters in the names of Peter and Paul. That suggests to me that people in the day recognized the value in attributing teachings to an authoritative figure. If in fact, revelation would have had the most authority in Paul’s day, then why would we think that any of the parallels represented elements of an oral tradition? If Paul would have viewed what the Lord had told him directly as more important than what he heard of Jesus’ earthly teaching, why shouldn’t we think it just as likely that the divorce teaching originated as a revelation claimed by Paul or someone prominent in one of his communities?
I don’t think that attempts to claim the legacy of a deceased leader are strictly a 21st century phenomenon. In the 7th century, Muslims split over who was the legitimate heir of Mohammed. Both sides fervently believed in revelation, and yet, they still saw the value in basing their claims on more direct links to the Prophet. Perhaps things were so different in the 1st century that no one would have tried to bolster their claim by asserting their personal relationship with the earthy Jesus, but I would be interested in seeing the evidence that this was so.


 steph
 January 12, 2013 at 7:12 pm
“How can I know what was an issue in Paul’s time other than by reading Paul’s letters?”
You can’t. Why demand you should? Why assume you should know? They’re not evidence of an historical Jesus.
“What I want is a clearer picture of Paul’s understanding of the historical Jesus, which such information might give me.” Why complain the letters he wrote weren’t gospels. Continual complaining such as is evident here, will not make them say something they don’t. They are not used as evidence for Jesus’ historicity. Why assume Paul should contain evidence of your issue that Paul wasn’t concerned with? We have arguments and evidence based on gospel sources, arguments and evidence written up in books Vinny. We find these arguments are supported by external sources and other NT material using methods of historical analysis.
“If Paul doesn’t say anything about Jesus’ teaching and healing ministry, how can I know that Paul thought he had one? “
You can’t. You can only distinguish between the plausible and perfectly ridiculous.
That Paul doesn’t say anything is based on your assumption which ignores arguments with evidence that he it would be implausible that he didn’t. Do we know what Paul thought about Caligula, Tiberius, Caligula or Claudius, or the cause of the weather? Do we know what he thought about the body and spirit in his belief in resurrection? Do we know what he learned from the Christians he persecuted?
Paul doesn’t say that Jesus had disciples and that Peter was chief among them, how can I know that this was Paul’s understanding? It’s not that I want Paul’s letters to contain more information about the historical Jesus. What I want is a clearer picture of Paul’s understanding of the historical Jesus, which such information might give me.
Paul does refer to ‘the twelve’, his own role to Gentiles, and the first gospel to the Jews, the special role of Peter etc. He had no reason to explain that Jesus chose disciples, a tradition they would have known. That he would have would have appeared superfluous at be best, but ultimately ridiculous.
Vinny – Paul’s letters were written after Jesus died. They are about early Christianity not Jesus’ life. It is not ‘unfortunate’ that his letters are only his perspective, in fact probably the opposite. But Paul is not of much use to historians and it really doesn’t bother historians. And they’re about Christian communities and mainly on issues like the nature of resurrection, not Jesus’ life, Vinny!!! Does Winnie the Pooh contain evidence of the life of AA Milne? Or WWI? Rhetorical, answer not necessary Vinny.
Later disputes about birth weren’t over whether or not Jesus existed or not. They were about his humanity and divinity. You are still incessantly making assumptions about what the letters should be about, forcing the letters to be evidence of something they are not, without consideration of the context and conditions of a developing early Church communities.
You contradict yourself or perhaps it’s just ignoring context again with your assumptions about what is valuable in attribution of teaching and authority. Paul claimed to have authority from ‘the Lord’ and attributed his teaching. Why are you imposing your 21st century view of reality on first century Judeo/Christianity?
I believe nothing would persuade you of plausibility. Paul’s letters weren’t intended to, Paul wasn’t concerned with issues you demand him to be, and you are committed to disbelief. Even a photo could have been fabricated, or not really ‘him’, if they had had a camera to shoot one. I also wonder how much and what you actually read. But I’m much happier never to know. Not ever.


 steph
 January 13, 2013 at 4:19 am
By the way Vinny, I hope you’ve read the latest New Oxonian post which I think answers your complaints here in a much more thorough and helpful way than my attempts to have. For example “[Paul's] turnabout from Judaism was so complete that his only intelligent interpreter, Marcion, believed he must have been speaking of a completely different God. As Harnack once remarked, “There was only one man in the second century who understood Paul, and he misunderstood him”.
Sad, it seems to me, that so much of the mythicist argument is based on what Paul does or doesn’t say about Jesus, considering there is a world of thought there that, cast to one side, makes it virtually impossible to know what Paul was talking about. Mythicism, among it many other dubious achievements, has achieved a new level of illiteracy in relation to Paul’s ideological and religious world.”
http://rjosephhoffmann.wordpress.com/2013/01/12/the-passion-of-jesus-the-galilean/


 vinnyjh57
 January 13, 2013 at 1:35 pm
Steph,
I did read Hoffman’s latest post and I think that it is a very interesting hypothesis. Off the top of my head, I would say that it is plausible, but I’m not at all certain that it is any less speculative than most reconstructions of the origins of Christianity. It seems to me that lack of direct evidence is still a problem.
I know that historicists love to charge mythicists with “wanting Paul to write gospels” or “complaining that Paul doesn’t write gospels,” but as far as I’m concerned, that’s just empty rhetoric. It’s a put down that doesn’t have any substance. The epistles needn’t have been gospels in order to corroborate the historicity of Jesus. They merely would have had to more clearly reflect that the Christian movement had its origins in a historical person whose teachings and actions during his earthly life were viewed as normative rather than in a supernatural being who manifested himself through visions and revelations.
Moreover, I think I have to base my conclusions on evidence of what was known, rather than conjecture about what everybody would have known.
Paul’s letters were written after Jesus died. They are about early Christianity not Jesus’ life. It is not ‘unfortunate’ that his letters are only his perspective, in fact probably the opposite. And they’re about Christian communities, not Jesus Vinny!!!
Notwithstanding the exclamation points, I do not find this persuasive Steph. The Pastorals were written after Paul died and the Petrine epistles were written after Peter died, but because Paul and Peter were viewed as authoritative figures, people wrote letters in their names in order to have them address issues that they never would have addressed. By the same token, if Jesus was viewed as an authoritative figure, I expect that his authority would also have been invoked on issues that he hadn’t actually addressed.
I am not committed to any particular position, but when my earliest sources for the origins of Christianity contain no historical information on its supposed founder, I think I have some legitimate reasons to have questions.


 steph
 January 13, 2013 at 5:43 pm
Rather than dismissing all historical scholarship’s tentative conclusions on Jesus in one fell swoop, as ‘speculative’ and based on assumptions, it’s helpful to actually engage with the arguments and evidence. Critical scholarship isn’t speculative. It examines the evidence and applies historical method forming plausible arguments. The main point about the post was to demonstrate why Paul didn’t provide the answers you demand from him today. It’s should have been obvious too, that the post is a summary of arguments based on evidence which will appear in the book. It’s shameful that so many mythicists persist in misrepresenting scholarship with a lack of critical discernment to discriminate between the individual proposals. Just selecting one example, critical scholarship does not dismiss the NT as a ‘pack of lies’, contra a blogger flipping what the post rightly claims of mythicists (ie made up on the basis of myths and storytelling in ancient literature), on ‘historicists’. This is a twentieth century concept implying devious motives which sensible people know was not part of the process of rewriting and embellishing traditions with contemporary concerns in mind, in their historical context. I am not including Bart Ehrman who does apply inappropriate terms and understanding with his flippant use of ‘forgery’ and ‘lies’. Resorting regrettably to an analogy, your demands of the letters in the NT are like someone wanting a doctor’s prescription for anti depressants from a recipe for chocolate cake. Although on reflection that’s a bad analogy as it is quite obvious that chocolate is a cure for depression…


 vinnyjh57
 January 13, 2013 at 6:33 pm
Steph,
Unfortunately, as much as I would like to be helpful, it is rather difficult to engage with arguments and evidence that are contained in a book that hasn’t been published yet. It was in fact obvious to me that I was going to have to wait to see Hoffman’s argument presented in full in order to know whether it answers my questions and concerns. Personally, I think it would be helpful if you stopped characterizing my ideas about the epistles as “demands” and “complaints.” It seems to me that it has been decided which box I belong in and I am to be shoved into it regardless of what I say. That seems to happen a lot on both sides of these discussions.


 steph
 January 13, 2013 at 6:58 pm
You weren’t just dismissing the tentative conclusions of this post. You described all reconstructions as ‘speculative’. I was suggesting it might be of benefit to yourself to engage with published arguments as well as the arguments forthcoming. You appear to be committed to a position of doubt – which is fine (I have no unchangeable convictions either) – until ancient sources provide the sort of evidence that you might find from more recent historical sources. In this case different historical methods would be applied, appropriate to material in a later historical context. In any case it’s futile: the historical Jesus is not the founder of the religion of the gospel brought to the Gentiles and preached by Paul.


 vinnyjh57
 January 13, 2013 at 7:14 pm
No Steph. I described most reconstructions as speculative, which seems like a rather measured description to me given how many different reconstructions there are.


 steph
 January 13, 2013 at 7:40 pm
Ah – so you did, my apologies. I wonder which ones you don’t find ‘speculative’. Personally I think far too many are based on prior assumptions of faith or unfaith and the evidence is manipulated to fit arguments. Furthermore the conclusions ‘reached’ are based on unshakable convictions. But critical scholarship and the Process of research is not about convictions – or speculation.


 vinnyjh57
 January 14, 2013 at 10:31 am
Steph,
Trying to reconstruct Christian origins has always seemed to me to be like trying to figure out the picture on a five-thousand piece jigsaw puzzle when you only have about seventy-five of the pieces. Some of the pieces you have may fit together in nice little clumps but there is no way to be certain what the spaces between the clumps look like. You can make educated guesses that the blue pieces are sky and the green pieces are foliage, but there is no way to overcome the problem of the missing pieces.
Prior to the 2008 financial crisis, many of the finest minds in the field of finance and economics thought that they knew a lot more about how things worked than it turned out that they actually knew. One of the problems that few recognized is that the percentage of economic history and the range of economic conditions for which testable data exists is really quite small. You had lots and lots of experts combing over the same forty to fifty years worth of data and extrapolating all sorts of models and predictions. I think this created an echo chamber effect which convinced the experts that they understood a lot more than they really did.
It seems to me that the field of New Testament studies faces a similar problem. We only have a handful of pieces to the puzzle that is the origin of Christianity, but we have a disproportionate number of scholars combing over those pieces with ever finer combs. I think that New Testament scholars may have succeeded in convincing themselves that they can have a much greater degree of certainty about their conclusions than the sparse data is intrinsically capable of supporting. You can develop the most sophisticated techniques imaginable, but you are still limited by the data upon which you base your conclusions.
I’m not sure that I’ve read any New Testament scholar who hasn’t seemed to me to be making at least some educated guesses to deal with the problem of the missing pieces. I’ve generally thought that Ehrman is careful not to go overboard, but I still think that he is forced to resort to speculation and assumption to fill the gaps. The assumptions and speculation may be both reasonable and plausible, but the evidence to corroborate them just isn’t there.


 steph
 January 14, 2013 at 7:31 pm
OK. We don’t have many pieces. We don’t have all the pieces of any historical figure. It is not about guessing. It is about analysing the limited sources we have and examining the evidence. It is about following where it leads. It is not about being dogmatic and convincing ourselves we’re right. It’s about tentative hypotheses based on arguments supported by the evidence, and accepting limits and uncertainties, and developing method.The problem you identify regarding (incompetent) over confidence is not limited to scholarship. It is a human problem: an inability to be self critical. I see it in conservative scholarship as much as I see it in Price and Doherty for example. Bart Ehrman is a qualified NT scholar but he does not represent NT scholarship and in particular, he does not represent independent scholarship of the Jesus Process. We do not endorse his work or methods. As for ‘overboard’, he makes various assumptions, ignores some important evidence that we do have, and he makes mistakes. Also he’s guilty of the heinous sin – anachronism. I think it might be helpful if you stopped characterising historical scholarship on early Christianity as speculative and assumptions. There’s a difference between Bart Ehrman and Roger Aus for example.;-)

 
 

 Mark Erickson
 January 9, 2013 at 11:53 pm
You used to be a mythicists, right Joe? And now you claim that you aren’t very interested in the historicity of Jesus. Yet you keep writing about it over and over and plan to write a book about it. Iterari assertionem, perhaps? But on to substance.
In the first and third partites of Occam, “necessity” seems important. Others have stated the same thing by expressing the razor as favoring simplicity if the explanatory power of the competing theories are equal. Your example from Hawking fits this bill exactly. The laws of physics and a god controlling the laws of physics explain the evidence equally well. So by Occam’s razor, just the laws of physics, without a god, is the favored theory. Another example, staying with physics, Newton’s law of gravitation is much simpler than Einstein’s general relativity. Yet GR explains much more data than gravitation. Quantum mechanics is notoriously complex. Yet it is the most accurate theory in all of science. It is necessary to explain the evidence.
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 rjosephhoffmann
 January 10, 2013 at 2:38 am
I said the question is interesting but that I am much more interested in the matrix than the man, and now we have to see a conjunction between the two, in a way that theological approaches always prevented–Jesus was the transcendent saviour. I think everyone should hang fire on some of this condensed soup until the book actually comes out, which it will not if I have to spend all my time unpacking it outline with bare assertions–which is fair enough…
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 Mark Erickson
 January 10, 2013 at 12:03 am
“It also requires any alternative theorist to present a more plausible and economical explanation of the existence of the gospels, and to defend the suggestion that they are fabrications against the parsimonious observation that they are, at least with respect to their primary subject matter, telling the truth.”
Again, if it explains the evidence better, a theory is allowed to be un-economical. It is simple to say the gospels are telling the truth. Apologists say it all the time. What if the theory of fabrication explains the evidence better? Would you stick with the gospel truth?
What is the primary subject matter of the gospels? The laundry list you posted the other day? The figure of Jesus fits into the milieu of second temple Galilee? What about the fact Mark doesn’t get many details about Galilee right? What about calling Jesus rabbi? How do you parse the conditions? So many questions!
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 rjosephhoffmann
 January 10, 2013 at 2:37 am
…As to theories: An uneconomical theory would certainly be permissible if the parsimonious one was inadequate to explain the cause or event behind a phenomenon. One of the things we confront is trying to identify exactly what the phenomenon is: is it the historical Jesus, a movement attributed to him, or some third thing? The problem of differentiation is enormous in this case–as you’ll recognize. However, my own “opinions” and what choir I used to sing in, mythtic or historical, are not the phenomenon we are investigating! Even if my “asseverations” only serve to keep mythicism honest, it will be useful since there may be ways to make the case a stronger one using methods that will come out of the Process.
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 Ed Jones
 January 10, 2013 at 10:50 pm
Joe: ” – - trying to identify exactly what the phenomenon is: is it the historical Jesus, a movement attributed to him, or some third thing?” The phenomenon “it” must relate to the writings of the NT. In my comment below the point is made that none of the writings off the NT is a reliable source for knowledge of the HJ, thus it is not “the historical Jesus”, thus not “a movement attributed to him”, rather it is “some third thing”. The writings of the NT are written by Gentile authors, beginning some 40 years after Easter, written in the context of imaging the Pauline Crhrist of faith, not Jesus..
 Our sole sufficient evidence for knowledge of the HJ is our primary source containing the original and originating faith and witness of the apostles. This source is identified to be the Sermon on the Mount. See Essays on the Sermon on the Mount by Hans Dieter Betz.


 rjosephhoffmann
 January 11, 2013 at 3:08 am
Dear Ed,
Your sensible response gives me a chance to say something constructive.
 1. The Jesus movement does not prove the existence of a historical Jesus any more than the existence of Hinduism argues the existence of Krishna. At the same time, many religions have had historical founders, though all are shrouded in legend.
 2. The degree to which the emphasis on Jesus’ status as a saviour god has influenced thinking about his historicity has been two-fold. For die-hard Christians, historicity is not very important. For Jesus-deniers, it means that historicity is not demonstrable.
 3. Beginning with the premise that Paul comes before the gospels has led to the postulate that Jesus was invented by Paul. This is itself is bad history, since it cannot be conclusively shown that Paul’s letters are earlier than oral historical tradition, and even if they were it would make Paul part of a process that is also contained in the more fanciful and legendary aspects of gospels as they develop beyond oral tradition.
 4. Most if the reason for placing Paul’s letters before the gospels is based on poor examples of relative chronology, an outdated view of apocalyptic that (eg) makes 1 Thess an early example of a genre, and circumstantial inferences–e.g., that Paul would have mentioned the destruction of Jerusalem, and the gospels at least in some degree seem to “look back” on the event. A more reasonable conclusion is that some elements of some gospels seem to look back on some events, others don’t.
 5. Hairsplitting and chronology aside, the Jesus of the gospels is not an especially extraordinary figure. He certainly violates ‘type” if we are talking about savior gods and legendary heroes (since when have many legendary superheroes only managed to get themselves arrested and killed). On the other hand, one who did might get even, narratively, if he could be raised from the dead and not end his life in humiliation. I am not saying that is what happened; I am saying that that is what his believers claimed happened.
 6. For the greatest part, the story about Jesus is not just plausible but typical. He belongs to a specific time, place, culture and says things characetritic of it. Hercules does not. Attis and Adonis and Mithra do not. His closest historical parallels–John Theydas, Judas the Galilean, etc. seem to have been like him but we know more about him than we do about them, so why would we want to substitute them as misremembered hims? If the answer is because we know them from Josephus, the answer has to be that we date the gospels, usually, before Josephus. This will not persuade a jaundiced skeptic, but it has to be at least acknowledged and saying that therefore gospels aren’t written until 150 or some equally absurd things doesn’t really help.
 This is just a taste of what I consider to be a parsimonious but inconclusive argument for the probability of Jesus’ historicity. The mythtics are howling because they refuse to admit that this has them cornered, so they are (again) resorting to sophomoric analogies to say that this is all too simple. It is simple, yes.


 Ed Jones
 January 12, 2013 at 10:41 pm
Joe, This is a Reply to your above Reply Jan. 11, 2013, @3:08 am.
 Thanks for your thoughtful response, even though I cannot avoid saying I have problems with each of your six comments. Rather than argument I can hope it might prove creative to attempt some discussion by way of understanding our differences in this highly problematic issue.
 An axiom which defines critical New Testament Studies: If you begin with Paul, you will misunderstand Jesus. If you begin with Jesus, you will understand Paul differently. To make sense here, two distinctly different earliest post-Easter movements is a given as per the comment.
 To begin with Paul is to begin with the writings of the NT, the letters of Paul, the Gospels, as well as the later writings of the NT, the sources for Christianity. Present understanding of certain of our top scholars argues that none of the writings of the NT is a reliable source for knowledge of Jesus, all are written in the context of imaging the Christ of faith not the person Jesus. (This understanding is confirmed by Eric Zuesse’s Christ’s Ventriloquist the first scientific probe of the NT). This essentially takes the writings of the NT off the table, whatever they may contain being irrelevant to whoever Jesus was and what he may have been up to. While a critical study of the NT under the conviction that its writings constitute our primary if not our sole source of Jesus understanding necessarily forms negative biases which seriously restrict any overall objective historical research of the NT over against authorial intent. Only since the 80s have certain of our top NT scholars, under the force of present historical methods and knowledge, identified our most certain alternative source which contains the original and originating faith and witness of the apostles, the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:3 – 7:27). Identifying this source “is a task to which specialized in the areas of philology, form and redaction criticism, literary criticism, history of religions, and New Testament theology necessarily applies”.

 
 

 davidjohnmills
 January 10, 2013 at 9:21 am
Here’s two attempts at a sort of parsimony:
1. Show me accounts concerning another figure which closely match those regarding Jesus, and I believe I will have doubts sufficient to consider his or her existence an open question.
2. The principle established by the belief in the existence of numerous figures who were once thought to have been historical, and written about (or even to, in some cases, eg Prester John, as far as I am aware) but may not have existed, is arguably sufficient to dispense with the need for a detailed alternative to ‘historicity’ before considering the question open.
Having said that, I tend to think that assuming, even if only slightly, that Jesus existed, is easily the more rational position.
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 Ed Jones
 January 10, 2013 at 11:44 am
Crucial new historical understandings of the “Jesus Puzzle” made possible by present historical and scientific methods and knowledge.
 Schubert Ogden: “We now not only know that none of the writings of the OT is prophetic witness to Christ, we also know that none of the writings of the NT is apostolic witness to Jesus.” This is a judgment based on historical evidence determined by an insider of the Guild of NT Studies. Eric Zuesse : “The religion of the NT actually has nothing to do with the person of the historical Jesus.” This is a scientific judgment based on scientific evidence determined by an outsider. Hence we now have convincing evidence, both from the methodologies of history from inside and science from the outside, that the writings of the NT, Paul’s letters, the Gospels, as well as the later writings of the NT, are not reliable sources for knowledge of Jesus. Our most certain historical evidence can only come from within the Guild of NT Studies, even as our best scientific evidence would reasonably come from outside. No evidence, historical or scientific, is presented to question the basic tenet of the Guild that we have a NT sources containing apostolic witness to Jesus. Only from within the Guild of NT Studies might a scholar have acquired sufficient competence in the Guild’s areas of special historical knowledge, which necessarily applies, for one is to become enabled to fully access the historical evidence necessary to identify this NT source of apostolic witness to Jesus. As Eric Zuesse’s probe (Christ’s Ventriloquist) demonstrates, full historical NT details of origins of Jesus traditions during the years 30-65, can only be accessed by historical scholars from within the Guild. E.g., Eric’s probe fails to recognize that there were two distinctly different post execution movements (denominations) during this earliest period of Jesus traditions, each with its own understanding of the significance of Jesus, marked by “an extraordinarily intimate, more precisely adversarial, relationship” (H. D. Betz). Both were pre Christian, pre Gospel, partly pre Pauline. The first movement was the Jerusalem Jesus Movement which began with the key disciples returning to Jerusalem, having fled to their native Galilee, purposing to again take up the teachings of Jesus. It was from this Jesus movement, later led by James Jesus’ brother, that we have our most certain source of apostolic witness to Jesus, identified by Betz to be the Sermon on the Mount. The second movement was soon to follow, a pre Pauline Hellenist movement which introduced the notion that Jesus was the Jewish Messiah whose significance was the salvific effects of his death and resurrection, which abrogated the Torah. This was in effect treason for Temple authorities. Paul is introduced as a participant in an apparent put-down by Temple authorities of some kind of anti Torah demonstration, holding the garment of those casting the stones in the Acts story of the stoning of Stephen, the leader of this Hellenist group (a historical reading counter to authorial intent). Next we have Paul as persecutor of this group, having his “vision” on the road to Damascus to where the Hellenist group fled. This resulted in Paul’s conversion to this group, from which he received his Christ myth gospel. In taking his gospel to the Gentile world, first to Antioch meeting with early success, this had the effect of severing true knowledge of Jesus from his teaching and his Jewish roots. As winners in the struggle for dominance, becoming Gentile Christianity, Paul’s Christ myth movement soon could label the Jesus Movement heresy to effectively remove it from the pages of history. The writings of the NT took place in the Gentile world under the primary influence of Pauline kerygma, to become the source for Christianity. Paul was never a member of the Jesus Movement actually he was its arch enemy. Thus the Gospels were written by followers of Paul’s Christ Myth gospel, not followers of Jesus in the Jesus Movement. All of these developments are sufficiently documented in the NT as it is read from a historical perspective over against authorial intent. It may well be rationally determined from the writings of the NT that there was a person named Jesus, However the real Jesus in his true significance can only be obtained from our most certain NT source containing the original and originating faith and witness of the apostles.
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 Stevie Gamble
 January 11, 2013 at 1:49 am
Joe
 This is all really, really strange. I had intended to confine my remarks on this piece to a comment on Facebook, which seems to me to be a good place to note that I had been amused by the amusement afforded to you by the absence of any knowledge of Occam’s Razor in those short-changed by their absence from the Thinking 101 lectures which should have been included in what passed for their education.
After all, I have some fascinating reading in hand; top of my Christmas present wish list was Volume 2 of Martin Wiggins’ Catalogue of British Drama, and a definitely unsecret Santa came through for me, so why waste my time on this tosh?
But I’ve seen all this tosh before; delete Shakespeare and Jesus from the boilerplate text and scholarship disappears. It’s replaced in both cases by the fantasies of people who just cannot bring themselves to accept that some lower class person might have done something which has radically changed the way that human beings perceive themselves.
Of course, in choosing his starting date of 1533 Martin recognised that the explosive growth of British drama was kick started by the English Reformation, and deliberately used by Henry VIII as a propaganda tool to enable the English Reformation to take place; history is pieced together on the data that you can find and is always up for revision if you find different data.
If the massive increase in dramatic works that we can trace hadn’t happened then it would be a completely different ball game, but it did happen. Aye, there’s the rub; the mythicists want to pretend that data is dispensable, along with reason, because that’s the only way that they can arrive at their preferred destination. But if that is acceptable then everything is gone; we have neither a tall ship, nor a star to steer her by, in order to find any destination. You are perfectly free to dislike Masefield’s poetry but I am glad that you are refusing to abandon navigation…
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 brettongarcia
 January 11, 2013 at 11:25 am
Just as simple, just as parsimonious, is this theory: that the story of Jesus originates in a single fictional story.
This would explain, parsimoniously, why the character of Jesus perfectly reflects countless elements of what we know about then-contemporaneous culture: it was because that is the world that the author knew.
A writer around c. 59 AD say, looking around, could have made up a sort of Stoic “humble hero” story. As a sort of modest parable on modesty. One based on, borrowing freely from, hundreds of similar tales all around. And as many authors do, the author placed his fictional, humble heroic martyr, in the setting most familiar to him: c. 10-60 Palestine.
Nothing is simplier,more parsimonious, than this theory: someone in 10-60 AD Palestine, just made it all up.
It all began with one fictional story. And an illiterate culture that hardly knew the difference between fiction and non-fiction, took it all as literally true. Since it had so many realistic details in it. And because the theme of a humble but ultimately triumphant hero, appealed to them.
I’m not saying I support this common theory. But it does explain a lot of things, and meets a lot of your own criteria. It is for example, 1) parsimonious; and 2) it does explain why the Jesus story has so much realistic, culturally-appropriate context and detail in it.
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 rjosephhoffmann
 January 11, 2013 at 5:12 pm
@ Garcia:
To be blunt, this shows a complete lack of understanding of the principle. You are now throwing the word around Humpty Dumpty style to make it mean what you want it to say. You are also violating the principle by continuing to extrapolate beyond necessity (as the logicians use it) reasons for the existence of the artefact and its content. You say “could have made up,” which invites further speculation; “stoic hero” is a category imposed on the story, “ultimately triumphant hero” a contradictory one (stoic heroes don’t rise form the dead, they embrace death, another contradiction). The story is not unified as to any of the elements of its composition, but you assume a single author theory and intent to “create” out of thin air a non-existence hero ‘based on similar tales…” (more extrapolation needed, as to which tales), to appeal to an Illiterate” culture that didn’t know the difference between fiction and non-fiction,” but why on earth would you write something to a population that couldn’t read? Do you think this was a bedtime story? And why would a story designed with your more grand motives in view be written as by Mark in such rudimentary Greek, or Greek at all since the “hero” isn’t? Parsimony in short keeps the discussion from spinning out of control like this Catherine wheel of idle and unfounded speculation that you seem to want to insist on. There isn’t evidence for any of what you say, which is chock full of contradictory premises and is about as far about from parsimony as it’s possible to get. I suggest you give your ideas a good shave with Occam’s razor.
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 brettongarcia
 January 11, 2013 at 6:08 pm
We are looking here for a simple account, as to how it might be that the story of Jesus appeared. Especially we want to how it happened that this story seems to parallel much of what we know was happening in history, at the time. Here, the simplest explanation – is that the story was a literary creation; a single work of fiction.
This hypothesis explains many things. If the story was made up by someone who lives in that same cultural nexus as his character, Jesus, that would explain, simply, why we find so many realistic details in it: like many writers, the author was using what he knew about his own time, as his backdrop. Writing about what he knew, in part.
How does this explain the character of Jesus”? No doubt he used the setting around him. But then too, every fictional writer knows that many fictional characters too, are created in part, by putting together bits and pieces of other real persons, or other fictional characters the author has read about. So this explains how many different myths, might have been assembled into one character (“Jesus”).
Where would anyone get an idea of a dying-and-resurrecting hero? We don’t know for sure that the first story had a resurrection. Likely this story was before Mark; though for that matter, if Mark is – as many think – our earliest gospel? Then not that often much of the resurrection at the end, is of largely left out, of many Bibles.
For that matter: would the concept of a dying hero, be incomprehensible for a good Hellenistic Jewish author, say, in this timeframe? In fact, the notion of a person who dies for his country, to save his country, is one of the most common cultural cliches of all time. And it can be found in the Intertestamental works in fact; or in say 2 Maccabees 7.11-37. Where a hero dies, hoping for resurrection (7.13); giving up his life to serve as a moral example of noble self-sacrifice, to help save his country.
So how was it that so many disparate myths might contribute to one character, and one coherent narrative? No great stretch of imagination would be required for an author looking for sources for a character, to start connecting these and dozens of other myths and legends, into his own main character; this is how writers usually do it.
It might seem impossible to some; but putting together lots of bits and pieces, into a coherent narrative, is just exactly what the average writer of fiction DOES.
No great leaps of imagination, no baroque departures from reason or simplicity, are required here. The solution is simplicity itself: a Jewish writer made up a single fictional story or parable, to serve as a moral example for the people of his own time. Using bits of what he saw around him, as his inspiration.
To say someone “must made it up,” is speculation – or better, perhaps it is a useful hypothesis. It is a scenario that fits so many of the facts, as even you have described them, that finally it deserves real consideration.
It DOES have a kind of simplicity: “it’s just a story. That someone made up.”


 rjosephhoffmann
 January 11, 2013 at 6:32 pm
I guess I would say that if Anachronism could fly and lay eggs that could hatch, fly and lay eggs, this is its perfect embodiment.


 Ken
 January 12, 2013 at 1:10 am
I’ve always found the late Prof. Howard Teeple’s observations on this question in his wonderful book “How Did Christianity Really Begin” to be quite cogent.
 He states….”If the Christians had created the person of Jesus out of thin air, their story of his life would not have included features that were contrary to Jewish expectations of the coming Messiah, features which early Christians tried desperately to explain in their efforts to persuade others, especially Jews, that Jesus was the Christ and fulfilled prophecy. A fictional Jesus would have conformed much better to the messianic hope and not have generated so many difficult problems for the early Christian communities.”


 davidjohnmills
 January 12, 2013 at 5:37 am
Ken,
Good point. I used to find this somewhat persuasive too. But then I realised that the criterion of embarrassment is really a very weak tool and also, more to the point, that Jesus wasn’t, de facto, embarrassing to converts, thus wiping out much of the remaining strength of the observation.

 

 steph
 January 20, 2013 at 4:44 am
David:
You’re absolutely right. The so called criteria of embarrassment, dissimilarity and multiple attestation have been abused by scholarship. More recently they have rightly been severely criticised in recent historical New Testament scholarship (see Goodacre, Casey, etc). While they are of some value they are of very limited application. For example Perrin’s accurate labelling and description of ‘dissimilarity’ consequently led immediately to its demolition and Hooker rightly said it should no longer be used. It is obvious the criterion produces a ‘special’ or unique human being without connection to the Judaism or anything of the early Church: a special person who is therefore especially unreal. ‘Embarrassment’ has many difficulties including the fact that it’s beyond belief that the authors themselves were “embarrassed” about anything in their Gospels, unless of course you’re referring to the skandalon of the cross – but with that all the early Christians dealt with in different ways. E. P. Sanders uses the term “against the grain” instead and while this is far more useful than “embarrassment” it still has limitations. Looking for features in an account that go “against the grain” is what historians do all the time. Multiplication used as a criterion implies that traditions that are subsequently repeated, have historical strength which is wishful thinking and wrong. No criterion should never be used on its own. As soon as the criteria become a set of tools for historical Jesus scholars, they become problematic and it is particularly important to remember that ancient historians did not do the same. Historical Jesus scholars often carelessly give little thought to how the criteria work together with one another and give little attention if any to revision of method and new approaches. Method and application of previous scholarship has tended too, to be, cough, embarrassing for future New Testament critical Jesus scholarship. :-)
Reply
 

 Stevie Gamble
 January 11, 2013 at 11:46 pm
Actually, the simplest explanation is that brettongarcia is a simpleton…
Reply

 scotteus
 January 11, 2013 at 11:47 pm
Yes, please, more Parsimony with that salad; moreover, more conclusions based on what is know or assumed to be true. That’s the scholarship part; the part that takes time, effor and patience.
Reply

 davidjohnmills
 January 12, 2013 at 5:28 am
‘Alternatively, they need to show what events, causes, and conditions may have led first century writers, of no apparent skill, to fabricate the basic elements of their story. This may seem elementary because it is.’
This may be the nub. But I would dispute it, on a number of counts. First, I would suggest that the 1stC writers did not appear to lack skill, by any stretch of the imagination.
What, I might ask, caused them to invent Joseph of Arimathea? I would suggest that they had a propensity to populate their narratives with figures who fitted their bill. Why not the main character?
Reply

 rjosephhoffmann
 January 12, 2013 at 6:34 am
I see. Your point is that they did not lack skill because they invented Joseph of Arimathea and that to have invented him required skill. I hardly know how to reply, so I won’t.
The argument as to skill is not primarily about motive or detail but about language.
The earliest gospel may have been written by a man with ulterior motives–he wanted to invent a saviour god built on models of other saviour gods to provoke debate in the twentieth century–same as Obama’s mother wanted to telephone in his birth to Hawaii knowing he would run for president one day. But if that is the case, Mark is a very poor prophet. I don’t want to invoke expertise, but this is a case where a little training would prevent embarrassing suggestions like this. The gospels, with Luke as an exception that has long been recognized as the third and improved edition, are written in the kind of Greek that can only be described as pauperish and common.
I have the sense that the whole conversation is backwards: in an anxiety to deny what history has made of him, mythtics are trying to prove that he never was. That is an absurd position, though completely understandable. It does however raise the question of motive: we woud immediately diusqualify from this discusssion anyone precommitted to the belief that Jeus was the son of God. What shall we do with people who, having concluded there is no God, want to say that Jesus did not exist because he was called that? So was Augustus. So was Diocletian. So was Claudius. Or messiah–so was bar Kochba, so was Siomon of Paraea, so was Antroges, so was Menachen ben Juda, grandson of Judas of Galilee, so was… and they were all historical figures. Do you think they are historical because we know less about them than we know about Jesus, or do you think we know more about Jesus because some underskilled first century writer made him up?
Reply

 brettongarcia
 January 12, 2013 at 10:18 am
Why assume that one of the published gospels is the original one?
Especially given massive evidence of editing, redaction in essentially all of them. Crude as they sometimes are.
Even Mark is still being edited to this very day. Today you can go to a bookstore, and get an edition that ends at say 16.19 – or another one. Where an editor took out that longer ending, to terminate the text at 16.8.


 steph
 January 12, 2013 at 7:21 pm
Garcia: Nobody assumes that except fundamentalist Christians and therefore, apparently many mythtics still do too.

 
 


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The Passion of Jesus the Galilean
by rjosephhoffmann

One of the features of cults is that members are true to their own. Like-minded people, most of them religious, have been willing to die for their cause. Once empowered, they have been willing to kill for it.
In Just War and Jihad (2006) I remarked that the “lord God of hosts” was essentially a war God whose colours, arks, icons and effigies were paraded in battle. He has blood on his hands from years past until the present, inspired by sacred books and their anointed interpreters. There are no two ways about it. Religion is to violence as orange is to juice.
It isn’t true of course that secular cults will always behave as badly as religious cults have done, but the nationalist and populist movements that were provoked by the secular conscience, from the French Revolution through the Communist victories of 1949 in China, have been characterized by the collectivizing evil of like-mindedness and powerful men behaving badly.
It’s enough to make us think that real problem is Us, not It–not religion, not its opposites. If it is true we made God in our image, it is also true that what survives his death is the part of him that was always, essentially us.
The Bible is not his book. It is our book. And in historical terms, getting rid of him doesn’t mitigate the factors that went into the process that gave us a cruel, fickle, plague-happy, arrogant, and unbearable father whose laws would govern us until St Paul in a rare moment of perception said Enough.
He said this, by the way, not in his own name, but in the name of someone he claimed was the messiah and chosen one of God, sent to abrogate all previous covenants and arrangements, sent to forgive and not condemn, redeem and not to punish. Like the Misfit in Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is hard To Find,” Paul is that man who “wisht he’d a met Jesus,” because it “ain’t fair he wasn’t.”

 “I wisht I had of been there…It ain’t right I wasn’t there because if I had of been there I would of known.”
Lacking the advantage of the observers of Jesus’ teaching, Paul is free to create his own moral and theological universe.
Whatever else Paul was, he was the greatest revolutionary in history when it comes to the God-concept. His ideas were completely unhistorical and at odds with Jewish teaching: he finessed his disagreements into a cult that turned the vindictive God of his own tradition into a being capable of forgiveness. Needless to say, the way he arrives at this is angstful and tortured, but he gets there in the end–-not through tradition and law, but through a stratagem: ”Christ the Lord.” His turnabout from Judaism was so complete that his only intelligent interpreter, Marcion, believed he must have been speaking of a completely different God. As Harnack once remarked, “There was only one man in the second century who understood Paul, and he misunderstood him”.
Sad, it seems to me, that so much of the mythicist argument is based on what Paul does or doesn’t say about Jesus, considering there is a world of thought there that, cast to one side, makes it virtually impossible to know what Paul was talking about. Mythicism, among it many other dubious achievements, has achieved a new level of illiteracy in relation to Paul’s ideological and religious world.
* * *
There will never be a cult of the historical Jesus. And I have made the claim that there never could have been a cult of the historical Jesus.
His “biographers” tell the story of a man who preached a kind of mock civil disobedience, but was as critical of Jewish legalism and ritualism as it was of Roman boots in Jerusalem. They tell us he gathered an unpromising following of women and yokels (Celsus’s words, not mine), failed to achieve whatever it is he wanted to achieve, and died among thieves as an enemy of the nation.
There is absolutely nothing improbable about this story. And there is also nothing unusual about the way it was improved, given the categories, archetypes, and models of hellenistic legend-making common to the period.
Emperors were divine. That’s what the historians and the coins tell us. They ascended into heaven as a matter of right and their effigies were worshiped centuries before the Christians thought it appropriate to erect an icon of their saviour.
One has to be committed to the view that Jesus was the son of God to think he was unusual. One has to be committed to the view that he cannot have been what the gospels say he is (and they say different things, not one thing) to deny his historical existence. Paul came very close to the edge in his theology. The gnostics went over it. Orthodoxy brought it back from the cliff, but at the expense of historical interest.
Both the believer and the Jesus-denier have to begin with his atypicality–his status as someone who stands outside the flow of human events. But the gospels locate him squarely within the flow of events.
For the believer, the case for Jesus is made on the basis of holding the gospels to be true in part and whole. For the critic, the “unbeliever,” the mythicist, the gospels are simply not telling the truth or so packed with lies that it is a waste of time sorting out the true from the false, the plausible and the perhaps.
Essentially, they allege the books are a fiction devised from fragments of misremembered stories, scraps from the floor of the Greek marketplace and the Jewish bazaar–the court of the gentiles. That there is no direct evidence this is the way the gospels developed, or that the stories cited at “sources” of the Jesus legend are, at best, literary allusions of the sort hellenistic writers and hellenized Jews were fond of making is unimportant and does not need to be acknowledged. Some especially adventurous souls have suggested that the only ”real” [sic] question is whether Jesus is 95% or 100% a fiction.
My own argument is a bit different. It does not begin with a sacred text but a religious artifact dating from the first century of the common era. It is a story about a man named Jesus the Nazarene who was a healer and magician, and who followed in the radical apocalypticism of someone named John the Baptist, fell out with his Jewish contemporaries over how the law should be interpreted, and was put out of business through a conspiracy between the pharisaic sect and a few law-and-order Roman officials who feared, more than anything else, another Palestinian revolt. I am not reading between any lines to see this in the gospels. This is the story at the most superficial of levels.
Devotees of the “dying and rising god” theory of Jesus like to point to the crucifixion as the centerpiece of their theory–after all, no dying Jesus, no rising god.
But history tells it differently. Appian tells us that when the slave rebellion of Spartacus was crushed (71 BCE), the Roman general Crassus had six thousand slave prisoners crucified along a stretch of the Appian Way, the main road leading into Rome (Bella Civilia 1:120). As an example of crucifying rebellious foreigners, Josephus says that when the Romans were besieging Jerusalem in 70 A.D. the Roman general Titus crucified five hundred Jews in a day. In fact, so many Jews were crucified outside the walls of Jerusalem that “there was not enough room for the crosses and not enough crosses for the bodies” (Wars of the Jews 5:11.1).
History has singled Jesus out of this crowd for other reasons, but crucifixion was so common a punishment for slaves, rebels with various causes, and common criminals that Valerius Maximus scoffs at is as “a slave’s punishment” (servile supplicium; 2:7.12), an epithet Paul arguably puns on in calling himself a “slave for Christ” after insisting that his preaching is all about a crucified messiah (1 Cor. 2.2).
I am happy to listen to details about how the gospel writers get details of the crucifixion wrong, or how the trials of Hercules are the model for the death of Jesus, but frankly, I have no desire to read fantasy when history will do and when the sources I am reading can easily be situated in the time-frame from which they come.
In arguing that Jesus is plausible, I am simply saying that the undecorated preacher of rebellion against the enemies of God and the corruption of the temple cult was transformed into the decorated embodiment of the power of God against the power of sin, mostly through the work of one man–Paul–who knew a few stories about Jesus but had never met him in the flesh.
It is not clear to me entirely why Paul does what he does to achieve this, but two things are pretty clear: the transformation is not carried out in the earliest identifiable stratum of the gospels. When a bit later the gospels also show shades of collaborating in this transformation, especially through legendary additions, it is because Christians have had to confront the reality of failing in their original mission. In redefining themselves, they redefined their “saviour,” but in ways so incoherent that it becomes almost impossible to know what ideas might adhere to the historical individual who put it all in motion.
Thus begins a process that has defined the growth of Christianity from their day to our own time.
It is not accidental that the defining moment for this transformation from the historical to the mystical is the crucifixion–-not the resurrection, which achieves its centrality through Paul’s growing sense of its popularity with crowds, not through the gospels’ almost passive inclusion of the tale at the end of the passion narrative.
The crucifixion is central to the gospel, not just narratively but psychologically, because it was the moment of crisis for the Jesus believers. It represents that moment when their history might have ended but did not; when Jesus’ reputation for apostasy and dangerous politics caught up with him, and would have caught up with them if they had continued to preach what he preached. Somewhat hypogeally, the gospels present this outcome in stories about the desertion of the eleven and the death of Judas, the betrayer.
So, they did with him what one normally did with a dead emperor. He lives on; his genius is immortal; he lives with the gods in heaven. His failure is his triumph. Death could not hold him.
Thanks to the rapid development of Christian theology after Paul the message about him became so familiar that even Romans could accept it. The course of Christology from the second to the fourth century is the biography of the Christus Victor, the one who overcame death, and finally of Christos Pantokrator, the one who rules the universe like the sun the sky.
This imperial image completely supersedes the historical as a category we can understand, because it has sent Jesus to live as the king of kings for all eternity. From now on, we will even set our calendars by the “date” of his birth.
 It is possible to read this later development back into the gospels, but not easily and not very successfully. It was only possible for this transformation to complete itself because by the fourth century these texts were already considered sacred and, in any event, no ordinary Christians could read them.
Even if they had, they would scarcely have cared about a first century Jewish dissident who died at the beginning of his career.
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Published: January 12, 2013
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5 Responses to “The Passion of Jesus the Galilean”

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 Matthew
 January 12, 2013 at 5:45 pm
Dr. Hoffmann, what do you say in response to Evangelicals who argue that it us very unlikely, if not impossible, for the gospels to have any legendary embellishments because of the amount of time between the events that the gospels narrate and the composition of the gospels themselves? Evangelicals love to quote the late classicist A.N. Sherwin-White to make their antilegend argument cogent. Not being a classicist myself or someone who has had any formal education in the classics, I am not in any expert position to evaluate this argument.
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 rjosephhoffmann
 January 12, 2013 at 8:45 pm
The idea that the gospels are protected from legend is prima facie false; First because history writing naturally incorporated legend, allusion and parallel, as history was more closely associated with rhetoric and literature than with “science.” Second, the natural course of events that caused the gospels to be written was apologetic and propagandistic, not biographical interest as such. The gospels aren’t good history just because they may have been written within fifty years of the time of Jesus. They are biographies of what people said, thought, remembered and believed. The question of the historicity of Jesus however is not convertible to the question of what kind of history the gospels present–not without a lot of specialized analysis.
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 Matthew
 January 13, 2013 at 12:54 am
I understand your points. I am wondering if you plan on discussing this in your new book or if you would be willing to? I am especially interested in better understanding the nature of myth and legends and what stories in the New Testament are best understood as myth or legend (I assume that the two are not the same). I assume that some of the miracle stories such as the feeding of the multitude or the calming of the storm by Jesus would probably be best considered as legends.
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 rjosephhoffmann
 January 13, 2013 at 3:17 am
Yes, good point. Myths tend to be explanatory, general, etiological and legends more specific to enhancing a private reputation. The calming of the sea seems to have roots in lore, from the time of the Jonah story to its use in the stories about Hanina ben Dosa, an almost exact contemporary of Jesus thanks for asking) who is historical (we think we know his burial place) and was considered both a healer and a miracle worker. Yes, I will discuss this all in the book.
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 Ed Jones
 January 19, 2013 at 11:00 pm
Crucial new historical understandings of the “Jesus Puzzle” by certain of our top NT Studies scholars made possible by present historical and scientific methods and knowledge (given outsider concurrence with Eric Zuesse’s Christ’s Ventriloquist).
 Schubert Ogden: “We now know not only that none of the writings of the OT is prophetic witness to Christ, but also that none of the writings of the NT is apostolic witness to Jesus.” This is a judgment based on historical evidence determined by an insider of the Guild of NT Studies. Eric Zuesse : “The religion of the NT actually has nothing to do with the person of the historical Jesus. What’s known today as Christianity started with Paul, and then was developed by his followers, who wrote the canonical Gospels and the rest of the NT”. This is a judgment based on scientific evidence determined by an outsider. Hence we now have convincing evidence, both from the methodologies of history from the inside and the methodologies of science from the outside, that the writings of the NT, Paul’s letters, the Gospels, as well as the later writings of the NT, are not reliable sources for knowledge of Jesus. Our most certain historical evidence can only come from within the Guild of NT Studies, even as our best scientific evidence would reasonably come from outside. No evidence, historical or scientific, is raised to question the basic tenet of the Guild that we have a NT sources containing apostolic witness to Jesus. Only from within the Guild of NT Studies might a scholar have acquired sufficient understanding of the Guild’s areas of special knowledge, which necessarily applies, if one is to become enabled to fully access the historical evidence necessary to identify this NT source of apostolic witness to Jesus. As Eric Zuesse’s probe (Christ’s demonstrates, full historical NT details of origins of Jesus’ traditions during the years 30-65, can only be accessed by historical scholars from within the Guild. E.g., Eric’s probe fails to recognize that there were two distinctly different post Easter movements (denominations) during this earliest period of Jesus traditions, each with its own understanding of the significance of Jesus, marked by “an extraordinarily intimate, more precisely adversarial, relationship” (H. D. Betz). Both were pre Christian, pre Gospel, partly pre Pauline. The first movement was the Jerusalem Jesus Movement which began with the key disciples returning to Jerusalem, having fled to their native Galilee, purposing to again take up the teachings of Jesus. It was from this Jesus movement, later led by James the brother of Jesus, that we have our most certain source of apostolic witness to Jesus, identified by Betz to be the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:3 – 7:27). This was soon followed, a pre Pauline Jerusalem Hellenist movement which introduced the notion that Jesus was the Jewish Messiah the Son of God whose significance was the salvific effects of his death and resurrection, which abrogated the Torah. This was in effect treason for Temple authorities. Paul is introduced as a participant in an apparent put-down by Temple authorities of some kind of anti Torah demonstration, holding the garment of those casting the stones in the Acts story of the stoning of Stephen, the leader of this Hellenist group. Next we have Paul as persecutor of this group, having his “vision” on the road to Damascus to where the Hellenist group fled. This resulted in Paul’s conversion to this group, from which he received his Christ myth gospel. In taking his gospel to the Gentile world, first to Antioch meeting with early success, had the effect of severing true knowledge of Jesus from his teaching and his Jewish roots. As winners in the struggle for dominance, Paul’s Christ myth movement soon could label the Jesus Movement heresy to effectively remove it from the pages of history. Thus the writings of the NT took place in the Gentile world to become the source for Christianity. Paul was never a member of the Jesus Movement actually he was its arch oponent. The Gospels were written by followers of Paul’s Christ Myth gospel, not followers of Jesus of the Jesus Movement. All of these developments are sufficiently documented in the NT as it can be read from a historical perspective over (against authorial intent). It may well be decided from the writings of the NT that there was a person named Jesus, however the real Jesus in his true significance can only be obtained from our most certain NT source containing the original and originating faith and witness of the apostles.
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The Truth About Jesus?
by rjosephhoffmann


Jerry Coyne at “Why Evolution is True” shouted a few weeks ago that “Joe Hoffmann Knows the Truth About Jesus.“
I am much beholden to Jerry for the good news [sic] since I didn’t know I knew. But as Jerry seems to like the word “truth,” let’s talk about it..
First of all, truth is a quality of propositions in logic, not a set of facts. People are always getting that wrong, but it’s high time we got it straight.
Even the Greeks–especially the Greeks–were too smart to equate truth with facticity. It is possible, not to mention fun,  to create a valid deductive argument that is completely false: A syllogism can be true, but not valid (i.e. make logical sense). It can also be valid but not true. It depends, as an annoying logician friend never tires of telling me after two gins, on knowing your modus ponens from your modus pollens, as in

All men who rise from the dead are gods.
 Jesus rose from the dead.
 Jesus is a god.
But count on it: There is always some wanker  in the corner (usually a mathematician) not sufficiently drunk who will say, “The problem is, you see, he didn’t” (smile).  Exactly.

Second, truth is a slippery word in the sciences and that is because the sciences are more comfortable dealing with epistemological variables of a scalar variety like “certainty.” Colloquially “truth” in the form of conclusions or warranted assumptions is what you get when all the evidence stacks up in favour of a hypothesis.  And the language of “falsification” (falsifiability) was widely used in the mid-decades of the twentieth century in philosophy to refer to the testability of hypotheses  through experimentation– a very deliberate attempt to move discussion away from the receding goal of  ”truthification” meaning a level of certainty that scientific method cannot provide.
But truth in metaphysics means something completely different.  Scientists normally have no interest in metaphysics because if they do they end up having to discuss things like the soul and the eternity of ideas, and if you want to make a scientist squirm start talking about those things.For that reason, scientists often group theology and metaphysics together as belief in fairies, while philosophy and theology have poignantly rejoined, Oh yeah?
To be a little more serious,  it is is perfectly reasonable to ask the question, What are the facts about Jesus?  I am happy to approach that question without the obvious rejoinder, It depends on what you mean by fact. Facts should not be subject to what you mean by them; if that’s your fancy you are talking about opinions. In my little outline of the Jesus book, I was not talking about what I mean by facts that I ascertain from some private knowledge or speculation; I was talking about what might be plausibly concluded on the basis of certain very limited and provisional criteria for establishing historicity: context, conditions, and coordinates.  This does indeed leave much in the realm of opinion, but it is the kind of working opinion that Socrates (and science) calls θεωρία–theory, and as all scientists know, theories are susceptible to grades of proof based on types of evidence. The same goes for historical inquiry.

Sometimes in such inquiry,  facts hide behind, under and on top of opinions. This is especially true in the artifact evidence we call the gospels. It is a fact for example that Mark or someone who wrote a piece of lore that goes by his name, said that Jesus was the son of God. Even if you take that statement as, properly speaking, false or fraudulent, it remains a fact that it is said.Saying it does not make it a fact that Jesus was the son of God.  If to be logical we want to put it this way, the statement is not falsifiable. But neither does it mean that Jesus is not the son of God.  Because the prior question (which too many mythicists and amateurs take for granted at their methodological peril) , is what did the writer mean when he called Jesus the son of God? That is not a metaphysical or theological question–though heaven knows after almost 2000 years it is hard to see it any other way.  It is a linguistic question.
More important, the gospels are full of pesky questions like that–language that taken at face value won’t even get you a nose.  To get at the facts we have to distinguish layers of meaning, cope with ambiguity, linguistic disparity, translation difficulties.  We also have to be aware of the type of literature we are dealing with: no one is quite sure what a gospel is (though theories abound),but there are a few works like them in the ancient world. But one thing we know they aren’t:  collections of facts.

Jerry is quite right that much of my outline sounds very much like a plausibility argument and that plausibility is a weak place to begin discussion of the historicity of Jesus:

While I haven’t yet read his book, since it hasn’t been written, Hoffmann’s analysis seems to be more a matter of opinion and plausibility rather than of solid historical documentation. And, when it comes to the existence of Jesus, “plausibility” arguments are all that historicism can adduce. They’ve never settled the issue, or even come close.
But to use his favourite word, this is not true. Look at the phrase “solid historical documentation.”
It is a good phrase but totally useless in sorting through much of ancient literature, where much of what we have to go on is neither solid nor (in the modern sense of objective reporting)  historical .
That is where plausibility comes in. Plausibility’s no a substitute for argument and evidence. It is a precondition for argument based on interpretation  of facts–meager, disguised, reversed, buried and otherwise hard to catch by the throat. Without establishing that Jesus in one stratum of the tradition about him–namely, the gospels– is a  plausibly historical figure there would be no sense saying that he is arguably historical. A Jesus who in all or most particulars violates the conditions, coordinates and context of his time would certainly be mythical, because mythical figures tend to operate in the service of an enveloping story–the sort of thing Paul does with Jesus by transforming him into the Lord at whose name every knee must bend–a timeless symbol of salvation and redemption from sin.
 There is no doubt at all that there is a is a mythical Jesus, and we already know where to find him.  My point is simply that the plausible Jesus of the gospels is not that figure. This is where the process begins.
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Published: January 17, 2013
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28 Responses to “The Truth About Jesus?”

.
 Dan Gillson
 January 17, 2013 at 5:26 pm
Nice try, but this probably too much for Jerry Coyne’s pea brain. He’ll probably just call “Straw man!” in response to it.
Reply

 Matthew
 January 17, 2013 at 8:23 pm
I don’t know why Dr. Coyne would want to weigh in. If Dr. Hoffmann were commenting about evolutionary biology (Dr. Coyne’s speciality) then Dr. Coyne would have the full expertise to comment in response. I respect Dr. Coyne as a scientist. But I would hate for him to make the same mistake that Richard Dawkins did. Dr. Dawkins tried his hand at being a philosopher of religion with his amateurish book *The God Delusion* only to make a clown of himself. I don’t want Dr. Coyne to marginalize himself. It’s great if he sticks to writing books about evolution and popularizing science for laymen such as myself. I don’t want to see Dr. Coyne make a case for mythicism only to consign himself to the fringe realm of Jesus scholarship like Richard Carrier is doing. But I can’t stop Dr. Coyne.
Reply

 stevenbollinger
 January 18, 2013 at 1:53 pm
I don’t want to defend Coyne’s or Dawkins’ remarks on Jesus or the Bible or early Christianity. But how did it come to pass that such highly-educated people (and throw PZ Meyers into that mix) are so woefully ignorant of subjects which interest them so much? I’m familiar with the “fundamentalist atheist” accusation, and it certainly has some merit, but I wonder whether it alone can account for a state of affairs in which someone as brilliant as Dawkins is so far from brilliant when he begins to pontificate about the Judeo-Christian-Islamic religion. Is it not the job — one of the jobs — of scholars to educate the public about their specialities? If the average layman is much better-educated about evolution than about Jesus, shouldn’t New Testament scholars take just a little bit of the responsibility for that? Is it necessary, for example, to use the term “kerygma” when writing in English, instead of “preaching”? Should Biblical scholars continue to complain about the public not understanding them, or should they try harder to be understood?
Reply

 Stevie
 January 18, 2013 at 6:31 pm
One of the curiosities of the fundamentalist atheist clique is that the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopalian Church knows a great deal more about evolution than the vast majority of the ardent devotees who stand in line for Richard Dawkins to autograph their books; she did post-doctoral research in marine biology.
Admittedly squids and human beings may not, at first sight, look hugely similar but on the one occasion that I heard her preach she tackled the question of the fear of the ‘other’ in evolutionary terms.
Of course, she’s married to a mathematician…


 steph
 January 19, 2013 at 5:00 am
I suppose ‘interest’ in a subject could identify an obsessive compulsion to destroy indiscriminately…
Stevie, that is indeed a delightfully curious fact. :-)


 stevenbollinger
 January 19, 2013 at 9:25 am
Stevie, steph, you both assiduously avoided my point, which has to do neither with the scientific competence of religious leaders nor with the compulsions of fundamentalist atheists, but is, more plainly put: what are Biblical scholars going to do about the public’s ignorance of the current state of your scholarship? Mockery and fault-finding will only get you so far.
But perhaps you enjoy being misunderstood. Which I can understand. Many’s the time I have only half-ironically sung along with Pete Townshend as he only partly-sarcastically sang:
Just wanna be misunderstood
 Wanna be feared in my neighborhood
 Just wanna be a moody man
 Say things that nobody can understand
I wanna be obscure and oblique
 Inscrutable and vague
 So hard to pin down
 I wanna leave open mouths when I speak
 Want people to cry when I put them down
I can understand what Pete is singing about there, most definitely. But like I said, and go ahead and ask Pete about this too, it’ll only take you so far.


 steph
 January 19, 2013 at 5:53 pm
Ironically I wasn’t disagreeing with your comment Steven, and my comment was directed at Dawkins and the other ‘highly educated’ celebrity atheists, who devote so much time to critique and little to inquiry. I should have left it unsaid in this context. Coincidentally, yesterday I listened to an hour long repeat recording broadcast again from October 2012 (and I remember listening to it then – I always tune into Kim) of a wonderful interview on Radio New Zealand with Kim Hill. She was talking to Pete Townshend who had just published his autobiography ‘Who I Am’ about his life, music and the others. Speaking of being misunderstood and as you so sweetly gave us Pete’s song, I’ll respond with a song for you from Aotearoa – a local band here born in the 70s: Split Enz (Tim or Neil Finn wrote it ;-)
Nobody listens to a word that I say
 And at work I’m just a foremans tool
 Sitting in the corner with my coffee & tray
 All the secretaries think I’m a fool
I don’t wanna suffer these conditions no more
 Haven’t I the right to say
 I don’t wanna suffer these conditions no more
 Nobody takes me seriously anyway
 Nobody takes me seriously anyway
 Nobody takes me seriously anyway
Loves not a glimpse, it’s a permanent rinse
 And it keeps you on your toes all day
 Every girl I met seemed to get apathetic
 When I looked at her that special way
I can’t get nobody else to take me for real
 They like to keep me tucked away
 Even if they listened to what I had to say
 Nobody’d take me seriously anyway
 Nobody takes me seriously anyway
 Nobody takes me seriously anyway
If war broke out I’d be the last one to know
 If there was a fire they’d just leave me to burn
 I got just as much to say as any man
 But I never seem to get my turn
I don’t wanna suffer these conditions no more
 Haven’t I the right to say
 I don’t wanna suffer these conditions no more
 Nobody takes me seriously anyway
 Nobody takes me seriously anyway
 Nobody takes me seriously anyway
(Nobody takes me seriously)
 Nobody.. no, no, no-nobody…


 Ian
 January 22, 2013 at 3:44 pm
It happened because we naturally give far more weight to voices in our own tribe. The voices that Coyne & co. feel are tribes-people are those that advocate fringe historical ideas, and so they give far more weight to them. When we read or listen to someone outside our tribe we already know we disagree with them, so we hear everything through the lens of knowing they’re wrong. When we listen to those within our tribe, we know we agree, and the agreeing comes naturally.
The same thing happens with creationists, of course. Intelligent people can believe the worst science, because their knowledge is weighted by the beliefs of the person speaking.
That we’re here is partly the fault of academic biblical studies. It has not, and does not strongly enough distance itself from confession.
And that is because the discipline is so overwhelmingly funded by vested interests. Even in the most ardently secular institutions, religion departments are the size they are because so many religiously motivated students pay to take their courses. Historians of Alexander would love access to such student cash!
Then you look at scholarly bodies. Say, the SBL, with its denominational special interest groups. Or the uneasy entwining of many secular religions school with seminaries. Particularly in the UK, all the secular theology departments I know get part of their cash from training ministers. It is easy to conclude that the whole thing is fundamentally allied to religious motive and purpose. Which is a clear marker, if you’re a particular kind of atheist, of the enemy tribe.
This is why Coyne can drop inuendoes about James McGrath being a creationist. That’s just indicative of the tribal boundaries he’s drawn, and how he perceives people in the enemy tribe.
This whole mess has almost nothing to do with facts, arguments, or any other such thing. And its solution is not better arguments, or clearer presentation of the facts, I don’t think. It is finding ways to break down the tribalism.


 stevenbollinger
 January 23, 2013 at 10:34 am
Ian: at long last, a reply which finds some of the fault for this tiresome feud on the side of Biblical scholars. It’s not 100% clear to me whether you’re accusing Biblical scholars, as well as New Atheists, of tribalistic tendencies: if not, let me just go ahead and explicitly make that accusation myself.
Biblical scholars’ criticisms of New Atheists are not necessarily inaccurate, but Lord Shiva the Destroyer, they do get monotonous at times. Not less monotonous than the New Atheists’ attacks against the Biblical scholars.
It’s clear to me that the Biblical scholars have a much better grasp of their own discipline than the New Atheists. (And haven’t I been saying so, repeatedly? Jeebus!) What I’m advocating here is, as you put it, breaking down the tribalism. Reaching across the tribal barriers. Again, I see the biblical scholars behaving as a tribe, and I’m not sure whether or not you do. Sometimes they address the great unwashed as if from a high pulpit. That’s not surprising. It has been the major way of making a living for those who study the Bible for a rather long time now, and the condescending tone of many of the “popular” books of Biblical scholars is very similar to that of sermons. It’s the tone of a tribe which became thoroughly used to being exempt from challenges from those outside the tribe. And sometimes they appear to just be talking amongst themselves. Which for 1500 years or so they were able to do without constant interruptions from layman, so who can blame them if they become a bit testy now and then? But what is Hoffmann’s intent above? Does Hoffmann really want to get through to Coyne? Or is his aim more to give other Biblical scholars a chuckle at Coyne’s expense?
Answers which boil down to “Coyne started it!” don’t interest me. I don’t belong to Hoffmann’s tribe, or Coyne’s, or anybody else’s.

 

 Drew
 January 23, 2013 at 6:01 pm
So you are suggesting that we who can see the Emperor is naked spend time examining every intricate detail of his vestments? Dawkins has the exact same qualification as any theologian to talk about religion, which is none at all.
Reply

 steph
 January 23, 2013 at 8:12 pm
Scholarship specifically trained in the cultures, languages and historical contexts of biblical and religious literature and history of religious ideas and traditions, often expressing special interests in other fields such as anthropology, sociology, and ancient and modern history, is sufficiently qualified to discuss religious origins. Dawkins is not qualified, you’re right.


 Stevie
 January 24, 2013 at 5:47 am
Drew
Drew
I don’t have the scholarship necessary to engage in the sort of work which Joe does; I am lousy at languages – little Latin and less Greek, and the little Classical Latin I knew went years ago because it was replaced with the somewhat changed Latin used in the English State Papers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, where I am historically most at home.
Now it may be that you are brilliant at languages and could easily learn all the ones you need; in that case you would do so and move forward to learning all the other skills which Steph mentions in her post.
Those are going to be a great deal harder for you because your post makes it clear that you are utterly clueless as to what doing
 history involves. Nevertheless, if you do achieve it you will probably end up being profoundly bored by people who tout their abysmal ignorance as if it were something to be proud of…

 
 

The Truth About Jesus? | ChristianBookBarn.com says:
 January 17, 2013 at 10:44 pm
[...] Recommended Article FROM http://rjosephhoffmann.wordpress.com/2013/01/17/the-truth-about-jesus/ [...]
Reply

 threecheersforreason
 January 17, 2013 at 11:05 pm
Professor Coyne is a smart guy, but he is burdened with some kneejerk sensitivities and prejudices which ought to be ameliorated by his scientific perspective but which, unfortunately, are not. He is, for example, sensitive about his physical appearance, so it’s really mean of you to post such unflattering photos of him; funny, too! I’m looking forward to the book with great anticipation.
Reply

 Tim O'Neill
 January 18, 2013 at 2:28 am
” … solid historical documentation … ”
This is something I keep finding with Mythers. Many of them come to the subject from a science background and a high school level grasp of how history is studied. They seem to think that it’s just a matter of looking up the relevant “solid historical documentation” and – presto! – you know what happened. Applying their standards for Jesus to some other ancient figures and showing them that, by these standards, virtually no-one “existed” brings one of two results: (i) sullen silence or (ii) a loud declaration that history can’t be studied at all because it is not science.
Nuance and interpretation, uncertainty and concepts like “the argument to the most likely explanation” leave these people blinking with near total incomprehension.
Reply

 Steven Carr
 January 18, 2013 at 6:48 am
Tim O’Neill is right.
Many people come from a science background Iincluding Coyne) and expect solid historical documentation.
What can be done with such people except teach them not to expect solid historical documentation?
Reply

 Matthew
 January 18, 2013 at 1:17 pm
Tim, you may well be right about this. I personally think that many Mythers suffer from “Apostate Syndrome”. Many of them are former fundamentalists who feel scammed by Christian fundamentalism and are angry about it. Several of them believe that science is the one true method of finding all facts and truth. If it could be proven that the gospel story of Jesus was pure myth with no historical person as its core, then they would be delighted. They would feel vindicated by it. Proving that Jesus never existed would be the ultimate egg-on-the-face of the churches.This is the biggest reason why so many fundamentalists-turned-atheists find Richard Carrier’s work so magnetic; he is their hero who is giving them the expert tools to humiliate fundamentalism once and for all. It’s tragic but true.
P.S. Tim, if you are the fellow I think you are, then you have a blog where you post book reviews. How is your response of Fitzgerald’s review of your book review coming along?
Reply
 

 Justin
 January 18, 2013 at 3:11 am
Brilliant Joe. As usual. Right to the heart of the matter. You are doing everyone an enormous favour actually taking time to respond to this kind of thing. Thanks.
Reply

 vinnyjh57
 January 18, 2013 at 7:16 am
My point is simply that the plausible Jesus of the gospels is not that figure. This is where the process begins.
True, but far too often in the field of historical Jesus studies, and from all points on the spectrum I might add, there is a whole lot of time spent on plausible in the hopes that no one will notice that the probable part isn’t much more than smoke and mirrors.
Reply

 Ed Jones
 January 18, 2013 at 3:20 pm
I follow the present understanding of those I perceive to be our top NT Studies historical scholars: NONE of the writings the NT, the letters of Paul, the Gospels, as well as the later writings of the NT are apostolic witness to the HJ, thus our traditoinal canon is not a reliable source for knowledge about Iesus. Our knowledge of the real Jesus is derived from a non traditional canon, the NT source which contains the original and originating faith and witness of the apostles. This has been identified to be the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:3 – 7:27). This is suffieiently documented in the NT. If anyone finds the interest, I will be pleased to attempt further discussion.
Reply

 Ed Jones
 January 19, 2013 at 12:24 pm
This is to say the solution to the “Jesus Puzzle” can only come from the Guild of NT Studies, I make the uncoditional claim that we have the solution in the works of our top NT Studies scolars. Those who have reached ther understanding under the force of present historical methods and knowledge. Basic to this undedrstanding is the conclusion that none of the writings of the NT, the letters of Paul, the Gospels, as well as the later writings of the NT satisfy the fundamental criteria of apostolic witness to Jesus, thus all are not reliable sources for knowledge of Jesus. We have a dfinite historical path well documented in the NT which leads to the text Matthew 5:3 – 7:27, named the Sermon on the Mount by Agustine, which is our most certain source containing the original and originating faith and witness of the apostles.
Reply
 

 Ken
 January 19, 2013 at 12:06 am
With all due respect, I believe premises are either true or false, while arguments are either valid and sound or valid and unsound, at least according to Irving Copi and his book “Introduction to Logic”, which was the standard text used in my university when I was a student.
Reply

 rjosephhoffmann
 January 19, 2013 at 2:06 am
We don’t disagree but a syllogism does not require a premise to be true for the conclusion based on arranged terms to be valid … That is the point — that truth is a quality of propositions
Reply
 

Mythicists at Long Last Ready to Embrace Mainstream Historical Methods Like Divination? says:
 January 22, 2013 at 8:42 am
[...] Joseph Hoffmann responds to Jerry Coyne. [...]
Reply

 brettongarcia
 January 23, 2013 at 5:50 pm
The Plausible Jesus though, is still not quite an Historical Jesus.
Many things are possible; but no all possibilities are realized, in real life or history.
Reply

 rjosephhoffmann
 January 24, 2013 at 6:27 am
Who has equated plausibility with historicity. Not me. At the same time mythical and legendary figures are normally totally implausible, so establishing context (etc.) becomes a precondition for any serious discussion of historicity. I have already said that the Jesus whom Paul makes the centre of his theology is a mythical figure, Christ the Lord. I have begun to suggest that the Jesus of the gospels is historically plausible given the three criteria I have used and which now need to be examined in detail using a systematic process. Quibbling over equivalences that have not been made and in fact are contrary to the way the argument must unfold is not very helpful. You seem to have committed yourself to the untenable axioms of mythicism, beginning with the ludicrous proposition that if Paul knew there was an historical Jesus he would have mentioned him. In fact of course, he does; and he also tells us why he can’t really use him for this theology except as a kind of “conditio sine qua non” because his crucifixion is a scandal and an embarrassment. I wish you would adopt a pre-canonical view of the evidence and consider for a moment that the letters of Paul and the gospels are two entirely different sorts of “information,” the latter a late second century religious memoir, the former a glimpse of how early believers under the guidance of a number of competing torrents of interpretation began to view the significance of a dead leader. (I have a feeling your immediate response will be to mention the resurrection: control your urge and spare me the trouble of explaining here what the book will make clear) -rjh
Reply
 

 scotteus
 January 24, 2013 at 9:26 pm
It seems the goal of all the study, research and speculation is as it has been stated before: the pain-staking task of separating ancient history from ancient myth-laden history.
Reply

 Ed Jones
 January 27, 2013 at 2:28 pm
Beyond “what migfht be plausibly concluded”, our sole “solid historical documentation” of New Testament evidence for knowledge of Jesus is the original and originating faith and witness of the apostoles. The origins of this historical evidence is the NT documentation of the event of the key disciples, neaming Peter, James and John, returning to Jerusalem soon after the execution (witin weeks?) purposing to again take up the teachings of their revered Master. From this beginning collections of sayings of Jesus were made to produce our most certain source containing this apostolic witness, the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:3 – 7:27), dated mid first century a contemporary of Paul’s Letter to the Galatians. All sufficiently documented in the New Testament.
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Sonnet 65: To Carolyn in Winter
by rjosephhoffmann


Landing in New York I smelled the breeze
of the jet-way. I inhaled it as home. Home.
The guy at immigration was all Please
and thank you, Where you been–Awesome.
But Hey, you are home, he said,  enjoy it.
I prowled for gifts, flew out toward Syracuse,
to a wife whose face once beautiful was ripped
with the agony of my arrival. How are you?
And you, I said. It must be cold. It is she said.

In Ithaca she poured gin, and said her lover’s name,
and how sometimes in the hard white weather dead
love stays dead, how then you have to find the same
thing you killed in another, whose unrepentant heart
follows yours on a mapless trail from finish to start.
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Published: January 25, 2013
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The Poet Laments His Lack of Wit
by rjosephhoffmann


I think in epithet
And deadly rhyme.
I think I simply do it
To save time.

I do not ever say
“I love you so.”
I say, in Auden’s way,
“It’s sad to go.”

I see your face before me
And I cry,
Quelle peine! Nécessité!
How love doth die!

I have no subtlety
That’s truly mine.
What I call poetry
Is  others’ rhyme.

I thieve the threads
Of poets who are better;
I tear them into shreds
Or add a letter.

I think in epithet
And deadly rhyme.
I think I simply do it
To save time.
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Published: January 27, 2013
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2 Responses to “The Poet Laments His Lack of Wit”

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 stevenbollinger
 January 27, 2013 at 1:36 pm
I don’t bother to rhyme
Which saves even more time
Reply

 steph
 January 27, 2013 at 7:42 pm
You make tradegy, witty, with brief rhyme. I love rhyme – balance and pleasing onomatopoeically. It seems natural. It must be something taoist in me. It’s sad.
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Mythicism: Anything Goes?
by rjosephhoffmann

The Jesus Process
1.  Plausibility and Possibility
In a few previous posts I’ve talked about the weight of “plausibility” in assessing arguments for the historicity of Jesus. A few commenters have correctly said that plausibility is not evidence. That’s true.  No one said it  was.

Plausibility is a precondition for managing the kinds of information that would be suitable for discussing a character like Jesus of Nazareth.  A plausible cabbage is a cabbage that is not being passed off as a cucumber.  Socrates–even without much evidence for his existence, outside dialogues attributed to him by a pupil whose dates and specifics are also sketchy–is typical of a range of fifth century Athenian philosophers.  He is thus plausible as Herakles is not. Franklin D. Roosevelt and Clark Kent were contemporaries in 1938; only one is plausible.

It is the minimal distinction between what is typical and what is unusual (or, strictly, incredible) that permits us to raise questions about plausibility. It’s true that a good writer can invent plausible figures, but in fact the characteristic of literature called verisimilitude (roughly, “believability”)  in its evolved form (realism) is a feature of modern literature that grows out of particular schools of writing–especially naturalism in fiction. Dreiser’s departure from Victorian novels of manners and morals in Sister Carrie (1900) is a good example. In the previous history of fiction, characterization was often stereotyped to reflect the moral or ideological prescriptions of the day. The raison d’etre of a literary or dramatic figure was to represent a virtue,  a vice, a fate, or teach a lesson–until relatively recently.  One of the incidental reasons to think that the Jesus of the gospels is not a stock or contrived figure is the lack of literary unity with respect to his character.  While countless scholars have seen this feature (including Schweitzer)  as “mysterious”, it is probably merely a function of inconsistencies among traditions.
In Aristotle’s era, dramatic heroes like Agamemnon or Odysseus possessed what was called “magnitude” (μέγεθος) or larger-than-lifeness, not life-likeness, even though he specifies a “grounding in reality” as the basis for all good dramatic art, which he regarded as an imitation (mimesis) of reality. Even plausible figures in ancient literature tend to be  highly constructed, and in cases where the figure is typically heroic–Seneca’s Hercules Oetaeus, for example–the artifice of the writer and artificiality of the figure are transparent.  A writer with the skill to make a Jay Gatsby or a Bruce Babbitt as opposed to a stock figure like Lucian’s Peregrinus (who may have been historical) would have been implausible in himself.
To say that Jesus is a plausible figure is thus merely to say the following: (1) His description fits the historical matrix from which it comes; (2) Allowing only for the credulity of writers and listeners of the time, there is nothing especially surprising about this description that would cause us to conclude it is fabricated or composed from assorted myths and legends, and (c) Lacking any positive grounds for thinking that the figure was invented through the fraudulence or malice of legend-spinners, it is more economical to think that it is a story (not an historical record) based upon the life and work of an historical individual. Saying only this and no more is saying that we prefer plausible explanations to more extravagant ones: that is what Occam’s razor requires us to do–to utilize and exploit the possibilities before us before spinning off into other possibilities that do not arise organically from the material in front of us and its closest known correlates.

The first “great” naturalistic novel, 1900
2. The Hegelian ‘Fallacy’
The older and more extravagant forms of mythicism came to light out of the Religionsgeschichtliche Schule, associated with the German universities, especially Göttingen and Tübingen. The names of the leaders of the school–Bernard Duhm, Albert Eichhorn , Hermann Gunkel, Johannes Weiss, Wilhelm Bousset, Alfred Rahlfs, Ernst Troeltsch, William Wrede and others–are known, primarily, only  to scholars.
 Most of the group (never really a school) were German protestant theologians, though they eventually had Catholic sympathizers like Alfred Loisy and a few so-called Catholic modernists.  Wrede (d. 1906) is perhaps the most famous of the lot for his work on the so-called “messianic secret” in the gospel of Mark, arguing that many elements of the gospel tradition were secondary and rationalistic– that the real source of Christianity’s success is a mythological interpretation of the life of Jesus rather than the teaching of Jesus ( “another backwater Jewish sect”) and other equally controversial ideas that were considered radical in their time.
The radicals and left Hegelians, like the history of religions club, were influenced by the idea that history moves in predictable patterns, under the influence of recombinant conditions ( a Zeitgeist  that shapes, alters,  synthesizes and recreates “ideas.”)  The Zeitgeist was, of course, a metaphysical construct but was often spoken of as though it was a real factor of change.  Hegel describes it as much:

Spirit does not toss itself about in the external play of chance occurrences; on the contrary, it is that which determines history absolutely, and it stands firm against the chance occurrences which it dominates and exploits for its own purpose. (Phenomenology of Spirit)
It is impossible to overstate the influence of the rival interpretations of Kantian and Hegelian philosophy on the New Testament scholars of the nineteenth and twentieth century.  I mention it here because one of the results of that influence was to assume that history is a form of ideological coalescence, a process where events and personalities invest other ideas, personalities and events to create the contexts in which we live–our “present.”  Truth resides in a complex outcome driven by the spirit of time and simplicity is hardly achievable at all as the flux continues.  For the same reason, the “original” idea is not as important as the unevolved idea: what stands at the end of the process, however temporary, is what is intended, “how things are.”
Hegelianism made its energy felt in fields as removed as geology, biology, archaeology, theology and philology: it gave us words like “evolution” and “synthesis” and “syncretism.” Even the conservative John Henry (later Cardinal) Newman wrote his famous 1878 essay “On the Development of Christian Doctrine” under its spell.  The belief that a single-minded monistic God directed the course of the world gave way to the belief in processes molding and remolding phenomena according to an”absolute” purpose.   Even early views of natural selection could be described as telic and purposive rather than “accidental” using Hegel’s idea of spirit and purpose as the unseen forces of change in history.
The application of Hegelian ideas  to theology and to biblical studies was simultaneous as the areas were taught in parallel fashion in the German faculties. The first doctrine that came under scrutiny was “inspiration”– whether the New Testament was a sui generis book delivered whole-cloth through divine revelation to inerrant scribes, or whether like other historical monuments it could be read and seen as a document of its time.  Slowly and irrevocably, Hegelian principles began to gnaw away at the doctrine of divine authorship  The notion that there were lots of messiahs  lots of saviors  lots of resurrections  and lots of parallels between Christianity and other ancient religions was exciting stuff in the theological lecture halls of 19th century Germany. If you can imagine what sexy scholarship looked like circa 1890, think Göttingen and Tübingen.
On the one hand, it was no longer possible to say that Jesus was unique, or even very different from his Jewish context.  On the other, more Hellenistic side, it was no longer possible to see the Christian salvation myth as entirely different from other salvation myths.
As an uneven amalgam of these two traditions (not to mention, a cake- batter blend of the two in certain sections of the fourth gospel) , it was tempting to conclude that the Jesus problem could be solved using Hegelian tools. That is what Strauss’s disciples thought  and later what Baur and Drews in Germany and a few radical Dutch and American scholars began to believe. In a word, they bought versions of the Hegelian “conglomerate” model hook, line and sinker, thinking that only theological conservatism prevented their colleagues from acknowledging the composite and basically artificial nature of the New Testament sources.

There are too many problems with the various Hegelian models to discuss them here but it may be enough to point to the most obvious one.  Concerning the implicit “theodicy” of Hegel’s view  the best place to start is with Thedor Adorno’s piercing Negative Dialectics.
Hegelianism is an overgeneralized way of dealing with historical processes.  In the long run, things run the course they run–influenced by the conditions under which they develop, like water at freezing point. An event in historical terms is a singularity no matter how influences bear on its occurrence.  Even the most rigid determinist would be hard pressed to say that Hegel’s ideas constitute a law of development.
Thus, in one sense, every historical event is unique. In another sense, it has many parallels  It is unique in the sense that it forms an Archimedian point of occurrence that does not share space with any other point; but like the stars in the sky, its analogies are not only obvious but help us to distinguish it from other events.  The key to defining a particular historical moment lay in its differentiation from what is parallel and similar.
That is why, with respect to the New Testament artifacts,  it is important to emphasize both the familiarity and unfamiliarity of the Jesus event. From the gospels we gather (or can reasonably conclude) that it was rather ordinary: the story is told  on a superficial level, with  allusions to ambient events–politics, rulers, sects, religious customs–but very little in the way of character development in the documents themselves.
We are given basic information to the effect that Jesus of Nazareth belonged to an established ablutionist sect of preacher-wonder-working dissidents who lived on the edge of Jewish popular opinion and “mainstream” sects,  and rapidly deteriorating tolerance of such characters.  The basic narrative provided in the gospels does not make Jesus unique, however; it absolutely situates him in the time and place where he is reckoned to have lived. Even at the point in the gospels where a mythic savior or celestial hero would defy death on Golgotha, smite his enemies and rise laughing into the heavens (as some strands of Gnosticism taught, the hell-harrowing Jesus of the Gospel of Nicodemus, and even the Christ of Philippians 2.5-11), the canonical Jesus simply dies a gloomy death, with only a drum roll and minor stage business thrown in to mark it.

Christ harrows hell
Some responders who are deeply committed to mythicism (and use the word “historicism,” rather absurdly, to describe a “belief” in the historicity of Jesus) cling to a notion that the existence of the gospels do not “prove” that Jesus exists because it is just as “plausible” that
(a) they (the writers) were wrong about him or,
(b) they are talking about some other Jesus or some other character by some other name who was wearing a Jesus wig;  or
(c) are, for amusement or malice,  making the whole thing up.
Unfortunately, each of these invitations to skepticism is non-parsimonious; that is, they ask us without warrant to lay to one side the concrete information and what it says in favour of alternative explanations not warranted by either internal or external reasons for doing so.  Parsimony does not ask us to put skepticism on hold; it asks us to use skepticism methodologically rather than as a Pyrrhonic silver key that, at the extreme, calls final certainty about anything into question.  The effect of unbridled, unsystematic Pyrrhoinism has always been antagonistic to final knowledge about anything and mythtic utilization of the “It could be this, or that, or anything else, or nothing at all” suggests that sort of indifference to  a constructive skeptical approach to the Bible.  Hume’s rejection of Pyrrhonism might apply: “Philosophy would render us entirely Pyrrhonian, were not nature too strong for it.” In short, the prior question–”What are we dealing with in the New Testament books and how can it efficiently be described” cannot begin with the belief that  all explanations have the same status and that all those rendering opinions have the same capacity to render good ones.

Sextus Empiricus, recorder of Pyrrhonism
The appropriate response to (c) is that while there is every reason for a gospel monger like Paul to make things up, given the fact that he is confronted directly–perhaps within two decades– with a post-crucifixion crisis in the life of a small band of religious orphans, there is no equally compelling reason for a gospel writer to do so.  Indeed, the way in which the synoptic  gospels confront the crucifixion has little symmetry with Paul’s expansive notion that the resurrection of Jesus is a “fate” that can be experienced by all believers, given a little tinkering with the definition of σάρξ (flesh).
The gospels seem early enough and linked enough to Judaism to resist applying the literal fable of Jesus’ resurrection to his followers.  Paul seems far enough away or disconnected enough from the Jewish context into which Jesus fits to explicitly attribute the effects of the resurrection to all those who are “in Christ.” Indeed, that is why his brand of Christianity succeeds where the slow tale of a Galilean wonder-worker would not have attracted or sustained attention. The theological positions are radically different.  Examination of the contents of these (accidentally) canonical artifacts has to begin with accounting for this radical difference, and a primary question would have to be: Why would any two writers “just making things up” make up such completely different stories? (That by the way is the subject of a chapter in the book, not a blog topic.)
As to (b) a rough application of the rule of economy would suggest that the artifact evidence is evidence of a man named Jesus, whose name, career and fate correspond to the careers and fates of others of the time.  A coincidence of a common name is evidence of a common name, and evidence of a common name ascribed to a similar career holds for very little unless one is wedded to dates certain for the gospels   For reasons I will try to make clear in my book, I hold to a relatively early date for significant portions of the gospels, not because I wish to stick them closer to the time of the “historical Jesus” but because in terms of their rationalization of his fate and what can be made of it, the gospels  like new wine, are a little thin. By the same token, “Jesus could have been anybody” does not respond to the fact that the gospels say that Jesus was an historically-located somebody, and as we’ve said before on this site, arguments from analogy and similarity would only be useful if we had satisfactorily exhausted the possibility that the gospels are substantially wrong in their descriptions.  Thus far, that case has not been made.
As to (a), that Jesus is “made up,” or is a deliberate fiction in the service of religious cult: a consistent application of economy would require us to state reasons for the fabrication. What is the likely social context for making up a rather dull story about a failed messianic prophet from Galilee, especially when that story flies in the face of essential parts of later mythological construals like Paul’s. A strong reason for the existence of the story would be that the story had wide appeal because the man was popular and people rem embered him, and that eventually these reminiscences, inconsistent and partial as they are, found their way into writing and then were copied, and by “John” greatly modified . 
The weak reason for the existence of the Jesus story is that is that an unknown scribe, with time on his hands  decided to tell a story.  Two centuries of careful work on the gospel suggests that the second explanation is absurd.  I will deal with that topic in my next post.
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Published: January 29, 2013
Filed Under: Uncategorized
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59 Responses to “Mythicism: Anything Goes?”

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 Antonio Jerez
 January 29, 2013 at 4:50 pm
Excellent! Another nail in the coffin of the mythicists.
Reply

 Justin
 January 29, 2013 at 5:16 pm
Joe,
You really have put all your thoughts on this together and publish it. Good on the blog but would be really helpful for all kinds of people and years to come. As ever, cogent, elegant and incisive. Useful antidote to the fanciful, irrational, fairy tales out there.
Reply

 stevenbollinger
 January 29, 2013 at 6:05 pm
“(c) are, for amusement or malice, making the whole thing up”
“For amusement or malice” hardly covers the whole range of plausible motives for inventing Jesus, but it seems abundantly clear that you actually know that.
Reply

 rjosephhoffmann
 January 29, 2013 at 10:06 pm
the full range will be between those, sure.
Reply
 

 Matthew
 January 29, 2013 at 8:05 pm
I was just thinking last week that perhaps the most “promising” of the mythicists is Richard Carrier. Carrier is having a book published sometime this year that could be considered his *magus opus*. I suspect that Carrier’s effort will backfire. He will marginalize himself far more than he has already done so and when this book is carefully scrutinized, Carrier will finally be judged as the fringe scholar people are already concluding that he is. But, ironically, I think that this book might be the best thing to ever happen to him. His credentails have made him a heavyweight of the Secular Humanist community and every bitter apostate out there will use his book as a club to beat fundamentalists with and supposedly misguided scholars like Dr. Hoffmann or as an excuse not to take them seriously.
The end result? This book can actually make Carrier wealthy. If he earns a lot of money from all the atheist mythicists out there, looking for the perfect superweapon to blow fundamentalist churches to smithereens, he will be set for life. And Carrier’s book probably will sell. I imagine it will be a best-seller just like any book written by Richard Dawkins or Noam Chomsky is almost practically guaranteed to be a best-seller.
Reply

 tnt666
 January 30, 2013 at 2:02 am
Unfortunately, one does not need to read Carrier or German philosophers to find accounts of miracles to be implausible. I have not read the previous stated articles, but ANY talk of miracle making automatically classifies someone as mythical for me.
Reply

 steph
 January 30, 2013 at 3:34 am
Are you dismissing Pontius Pilate as historical and practically every famous figure mentioned in ancient history as well? There aren’t many without a few miracles stories attached. What about Joseph Smith? And Agnes (otherwise known as the nun Teresa of Calcutta)…?? No Roman emperors?


 vinnyjh57
 February 1, 2013 at 11:38 am
There aren’t many without a few miracles stories attached.
Steph,
As I’ve said before, the difference with the others is that the miracle stories arose as a result of events during their natural lives. With Jesus, the stories about his natural life were only preserved and perpetuated in order to promote belief in a miracle that was thought to have taken place after his death. When you scrape away the miracle stories about Alexander the Great, you still have a significant historical footprint based based on his accomplishments. When you scrape away the miracle stories concerning Jesus, you scrape away the only reason anyone ever told any stories about him in the first place. A historical Jesus of Nazareth would be just as likely to have come and gone without leaving any discernible trace in the historical record. What tools does a historian possess by which he could hope to establish the existence or non-existence of such a man?


 steph
 February 1, 2013 at 9:10 pm
The main difference between Jesus and Alexander is that Jesus was a religious leader and Alexander was a military leader. The second is that they each come from different cultural and historical contexts. “When you scrape away the miracle stories concerning Jesus, you scrape away the only reason anyone ever told any stories about him in the first place”. Not that it would matter anyway, but no you don’t. There are multitudes of differences between historical figures with myths attached in different cultural and historical contexts Vinny. Miracle stories did arise as a consequence of natural events in his life. His mother gave a natural birth, and later Matthew wrote a myth. He was important to his followers. It’s been argued to demonstrate belief in his mission to save Israel in an apocalyptic time. He taught about human principles and Jewish Law in order for people to be saved. Not all miracles can be treated the same. He was known as a healer but some of these ‘healings’ were exorcisms and exorocisms are a cultural psychological phenomenon. Healing stories become exaggerated in story telling. The calming of the storm and feeding of five thousand, turning water into wine, many myths, each of which must be treated separately. There are good and reasonable explanations for their origin and development with arguments and evidence which there is absolutely no point in repeating here. Perhaps try Roger Aus. He has written several monographs on different miracles. In many ways your ‘logic’ suggests that historical figures must be mythologised on the basis of previous ones, in a sort of assumed parallelomania. They’ll all different. With many similarities.
“the difference with the others is that the miracle stories arose as a result of events during their natural lives.” Difference? Really?


 vinnyjh57
 February 2, 2013 at 10:38 am
Steph,
I fully agree with you about the main difference between Alexander the Great and Jesus, and it is precisely my point. Military leaders do things that bring them to the attention of the prominent and literate people of their day. Their campaigns often leave archeological evidence. A military leader leaves a historical footprint in ways that are well known and that can be compared to the footprint of other military leaders. This is what enables historians to isolate the myths that sometimes arise around military leaders from the actual events of their lives.
A religious leader like Jesus is another matter altogether. Until he annoyed the Roman authorities sufficiently to get himself crucified, we cannot establish that he ever came to the attention of anyone outside a small band of illiterate peasants. We cannot establish that anyone of prominence became aware of his existence until decades after his death. We cannot establish that anyone had any information about him other than the stories that the cult preserved. I don’t believe that we have any reason to think that the cult would have existed to preserve those stories had not it come to believe in supernatural events that took place after Jesus’ death. I think we have every reason to think that the cult invented stories about him in order to perpetuate belief in his postmortem supernatural accomplishments. I also think that we have reason to believe that the primary reason that any particular story was preserved was because it was useful in perpetuating that belief.
In the case of Jesus, I remain skeptical that it will ever be possible to isolate the myths from the actual events of his life because there is no way to establish that any story about the events of his life would have would have been preserved but for its utility in perpetuating belief in the resurrection, and hence, no way to establish that any particular story wasn’t invented for that purpose.
If the evidence for Jesus’ existence were not problematic, I don’t think these discussions would spend so much time on issues of parsimony and plausibility. Those are questions you ask when the evidence is ambiguous or inconclusive.


 steph
 February 5, 2013 at 7:22 pm
So why did and who did, write a story about a divine man who never lived who healed and taught and performed miracles? And why did they include details about Jewish Law that only a Jewish audience would understand? And why does he used an Aramaic idiom to predict Jacob and John would die with him, when they didn’t die with him? And what’s all this about ‘the son of man’ which is nonsense in Greek? And why does he predict the temple would be taken down stone by stone when it wasn’t? It was burned. And why did the story forget to mention the resurrection?


 rjosephhoffmann
 February 6, 2013 at 8:58 am
Aha! But Steff you miss the point that these were VERY CLEVER and VERY sophisticated writes who knew they were duping untold generations of god believers with their tricks. What an amazing concoction from these seemingly innocent, but terribly deceitful writers.


 vinnyjh57
 February 5, 2013 at 9:08 pm
Steph,
I’m not sure who wrote the story, but whoever it was, I think that they wrote it to promote belief in a supernatural heavenly being who had manifested himself through visions and revelations. Had it not been for those visions, I am doubtful that anyone ever would have bothered to write anything about the man.
As to the various details that the writers included, my guess is that most of them had previously proved effective in promoting belief in the supernatural being. I think that details that were ineffective would likely have been dropped. In effect, details were recorded because they had survived years of focus group testing.
It is certainly a possibility that some of the details had their origins in memories of an actual event that occurred in an actual person’s life. However, it is also a possibility that any of the details could have been invented by someone who thought that they might be an effective means of promoting belief in the supernatural being. What I don’t see is any credible way to distinguish between those possibilities. As far as I can see, it all comes down to personal intuitions concerning plausibility.


 steph
 February 6, 2013 at 6:53 pm
Vinny,
This is incredible. You dismiss arguments and evidence and all previous scholarship, with the implication it can be boiled down to ‘personal intuitions’. It appears you clearly depend on yours as you weave one of the most incredible stories I’ve read.
Have you read the church fathers? You show no signs of having done so. From these it is quite clear there was much disagreement within the early churches. Treatises and letters reflect the claims that others spread false teachings and heresies. So Paul too. The disagreements are largely about Jesus’ nature, ie the difference between humanity and divinity, the amount and the point at which he became divine and particulars about his birth. Yet you have a problem with a completely ordinary Jewish human being called Jesus, whose birth and early life we know nothing of nothing of whose birth we know, human being called Jesus who even got things wrong from predicting the temple would be taken down stone by stone in their lifetime when it was burned over a generation later, to predicting that he would rise from death according to the tradition of the Macabbean martyrs. Instead you ignore all scholarship, and avoid all historical problems including textual ones with a glib dismissal, labelling all scholarship indiscriminately on your mythicist friend’s blog, ‘like fundamentalists’. You appear to speculate with your ‘intuition’ about what people would think and do and how they would behave in a culture and period of history you show no signs of understanding. How did this original mythicist sell his story and why would anyone, and how, and who, be persuaded to buy it to promote it themselves. Wouldn’t someone having visions declare them himself hide it when nobody would have declared him mad? As for ‘contradictions’ you use the word without recognising that contradictions are not all the same. It is not about simple contradictions but trajectories with explanations to demonstrate redaction and identify historical context.


 vinnyjh57
 February 7, 2013 at 3:42 pm
Steph,
I have not the slightest problem with a completely ordinary Jewish human being called Jesus of whose birth and early life we know nothing and who even got all sorts of things wrong. I think such a person is entirely within the realm of possibility. However, as I’ve said before, we really can’t expect completely ordinary Jewish human beings to have left much of a mark in the historical record, which I think should make it very hard to establish the part such a person played in the origins of a cult that was primarily focused upon a supernatural being who manifested himself through visions and revelations.
I’m with Tristan Vick on this one. I think that a reasonably intelligent layman should be capable of understanding why the case for a historical Jesus is as convincing as it is claimed to be. As I am a more than reasonably intelligent layman, I think I am capable of judging whether I am getting a straight answer from the people who claim to be so much more knowledgeable than I am.


 steph
 February 7, 2013 at 7:15 pm
Vinny, I didn’t really expect to change your mind about anything. I don’t think that would be possible. I’m with Berry – but I’m also with Joe: The authors of the gospels were an amazing concoction from seemingly innocent, but terribly deceitful writers…:-)

 

 Paul Regnier
 January 30, 2013 at 11:07 am
To be fair to Carrier, he makes his books available pretty cheaply online so I don’t think he’s in it for the cash. The fame, the women and the giggles maybe, but not the cash.
Reply

 steph
 January 30, 2013 at 7:36 pm
Some even have a desire to be ‘known’. That is they want to be famous. And claims ‘fans all around the globe’…. Enough to make one explode.

 

 Berry
 February 6, 2013 at 2:04 pm
Vinnie, you’re always trying to be the “reasonable” myther in these boards, but when pressed for anything specific, you really strike out and look pretty silly doing it.
You say: “I’m not sure who wrote the story, but whoever it was, I think that they wrote it to promote belief in a supernatural heavenly being who had manifested himself through visions and revelations. Had it not been for those visions, I am doubtful that anyone ever would have bothered to write anything about the man.”
First, the lack of known authorship troubles you with regard to the historical Jesus, so why doesn’t it trouble you a bit in regard to your pet theory?
Second, “they” wrote to promote belief in a heavenly being who manifested, blah blah blah. Seriously? Actually, “they” wrote to promote belief in a specific sect of Judaism. Right or wrong, their beliefs didn’t spring up out of nothing.
Third, you should describe these “they” people a bit. Who were they, why did they do what they did, why did it spread the way it did? There are plausible answers to these questions regarding Christianity, while mythers can do nothing but grasp at straws.
Fourth, “had it not been for those visions…” What proof do you have of these visions? You’re pulling this (stuff) entirely out of your (hat), and pretending to have a pony. You don’t even have the basis of a reasonable theory, yet you pretent fo be saying something reasonable.
Reply

 vinnyjh57
 February 7, 2013 at 11:24 am
Berrie,
I’m not sure what happened to the response I posted to your comment yesterday, but I will try again.
I am not a myther. I am agnostic about a historical Jesus. Sometimes the sources are so problematic that a historian cannot do anything more than lay out a range of possibilities. One of the things that makes the sources problematic for any theory is lack of known authorship.
One of the possibilities that most mainstream scholars seem to find respectable is that the historical Jesus was so thoroughly mythologized that almost nothing can be known about with any certainty. What puzzles me is that while “almost nothing” seems to be a perfectly respectable position, “nothing” is deemed to be bat-crap, KoolAid-drinking, tin-foil-hat crazy. I just don’t see that “almost nothing” and “nothing” are far enough apart to justify such disparate reactions.
As far as the visions go, Paul says that he and some predecessors witnessed appearances of the risen Christ. I acknowledge the possibility that Paul might have been a schizophrenic or a pathological liar, but I hardly think that citing those visions constitutes an attempt to pull something out of my hat.
It is true that there are plausible answers to your questions, but as we all know, plausibility is only the starting point. Parsimony is frequently in the eye of the beholder.


 Berry
 February 7, 2013 at 2:07 pm
Vinnie:
You seem like a nice guy, so I don’t mean to be too harsh, but your game is a bit tiring. You keep insisting that you are not a myther, but you defend mythers and mythicism all over the internets.
And you keep making the same statements, based on misrepresenting people’s words and the facts.
Your latest response is an example. For one thing, when historians say they know “almost nothing” about the historical Jesus it is in the context of certainty. There is very little we can know with certainty about whether Jesus said one thing or another or whether the miracles were based on real (non-miraculous) events or how exactly he died or was buried.
But that isn’t anywhere close to saying that we know “almost nothing” about whether Jesus existed. For that, the probability is overwhelming and the agnostic position involves throwing up one’s hands and ignoring the evidence.
What’s more, whlle “almost nothing” might not be much different from “nothing” if we were talking about grains of salt, in the context of our discussions about whether Jesus was a real person it IS a huge difference.
We know almost nothing about the apostle Peter’s wife, other than the fact that he is mentioned to have a wife. That we don’t know her name or anything else about her is no reason to doubt that she existed. Why? Well, there is nothing remarkable about a Hebrew man of the time being married. There s no reason to think someone would make such detail up.
Just the same, the elements of the Jesus story fit what we know about the time period, down to the exaggerated claims of supernatural deeds. There were similar exaggerated miracle claims made of Peter and Paul in the New Testament and of those and others, including Simon Magus, in other literature, but those claims are not evidence that those people were made up. We recognize a type of hyperbole that was common at the time.
If Paul’s visions were the only thing we knew about Jesus, you might have a point, but there is so much other detail from so many other sources that developed over time, your point is not very credible.


 steph
 February 8, 2013 at 12:43 am
I wonder what Paul was thinking when he said Jesus was raised up from the dead, just as the Macabbean martyrs (men who had lived) and the Psalms described of a man, if he wasn’t assuming Jesus was also a man who lived and died. He had to live and die before being raised from the dead. Isn’t that assumed? Do divine men die? He ‘became’ divine when he was ‘raised up’. Paul, after busily killing Christians, converted, and wrote letters to Christian communities telling them how to behave and somebody else weaved a life into a gospel. When exactly the latter was finished is debated. But arguments and evidence suggest that there is some early material that wouldn’t have been included if it was written later, and this same material is altered or eliminated by the later gospels. But what did Paul mean? He didn’t know about Jesus until after he died. He was aware of some of the things Jesus (might have) said but he didn’t know about him until after the living man died. And was raised from the dead. It’s extraordinary that mythers are so insistent Paul should demonstrate that he knew about Jesus. Effectively why the heck didn’t Paul write a gospel………..

 
 

 steph
 January 29, 2013 at 8:30 pm
There could be a market for Jesus wigs. Long soft yellow hair? :-)
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 Ed Jones
 January 29, 2013 at 9:54 pm
The present understaanding of certain of our top NT Studies scholars about the historicity of Jesus.
The problematic of the writings of the New Testament which produces the many Jesuses, even the mythicist’s no Jesus, can all be psychologically understood by the maxim which defines the methodologies and their related conclusions in New Testament studies: If you begin with Paul, you will misunderstand Jesus. If you begin with Jesus, you will understand Paul differently.
 To begin with Paul is to begin with the writings of the NT, the letters of Paul, the Gospels, as well as the later writings of the NT, all of which certain of our top NT Studies now know are not apostolic witness to Jesus, thus not reliable sources for knowledge of Jesus. “The sufficient evidence for this point is that all of them have been shown to depend on sources earlier than themselves and thus not to be the original and originating sources that the early church mistook them to be in judging them to be apostolic”. (Schubert Ogden). Without a readily identifiable alternative source which might have claim to apostolicity, there effectively has been no evident way to “begin with Jesus”. Thus the writings of the NT are widely taken to be our primary if not our sole NT source for knowledge of Jesus. Scholars both within the Guild of NT Studies and outside secular critics seem bound each to his/her own particular bias: the NT scholar, with convictions that conflates the NT Christ of faith myth with the HJ or that a credible Jesus yet lurks somewhere behind these texts; while the secular critic , with the convictions of the Mythicist argument or at most a Jesus of no or little historical significance.
 Only since the 80s have certain of our top NT Studies scholars, under the force of present historical methods and knowledge, become confirmed in their recognition that indeed we do have an alternative NT source containing the original and originating faith and witness of the apostles in the texts of the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5:3 – 7:27, the SM). Although the SM is positioned as a front-piece in the Gospel of Matthew, its identity and significance has been seriously obscured, even to credible NT scholars, by a widely held redaction-historical claim that the evangelist Matthew composed the SM out of Q traditions and his own composition, to fix the SM to its secondary context the Gospel of Matthew. Betz dispels this claim with his developed hypothesis that the SM is a source that has been transmitted intact.
 James Robinson’s history of this development: “For over the last two centuries there gradually emerged a new access to Jesus, made available through objective historical research. To be sure the Evangelist themselves have already tailored their narrations of Jesus’ sayings to focus on the (Pauline) kerygma, making the gospel of cross and resurrection the quintessence of the whole ministry of Jesus. Yet for modern people, a person who remains historically inaccessible is somehow unreal, – - indeed a myth. The result was in the Nineteenth Century, the quest for the historical Jesus. It was no coincidence that a century and a half ago, as the rediscovery of Jesus was just getting under way, there came to light a collection of Jesus’ saying used by Matthew and Luke in composing their Gospels. Matthew and Luke updated the sayings so that they made clear what Jesus must have meant, namely what Matthew and Luke meant, and embedded the sayings in their copies of the Gospel of Mark, making of Matthew and Luke hybrid gospels, partly Mark and partly the sayings collection. Then, after Matthew and Luke used it in their enlarged and improved Gospels, that primitive collection of Jesus’ sayings (which grew within the Jesus Movement to become the SM) was no longer copied and transmitted by (Gentile) Christian scribes, since the church of course – unfortunately — preferred those more up-to-date and complete Gospels (from birth to death, written in the context of Pauline Christ kerygma in the Gentile world some 40 years after the crucifixion, effectively severing Jesus from his sayings and his Jewish roots). This more primitive text was itself lost completely from sight. In fact it ceased to exist, no copies of Q survived. It was never heard of again, after the end of the first century, until, in 1838, a scholar in Leipzig, Germany, detected it lurking just under the surface of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. – - scholars came to call it simply the “source”, in German “Quelle”, abbreviated ”Q”, we have come of late to call it the Sayings Gospel Q. This old Sayings Gospel was not like the canonical Gospels. So colored over with the kerygma of cross and resurrection that the historical Jesus, though embedded therein, was actually lost from sight by the heavy overlay of golden patina. Rather this document was just primitive enough to contain many sayings of Jesus without kerygma overlay. Here the real Jesus who actually lived in history has his say. ” (The Real Jesus of the Sayings Gospel Q, by James M. Robinson, an article online). For what the real Jesus did have to say see Essays on the Sermon on the Mount by Hans Dieter Betz.
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 Ed Jones
 February 4, 2013 at 10:41 pm
In simplest terms our sole sufficient evidence for knowledge of the real Jesus is the New Testament source which contains the original and originaging faith and witness of the apostles. This source developed from the event of the key disciples returning to Jerusalem (within weeks?) purposing to again take up the teachings of their revered Master to begin the Jerusalem Jesus Movement. From within this movement collections of sayings of Jesus were made which grew to become the Sermon on the Mount. Hans Deiter Betz is the expert on the Sermon naming it the alternative to Gentile Christianity as known above all from the letters of Paul, the Gospels, as well as the later writings of the New Testament. This development is sufficiently documented in the NT
 as positive evidence beyond the “plausable”.
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 Steven Carr
 January 30, 2013 at 2:55 am
Josephus mentions an apocalyptic preacher named Jesus, who was killed after preaching that Jerusalem was doomed.
There is simply no way to doubt the existence of an apocalyptic preacher named Jesus in the first century AD.
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 stevenbollinger
 January 31, 2013 at 8:44 am
“There is simply no way to doubt the existence of an apocalyptic preacher named Jesus in the first century AD.”
There is simply no way to believe that you have an open mind on the subject.
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 brettongarcia
 January 30, 2013 at 2:55 pm
Theologians should not try to be historians.
Is Socrates plausible in the context of then-current Athens? His contemporaries did not think so: they sentenced him to death for being so far out of line with then-contemporary beliefs, mores.
Is Jesus realistic, in a way that would be impossible for a 1st century writer to portray? But he is not so realistic; he is GOD; larger than life, more self-sacrificing than most; and walking on water.
Indeed, the special quality that leads us to suspect it was mostly made up, were extraordinary things like giant miracles. Historical figures were said to do this too: but to such an extent? Jesus is a “miracle-worker” even first and foremost.
You criticize Hegel and his idea of people as products of their time. But then your main argument is that we best know jesus existed or was plausible – because he matches the characteristics of his time.
And then? If you value “parsimony”? Then ask yourself this: how simple, brief – parsimonious – really, is the vast, vast apparatus of traditional Christian religious studies? Is all the literature on the provenance of the gospels, really brief, and simple?
If “parsimony” or simplicity is your value, then traditional religious studies fail. And fail totally.
Far, far more simple, are the four simple words: “someone made it up.”
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 steph
 January 30, 2013 at 7:49 pm
Are you ‘trying’ to be a historian Brett? Some theologians have degrees in, or including other things, including history, philosophy, classics and linguistics. Not all historians of Christian origins are theologians and theologians don’t just read theology. I have no degrees in theology, in fact my university neither taught it nor offered it as a degree. I studied the history of the world’s religions and many other things as well, including history. Multidiscipline degrees and interdisciplinary approaches were encouraged. I didn’t have any objection to that – I embraced it. Greedily.
The rest is characteristic of you muddling up, as always.
As to you last question: the answer is ‘why’.
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 Antonio Jerez
 January 30, 2013 at 10:12 pm
Yeh, and I suppose that somebody must have “made up” brettongarcia too because I cannot imagine a person with such a simplistic mind being for real. The answers we are still waiting for from the mythicists is a plausible scenario of WHY and HOW Paul, Matthew and the others made up their phantasy jew.
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 Berry
 January 31, 2013 at 10:15 am
Actually, a big flaw in your argument is that the NT writings themselves don’t portray Jesus as God. John is the closest thing to portraying Jesus as divinity, but whether he goes there has been the subject of debate through the centuries. The writings were later interpreted to portray him as God and that generally how they have been taught in orthodox churches.
But that goes to show that what you are fighting against isn’t the historical Jesus, but later theological gloss.
There is nothing more simple than the idea that Jesus was a real figure whose life was exaggerated by later followers, in much the way that others did at that point in history.
It much more difficult to imagine someone making up this life and complicated backstory. And then getting others to imagine and write about the same life in so many other complicated ways, all while intersecting that life with real events and real people.
“Someone made it up” is the least plausible explanation. Why? How? When?
However, I grant it is the most simple explanation for someone who doesn’t want to admit the truth is complex and the details ultimately unknowable. It’s simple if you don’t want to tax your brain or flat out don’t care (which is reasonable, just not intellectually honest).
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 rjosephhoffmann
 January 31, 2013 at 11:57 am
Where in the world do I say that the NT documents portray Jesus as God? If I do not say it, how can it be a big flaw in my argument. I am not sure you actually understand the argument. You seem to be arguing rather against what you assume to be my “position.” But I don’t think you understand that either. I would love to hear you paraphrase it?


 Berry
 January 31, 2013 at 12:05 pm
Sorry, Joe, I was replying to brettongarcia’s comment. You I mostly agree with.


 steph
 January 31, 2013 at 7:03 pm
I think all replies respond to Garc who preaches with such mistaken authority:
“Is Jesus realistic, in a way that would be impossible for a 1st century writer to portray? But he is not so realistic; he is GOD; larger than life, more self-sacrificing than most; and walking on water. writer to portray? But he is not so realistic; he is GOD; larger than life, more self-sacrificing than most; and walking on water.”
It is Garc’s muddling up: Garc cannot distinguish between NT documents and later Christian doctrine.


 Persto
 February 1, 2013 at 12:37 am
Berry,
I agree. Although, I do think certain mythicists make a few good points, and, in my opinion, the mythicist position is a worthwhile component of the historical process, but, overall, the mythicist argument seems to be, as you say, the least plausible explanation, for the reasons you state. That’s why I don’t find it very persuasive.
Regards

 
 

 Tristan Vick
 January 31, 2013 at 1:35 am
But, but, but… Joe!
Krypton exists, or haven’t you heard?
http://advocatusatheist.blogspot.jp/2012/11/superman-is-officially-as-real-as-jesus.html
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 rjosephhoffmann
 January 31, 2013 at 11:03 am
Ah! how could I have missed the evidence: so Francis Bacon impersonating Shakespeare in a Mae west wig was really St Paul in a cape posing as someone who knew a illusory figure named Jesus. Got it.
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Joseph Hoffmann on Mythicism, Skepticism, and Historical Reasoning says:
 January 31, 2013 at 8:32 am
[...] Joseph Hoffmann posted on whether “anything goes” in mythicism, providing a wonderful discussion of the appropriate and inappropriate sorts of “skepticism” and illustrating how historians reason about the evidence regarding Jesus. Around a lengthy treatment of Hegelianism, he writes things like this: [...]
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 stevenbollinger
 January 31, 2013 at 9:08 am
“Socrates–even without much evidence for his existence, outside dialogues attributed to him by a pupil whose dates and specifics are also sketchy”
Dialogues written by two different pupils, actually. Plato and Xenophon. Plus a mention in Aristophanes’ Clouds. All contemporaries. And mentions by a few more contemporaries. Including Thucydides, who, like him or not, must surely rate as at least slightly more sober, down to Earth and reliable than the NT authors.
And there are sculptural likenesses of Socrates which look as is they could be copies of likenesses made of an actual person. Nobody has the slightest idea what Jesus looked like — if he existed.
And I’m not even particularly interested in Socrates or Plato. I’m certainly not an expert on the Socratic problem. The differences between it and the HJ question are so many and significant that I’m really surprised that you mentioned Socrates. I’m beginning to grasp your arguments for the plausibility of the historical Jesus. But they’re not convincing me yet.
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 rjosephhoffmann
 January 31, 2013 at 11:01 am
“Socrates–even without much evidence for his existence, outside dialogues attributed to him by a pupil whose dates and specifics are also sketchy–is typical of a range of fifth century Athenian philosophers.” The point is not that Socrates is implausible but that with sketchy evidence (I think) it is justifiable to assert his existence. You seem to imply that the accent should fall on massive evidential differences therefore evidence for his life and activities must come from the writings of Plato and Xenophon. It is likely that neither of these presents a completely accurate picture of him, but Plato’s Apology, Crito, Phaedo, and Symposium contain details which must be close to fact. The “bust” you refer to is a copy of a copy that may or may not resemble him; it’s based on charactonymic evidence, and a tradition that there was a bronze effigy of him made by Lysippos (4th century) of which the 1st C AD copy in the Louvre is supposed to be a copy. But no one knows that for sure. Not sure what the reelvance of not knowing what Jesus looked like has to do with anything. Try this for starters on the Socratic problem: “One thing is certain about the historical Socrates: even among those who knew him in life, there was profound disagreement about what his actual views and methods were. Apart from the three primary sources below, there were those called ‘minor Socratics’, not for the quality of their work but because so little or none of it is extant, about whose view of Socrates we shall probably never know much.[2] After Socrates’ death, the tradition became even more disparate. As Nehamas (1999, 99) puts it, “with the exception of the Epicureans, every philosophical school in antiquity, whatever its orientation, saw in him either its actual founder or the type of person to whom its adherents were to aspire.” http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/socrates/#2
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 stevenbollinger
 January 31, 2013 at 11:40 am
“The point is not that Socrates is implausible but that with sketchy evidence (I think) it is justifiable to assert his existence.”
Well, we disagree. I would not call the evidence sketchy. Perhaps I define the adjective differently than others, but to me, one thing “sketchy” suggests is that the amount of evidence is small. I would also hesitate to call the evidence for Jesus’ existence sketchy. It isn’t the amount of evidence which leaves me unconvinced in Jesus’ case, but the nature of that evidence.
“You seem to imply that the accent should fall on massive evidential differences therefore evidence for his life and activities must come from the writings of Plato and Xenophon”
I’m sorry, I did not mean to imply that. Actually I think that the most reliable evidence may come from Aristophanes, if one assumes that while lampooning Socrates he was at pains to make his caricature very recognizable to his public. But quite aside from the question of whose depiction of Socrates contains the most solid information, the very fact that four such very different contemporaries as Plato, Xenophon, Aristophanes and Thucydides all depicted him among other contemporaries whose existence we have no particular reason to doubt — well, I’m not sure what the correct jargon for something like that would be — “triangulation,” perhaps? — but it’s one reason why I myself wouldn’t call the evidence for Socrates sketchy. (There’s a lot of subjectivity in such terms, of course.)
“Not sure what the reelvance of not knowing what Jesus looked like has to do with anything”
Just that nonfictional people have appearances, and that no-one has any idea whether Jesus was tall, short, thin, physically weak, muscular, heavy, fair, dark, straight-haired, curly-haired — there is no such adjective in any description of him in any primary source. Which doesn’t prove anything. It is, however, a notable absence. Well, perhaps it’s notable. It’s one less nail available on which an historical portrait of Jesus could be hung.


 steph
 January 31, 2013 at 8:48 pm
The evidence for Socrates is sketchy. It comes from contemporaries who belong to a different social class and culture from Jesus’ contemporaries. While Jesus’ followers may have been taught to read Torah and have a basic ability to write (see Josephus on schooling of Jewish boys), there was no equivalent in the Jewish community or lifestyle to match the philosophical and dramatic authors around Socrates. No contemporary historian bothered to mention him. And none of their depictions may be ‘true’. Jesus’ contemporaries may have passed on the traditions orally and in notes, while Socrates’ passed his on through fictionalised depictions. We possibly have an imaginary description of what the creator wanted him to be remembered looking like. The evidence for Socrates, I think, is sketchy indeed. And nobody bothers to tell us what he ate for breakfast: ‘a notable absence. Well, perhaps it’s notable. It’s one less nail available on which an historical portrait of Socrates could be hung.’

 
 

 Tristan Vick
 February 1, 2013 at 2:09 am
(EDITED)
One of the problems I have is the difference between compelling evidence and convincing evidence.
Whether or not Socrates has convincing evidence, the evidence he existed is compelling.
The historical Jesus suffers the same uncertainty. Regardless of how compelling the evidence is, we still need that positive evidence to take us the rest of the way.
The fact that there is nothing to convince us of Jesus actual existence is troublesome. Now I know you may point out some rather good indicators that he existed, but that’s what I mean by being compelling. Be compelling all you want, if all you want to be is compelling. But bring some proof, if you want to be convincing.
Also, the analogy with Socrates is rather insufficient because insufficient time has been spent on investigating the existence of Socrates as compared to the Christian messiah.
This being the 21st century and having historians no closer to the truth seems to suggest, to me, that a continued investigation into the question is a huge waste of time.
Every rock has seemingly been over turned. All that can be revealed most likely has been.
Of course, I could be wrong about this. But I doubt any forthcoming evidence will vindicate the Biblical position, let alone the historical one. At best anything extra will only fill in small gaps of the already vague historical framework.
It seems to me there is a statistical trend over the past few centuries. The evidence has been fading fast. It has all but flat-lined.
Let us assume, for the sake of argument, we actually DO know most everything there is to know about Jesus Christ.
Can we be convinced he was real?
Absolutely convinced?
I know this is why Joe ends at agnosticism when it comes to the question of the historical Jesus. He could have existed. But then again, there is a slight minuscule chance that he didn’t. He might have even been a hybrid, part legend, part man, and the legend got away while the man stayed behind in the first century.
To me, the entire field of biblical studies, having spent more time and energy researching and investigating this one historical figure–far more than any other–should have turned up positive evidence by now which would be more than convincing.
Convincing to the layman. Not historians with well trained eyes, mind you. Convincing yourself Jesus may have been real is easy to do. There are already a lot of believers who’ll gladly side with you. But hardly any of them have looked at the evidence. When you do look at the evidence, it’s anything but convincing.
You need to be able to throw down the evidence and say here it is without needing people to pull our their reading glasses and squint through their lenses to try and see what you’re getting at.
It needs to be obvious.
But that evidence is gone to us now. Dried up in the sands of time and washed away on a desert breeze.
So did the historical Jesus exist?
I cannot think of a more unimportant question than this. Or a bigger waste of time.
So are the mythicists wrong?
Who cares?
It requires us to ask the first unimportant question before we can even get to it, making it doubly unimportant.
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 steph
 February 1, 2013 at 4:00 am
There is a lot of argument and evidence to demonstrate that the “Christian messiah” did NOT exist as a historical figure but was an image developed by the Christian Church. Who is the ‘we’ to be convinced? Have we really left no stone unturned? The DDSs and Nag Hammadi were revealed only last century. This has boosted knowledge, and among other things, has provided a contemporaneous source to examine in order to advance knowledge in the use of languages and writing which is significant for examining evidence. Have you read everything there is to read? Have we explored all methods to examine developed evidence and argument? Mythicists demand modern historical standards for ancient historical evidence. What is the ‘real’ Jesus? Reminds me of the terrible Luke Timothy Johnson. If it’s so unimportant and such a waste of time why do you write such long comments about it and bother other people with your subjective opinion?
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 stevenbollinger
 February 1, 2013 at 9:33 am
Tristan Vick:
When I look at the time people spend playing Sudoko and video games — or the amount of time I spend on chess, for that matter — and watching things like the so-called “History Channel,” it’s hard for me to consider a halfway-serious-or-better investigation of any historical subject to be a waste. But of course it’s a subjective call. I’d rather discuss Livy than Jesus, but I’m an autodidact, and there are many times more discussions of Jesus available to me than of any other ancient subject, so I’m going with the flow.
“Every rock has seemingly been over turned. All that can be revealed most likely has been”
Most certainly not. Aside from the question of how thoroughly the evidence we have now has been sifted and how sensibly it has been evaluated, ancient documents are turning up all the time. The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi manuscripts are merely the most famous examples. Have you heard of Oxyrhynchus? It was an ancient town in Egypt. Late in the 19th century fragments of payrus began to be found in what had been the town’s garbage dump. What was their trash is literally our treasure: over 10,000 manuscript fragments have been found in that pile of ancient garbage, mostly from the first few centuries AD and some BC, including some of the oldest known fragments of the New Testament, and many other Early Christian writings, and they’re still digging, and they’re still deciphering what they’ve found so far, and that’s just one site. There is absolutely no way to tell how many more manuscripts will turn up all over north Africa and the Middle East, or how revealing they will be. Not to mention other types of archaeological finds.
“I cannot think of a more unimportant question than this. Or a bigger waste of time./So are the mythicists wrong?/Who cares?/It requires us to ask the first unimportant question before we can even get to it, making it doubly unimportant.”
And yet you’re here, writing about it, instead of doing something you would consider important. That’s odd. Are you trying to save the rest of us from ourselves?
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 Berry
 February 1, 2013 at 1:38 pm
Tristan, you say:
“The fact that there is nothing to convince us of Jesus actual existence is troublesome.” Who is “us?” I think you speak for yourself.
You say the evidence needs to be “obvious.” Well, apart from having no videotape, it is obvious.
The man was an apocalyptic prophet at a time of known apocalyptic fervor. He belonged to a nationality that was known to have suffered under Roman rule, and met the same fate as others of his group. He spoke a message that fits well into the time period in which he spoke it. He had a small group of followers that after death was led by his physical brother James, a man who was himself the subject of many writings from the period.
His followers argued about which ones had a closer relationship, which ones closer represented his teachings and the meaning of his painful and embarrassing death. As time went on, as hope in his message became less plausible, the original version of his teachings and legacy was replaced with one more relevant to the later audience.
The accuracy of any of those things individually can be debated, as can be the details of the things written about him that were obviously embellished. But that all of those would cumulatively originate from an invented figure is nothing less than ludicrous.
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 Antonio Jerez
 February 1, 2013 at 9:44 pm
Tristan, what historians with welltrained eyes are you thinking about. As far as I know almost no secular historians with Antiquity as à specialty doubt that Jesus existed.
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 vinnyjh57
 February 2, 2013 at 2:41 pm
What is the likely social context for making up a rather dull story about a failed messianic prophet from Galilee, especially when that story flies in the face of essential parts of later mythological construals like Paul’s.
Are Paul’s construals later than the gospels?
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 rjosephhoffmann
 February 2, 2013 at 4:38 pm
What do you mean “later than the gospels” The gospels are the end product of a long period of collection, redaction (editing not excision) and elaboration. If the one called Mark is the earliest it may have been written as early as 66, or possibly a bit later than 70 CE. By then, we think, Paul was quite dead. If on the other hand you mean the individual elements that went into the gospels, then some of them–e.g. the account of the crucifixion, and some teaching elements–are doubtless earlier than Paul and others later. Assigning Paul’s letters dates in the fifties and arranging them on the basis of a relative chronology is a parlous battle not for the feint hearted. Unfortunately, much of that dating (e.g., an early date for 1 Thess) is based on impressionistic appraisal of the “apocalyptic” content of the message with no real basis in fact. My answer is that the oral tradition behind the gospels is certainly older than Paul, and as Paul’s letters are written of a piece and partly in reaction to the crucifixion, the 50′s is an ok average date. However the antiquated mythicist ideas that as Paul doesn’t talk about an historical Jesus and the gospels do “proves” that Jesus was an historicized fictional figure rather than a real one is simply based on a 19th century defective understanding g of the formation of the Jesus tradition that, frankly, almost no one outside the mythtic circle believes any more. (rjh)
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 brettongarcia
 February 3, 2013 at 12:02 am
Until he was silenced/suspended just a week ago by the Church, Thomas Brodie recently argued that the whole notion of an “oral tradition” predating the gospels, overlooks clear signs of editing and other markers suggesting a clearly “literary” origin for even the oldest material in the gospels. Some scholars notice clear signs of literary editing for example even in say, “Q” material, and the oldest material in Mark.


 rjosephhoffmann
 February 4, 2013 at 9:20 am
That’s an absurd notion since by the time something is reduced to literary form editing is the natural way of recording it; simply begs the question. There are clear signs the Odyssey was edited and that even our earliest written MS of it show that tranche; it is also true that Homer never wrote it, if Homer there was, and that all such works were transmitted orally through stereotyping, which also would have been the mimetic behind the gospels. Any other sallies?


 vinnyjh57
 February 3, 2013 at 9:34 am
I don’t think that it proves Jesus was a historicized fictional figure rather than a real one, but I do think that Paul’s silence regarding a historical Jesus and his refusal to credit his predecessors for his understanding of the gospel make it extremely difficult to identify those elements that are in fact earlier than his mythological construals. There seems to me to be very little about the formation of the Jesus tradition that can be described with words like “doubtless” and “certainly.”

 
 

 Mike Wilson
 February 3, 2013 at 4:56 pm
Reblogged this on Brain Puke.
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 Mark Erickson
 February 5, 2013 at 1:03 am
“that is what Occam’s razor requires us to do–to utilize and exploit the possibilities before us before spinning off into other possibilities that do not arise organically from the material in front of us and its closest known correlates.”
No, no, no. Occam’s razor does not require us to do anything but favor the simpler thesis when it has the same explanatory power as another thesis. You mucked this up in the other post too. You ignore the word “necessity”, used in two of the three axioms, here as well.
How do you determine what arises organically from the material? How do you determine what counts as a close enough correlate?
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 rjosephhoffmann
 February 6, 2013 at 9:05 am
Erickson you are begging the question and claiming a distinction. The simpler thesis is not the elaborate conspiracy and mythic convolutions within mythicism. What arises organically from the material in method are precisely those linguistic and hermeneutical tools that competent scholars in NT studies use. The only thing that is mucked up is your understanding of some pretty basic principles that you twist out of shape and then profess to understand better than everyone who actually understands them. The term organically has to do with a particular documentary and cultural matrix. You really do need to load your gun with bullets and not mush before you fire off these comments.
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 Steven Carr
 February 8, 2013 at 2:40 am
STEPH
 It’s extraordinary that mythers are so insistent Paul should demonstrate that he knew about Jesus.
CARR
 Was Paul kept out of the loop when it came to oral tradition about Jesus?
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 rjosephhoffmann
 February 8, 2013 at 2:46 am
That is an interesting sentence when Paul complains bitterly in Gal and 2 Cor especially that he is being kept out of the loop by the “superapostles” who actually knew Jesus. Sometimes, as a teacher of mine once said, a good Bible can shed massive light on the commentaries: you should read one.
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 steph
 February 8, 2013 at 3:32 am
Carr, it’s interesting reading that source, not to mention the fragments and manuscripts as well. And Steven, reading through whole letters in that book by Paul, its interesting that some of the things he writes have parallels with several of the teachings, sayings, and language, attributed to Jesus in the gospels. It’s fascinating how the book does indeed often shed massive light on some of the more extraordinary commentaries.

 

 Berry
 February 8, 2013 at 12:05 pm
Steven:
To take Prof. Hoffman’s point a step further, a theme that runs through all of Paul’s writings is his authority in relation to the people who lived and worked with Jesus. He was angry at those who tried to ignore him because they knew Jesus personally. Paul’s rebuttal is that he saw the real Jesus in a vision.
I know taking things in context is difficult when you can’t think much beyond sarcastic asides, but what makes more sense in that scenario — that the vision led to the creation of a fictional person or that the real person gave rise to the fictional vision?
For any rational person, the answer is obvious.
And it’s not just a dispute in Paul’s writings. The same issue colors
 Acts and James, who ironically was the subject of all sorts of lionizing commentaries by writers in the first and second centuries. It was said the Jersusalem temple was destroyed in 70 AD as God’s judgement against the murder of James by the high priest a few years earlier.
Now since someone in antiquity wrote something that obviously isn’t literally true about James, you have to conclude that he never existed, right?
Right?
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The Revelation
by rjosephhoffmann

غار حراء



You are as dark as your name
but is there something more?
What of the one who’s not the same
minute to minute, for
You specialize in being unknown–
Except for your shoulders or
Your breasts cupped, or a frown
That melts into a self-approving smile
When I am caught speechless
In beauty’s glare and bravery overtakes you.

I thought I loved your neck the most–
It has a fleshy resonance, a certain style–
But now, I think, I like the rest
Of you.  I have become a connoisseur
Who hopes like Moses for a sign
And waits, expecting you to lure
Samson from his sleep with naked thighs.

And will it come, this final vision?
Will you make my life dance
Like so many dervishes in fast
And furious step, until they chance
To say, Listen! The music’s done, at last.
Or will you, thighs clad,
Retreat into my lengthening past,
Like my shadow, like your mad
Ideas, by what this love will cost?

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The Passion of the Christ-Deniers
by rjosephhoffmann

he recent uptick of interest in the historical Jesus is fueled partly by a new interest in a movement that was laid to rest about seventy years ago, but has received a new lease of life  from a clutch of historical Jesus-deniers.  The rallying point for the group is a site maintained by a blogger by the name of Neil Godfrey, an Australian university librarian who, like many others who have assumed the position, comes from a conservative Christian background.
In the broadest terms, the movement feeds and thrives on the thesis that Jesus of Nazareth never really existed.  There are various permutations of that basic position: (a) That he was concocted lock, stock and cross by a second century religious movement that (also) produced the documents of New Testament; (2) He is a composite of semi-historical characters, but no one in particular; (c) He is the reworking of an assortment of ancient dying and rising god myths, a little from here, a little from there.  There are sonata and fugue-like variations of these variations, but the central premise is that it is easier to explain the origin of Christianity without an historical founder than with one, and easier to explain the development of the New Testament as the work of garden variety story-makers, working out and reworking the myth of Jesus as the crowds began to come to the church door.  If the gospel-writers were Hertz, Paul was Avis: he tried harder and finally won the competition to get the wobbly faith off  the starting block.  (The fact that Paul failed miserably even to secure his own reputation into the second century is an inconvenient bit of business for the mythicists.)
Much of their  argument gets down to details, if not back of the fridge leftovers,  and much of what I have had to say about the topic so far has been in clarifying these details.  There will be plenty of scope to discuss the flaws and crevices in the “logic” of mythicism in my forthcoming book, though the book itself is about what we can reliably know about Jesus, not an assault on the Nichts da ist, und es gibt nichts zu wissen school.
I increasingly regard the “mythers” or “mythtics” or (more traditionally) “mythicists” as belligerent yahoos who behave like sophomores at an all-city debating contest. They are out to score (or claim to score) points against anyone suspected of what they label “historicism.”  In case you are interested in what that word means when they humpty dumpty it, it means anyone who believes in or defends the proposition that Jesus was real.

I have grown to dislike the mythtics because they are fighting for a cause they don’t fully understand, based on evidence they can’t cipher  for an objective they can’t reach.  I know that in  other contexts this might make them idealists or romantics, like Byron’s dying for Greek independence.  But idealism and romanticism are usually defined in relation to objects and intentions.  What are the objects and intentions of the mythicists? Why do they regard what they are doing as important?  Is it out of some desire for truth—to get to the bottom of a case and see historical justice done.  That would qualify as idealism.  Or is it simply to make their opponents look mean-spirited and wrong by pursuing immoderate ends in the rashest way.  That wouldn’t.
I regard them as hurtful because they are turning the serious question of Jesus of Nazareth’s existence into a farcical one.
Which raises the question I want to address here.  Why is it so important to certain people that Jesus did not exist?  Is it just the flip side of the importance of the premise that he did?
Before I get to that, however, a story.

The Roman historian Tacitus writing of the year 57 CE in his Annals (XIII.32,in about 114) discusses the trial of a certain Pomponia Graecina  a Greek woman married to a Roman solider–Aulus Plautius who was decorated for his bravery in the British campaign.  Pomponia had embraced what Tacitus calls a “foreign superstition” and was handed over to her husband for trial. Plautius found her innocent, together with some members of her family.  Interestingly Tacitus does not directly mention that the foreign superstition was Christianity.  The strong surmise that it was comes from later, third century inscriptions commemorating members of the gens Pomponia, who apparently led an austere life and like Pomponia dressed soberly (by the standards of the post-Neronian period)–”as though  they were always in mourning”   Tacitus says.  Importantly the date of her trial and her (presumably earlier) conversion corresponds to the average dates for Paul’s missionary activities and his earliest letters but predates any  involvement in Rome, which is thought to date from the late fifties or early sixties of the first century. Paul knows churches like the one Pomponia may have founded, but so did lots of missionaries preaching many different “gospels” during the same hyperactive period.  The trial of Pomponia simply illustrates the heterodox and competitive environment in which these stories were fashioned, and Tacitus bears indirect and inadvertent testimony to it.
Seven years later, in Tacitus’s discussion of the Neronian persecution (Annals, XV, 44), the same xenophobia sets in: for a major fire probably caused by accident Nero blames a foreign sect “hated for their abominations, called Christians,”  and then continues:  ”Christus, from whom their name is derived was executed at the hands of the procurator Pontius Pilate in the reign of Tiberius.”  He goes on, “Checked for a moment, this pernicious superstition again broke out not only in Judaea, the source of the evil, but even in Rome, that cesspool of everything that is sordid and degrading.”  He then describes the process by which people accused of belonging to the sect could be tried, a process for which there is strong evidence in the famous letter of Pliny the younger to Trajan some fifty years after Nero’s rule.  The fire was real enough: four of the fourteen districts of Rome escaped the fire; three districts were completely destroyed and the other seven suffered serious damage.  Christian forgers later tried to blame Nero; and in the second century Dio Cassius accused Nero of playing his lyre during a production of his favourite epic, the “Sack of Ilium” while the city was burning.  It is Tacitus’s sober report that Nero was not in the city at the time and that when he saw the damage, paid for the relief efforts out of his own pocket (Annals, XV.39).
Mythtics spend a lot of time denying or countering evidence while always demanding more of it.  Thus for example, they might want to say the following about the above passage: (1) It only goes to show that there was a movement called Christianity; (2) the fact there is a third century cult named after someone named Pomponia does not prove it was the same Pomponia; it might have been anyone; (3) Tacitus could have got the very basic information about the historical “location” of Jesus in relation to Tiberius and Pilate from Christians who had come to believe this (though probably not from literary sources); but why bother since (4) how do we know Tacitus really wrote this? Weren’t the Christians master forgers and interpolators?  Didn’t they mess with purported references to Jesus in the work of Flavius Josephus? The best proof of which is that they made Jesus up.

Most historians would regard this treatment of sources not just absurd and flatfooted but dizzying in its circularity,  especially as Tacitus died only a few years after the younger Pliny’s famous letter, written ca. 111 (Pliny jr. was a great admirer of Tacitus)  and was born, according to the best evidence, in a year when Paul would have been missionizing the provinces and prior to any “first edition” of the gospels.  That makes his scant but direct reference to Jesus significant, not least because it is entirely lacking a theological motif and seems conservatively Roman in its denunciation of the Christ cult as a “superstition” (lit. a new religion).  His distaste for the actions of the faith will be echoed by Celsus, by Porphyry  and even after the legitimation of Christianity under the final pagan emperor Julian.
Take a breath: and note well.  No one is suggesting that a reference in Tacitus written at the end of 116 CE about events of 64 CE can be considered a clincher for the historical Jesus.  However neither Tacitus nor Suetonius later, nor Celsus, nor Josephus if he mentions Jesus at all, raise the slightest doubt that Jesus was a flesh and blood character from their recent past.  I repeat, their recent past.  We have often established the irrefragable historicity of persons in the ancient world with much less to go on. In fact, the circumstantial proof for details of Tacitus’s own life are pretty scant; and they come from Pliny, who was soft on Christianity.  What might we want to conclude from that?  Please don’t write in with suggestions: it’s called irony.
The reason that the mythtics are determined to hide the evidence under their bed  and then ask where it is seems to come from the darker regions of intentionality.  So let me be direct.
It is important to them that Jesus should not exist.  It is important to them in a way that the existence of Proclus or Anacreon or Alcibiades or even Socrates is not. The mythtics don’t want history, they want a victory. They don’t want serious discussion or best interpretation, they want to score points.  Almost every discussion I have seen on their sites or mythtic-friendly atheist sites resembles nothing so much as the citizens of Lilliput trying to pin down a sleeping Gulliver with sewing thread, with lots of back-slapping and cheer-leading points presumed to be won against mainstream scholars with more…conservative ideas.
They don’t want there to be a historical Jesus because they think that if there wasn’t they have somehow zapped the “foul superstition” Tacitus describes right out of existence.   No historical Jesus  no son of God, no resurrection,  no salvation, no final judgement, no heaven above or hell below.  Christianity (do you hear me brothers and sisters?) is fucked. It is a lie built on a myth, sustained by dishonesty and fed to the ignorant.  The historical Jesus is the key to exposing the falsehood of it all–including the deceit of the grandly glorious Roman Catholic church and the backwater Pentecostal assemblies who have made their reputation by poisoning minds and ruining lives with their fakery and dogma.  The stakes are high, so the tactics have to be mean.  This Jesus (myth) must die.

The agenda for the mythtics is as theological–or maybe better, evangelical– as the agenda of the Christian apologists: it’s a winner- take- all game based on the idea that Christianity is vulnerable on this score in roughly the same way that most atheists believe the existence of God is buggered by the classic problems of theodicy.
I anticipated the confusion of ends and means in a couple of essays in the collection Sources of the Jesus Tradition.  The essays were primarily intended as orientation rather than scholarship, but I have reason to think that the mythtics didn’t give them much time.  To make it easy, an early and less refined version of the lead essay, “Of Love and Chairs,” is available at The Bible and Interpretation.  Ideally, it should give rise to discussion–but I am pessimistic that it will.   It offers very little: it makes the pretty obvious point  that the existence of God and the existence of Jesus are two different things unless (a) you believe Jesus is God or (b) you believe that a Jesus who did not exist cannot have been God, which might also have some impact on some ideas of God as well.
A serious discussion of the historicity of Jesus does not arise from either of those beliefs.  The existence of Jesus is not a theological problem.  It should not be motivated by events in our own religious biographies and experiences.  It is not a case in metaphysics.   It is an historical question that should be free of theological ends and metaphysical implications.  Otherwise, it cannot be answered.
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Published: February 8, 2013
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60 Responses to “The Passion of the Christ-Deniers”

.
 Justin
 February 8, 2013 at 4:29 pm
Excellent, as ever Joe. And looking forward to the book.
Reply

 Clarice O'Callaghan
 February 8, 2013 at 5:32 pm
Hi Mr. Hoffman, you wrote:
“Which raises the question I want to address here. Why is it so important to certain people that Jesus did not exist?”
Because the human race has been duped into atrocities from the beginning that changed the course of history for the worst–this will continue with an HJ. Because some of us aren’t superstitious and know that we have been held back as thinking, questioning, and reasoning beings because others aren’t using their fullest capabilities. We could be so much more as a human community, not cognitively stulted and stifled with no spark for looking outside the box. Because people who think for themselves rather than just suck up culture mindlessly know that faith is blind, wishful thinking.
Because some of us are concerned about the human race’s cognitive development, well-being, and progress. We’ve lost too many minds that could have been fine instead of superstitious.
Reply

 Matthew
 February 8, 2013 at 6:37 pm
Clarice, I understand your concern. However, I don’t think ridding the world of a historical Jesus will make the problem of atrocities completely disappear. It’s not religious communities like the Christian church which have the exclusive patent on crimes against humanity. Even if it can be proven that there is no historical Jesus and that there never was a historical Jesus, that wouldn’t prevent atrocities, period. It may have prevented many crimes against humanity and may have prevented the loss of life and have fostered scientific progress. But even if there was never an historical Jesus, there will always be atrocities. There will always be people like Joseph Stalin. There will always be Stalinists who will commit crimes against humanity regardless of whether a historical Jesus existed or not. Proving that Jesus never lived wouldn’t stop such people from murdering others.
Reply

 Clarice O'Callaghan
 February 8, 2013 at 9:28 pm
True, but the problem of atrocities would be so much less.

 

 Dwight Jones
 February 8, 2013 at 7:20 pm
As an infant species, Clarice, it may be too early to be judgemental? The imagery of our forefathers isn’t bullshit, any more than painting is. It’s a continuum that depends on solidarity.
Reply

 Clarice O'Callaghan
 February 8, 2013 at 9:32 pm
Remember that our foreparents were pre-science. They did the best they could with what they had. Different worldview now but some haven’t caught onto it.

 

 muller403
 February 8, 2013 at 8:37 pm
Hello Clarisse,
 I think a very minimal HJ existed and I am not superstitious, nor a Christian.
 Your rant seems to be targeted towards Christianity rather than HJ. If it is so, I approve most of it. But what does that have to do with a dead poor Galilean?
 I also think the multitude of competing & vastly different no-HJ theories for the beginning of Christianity are a subject of ridicule. Many of them have little so-called evidence for support, plenty of weird thinking, quasi cultist beliefs & dogma, a lot of far-fetched notions, many hidden problems, plain sillyness. Most are without any reconstruction (with approximate dating of early Christian texts, sequence, explanation for any deemed interpolations, etc.) and way too far outside the box. They look as agenda driven parodies of historical studies.
 Some of the adherants of these no-HJ schemes are quasi-sectarian, almost religious in their belief and spend a huge amount of time arguing & fighting each other on the internet. Mythicism, in its many facets, has become a religion of many sects, where almost anything goes.
 Cordially, Bernard
Reply

 rjosephhoffmann
 February 8, 2013 at 9:22 pm
That is an impressive agenda, but unfortunately has nothing to do with the historical question: I doubt that in 2013 the discovery that Jesus was made up will rectify the errors that his propagation hath wrought. But, you do prove my point about the agenda.
Reply

 Pseudonym
 February 11, 2013 at 8:25 pm
True story: I once asked a creationist why he was so adamant on denying the last few centuries of science. The answer was, essentially, because were creationism true, it would incontrovertably prove Christianity true.
James McGrath’s observation that mythicists are the creationists of history is very, very apt. My agenda requires X to be true, therefore X is true.
Reality tends to be complicated, nuance-ridden, and full of inconvenient detail. Whatever your particular prejudice, reality almost never supports it unambiguously, and no amount of wishful thinking can make it do so.


 Geoff
 February 12, 2013 at 8:19 am
Pseudonym, But what is the agenda? You operate under the assumption that there is an agenda, say, for example, to undermine Christianity. Yet, how is the belief that Christianity was founded by a deluded would-be messiah on a suicide mission and his delusional cult followers any less damaging? As I have said, if it were true that early Christians believed in a celestial intercessor that revealed himself to them in very personal ways, how is that so different than the belief of modern Christians? I submit that it is the same. The agenda is not to undermine Christianity. The agenda, for me, is to excavate the origins of this extraordinary religion and belief system. Holding onto the HJ thesis is limiting in that regard.

 

 Ken Scaletta
 February 20, 2013 at 11:30 pm
Frankly, I think a historical Jesus is far more devastating to Christianity than a mythical one.
Reply

 muller403
 February 21, 2013 at 12:17 pm
Yes Ken,
 That’s what I think also.
 At first (in Paul’s generation), that HJ was known as someone of little historical importance, who had the misfortune to be crucified as king of the Jews, due to a set of (historical & religious) circumstances. No wonder Paul and the author of Hebrews concentrated only on a (human & earthly) Christ crucified (and believed resurrected), and nothing else about the man Jesus.
 Then came the gospels, canonical and others, plus all kind of associated stories, some about the enfancy. They were full of myths and contracdictions, but stuck to that HJ.
 No wonder that, with exceptions, most “fathers” of the Church and Christian Gnostics avoided most or all of this mythical HJ in favour to a pure religion based on Platonism and Logos. More so when these Christian writers were ridiculing myths about the pagan gods.
 Cordially, Bernard


 Clarice O'Callaghan
 February 21, 2013 at 1:42 pm
How so?


 steph
 February 21, 2013 at 6:05 pm
Clarice, because an historical Jesus is going to be a normal human being who couldn’t turn water into wine, and for most Christian churches today, Jesus still comes with a bit of baggage like the epithet ‘divine’ for example. To demonstrate that Jesus was a normal human being is potentially devastating to [conservative] Christianity. Mythicists on the other hand, are not a threat to their beliefs. They merely dismiss/ignore them as neither has evidence to disprove the other.


 Ken Scaletta
 February 24, 2013 at 1:23 am
Steph is exactly right about why I said that. A real, human Jesus has to be a real human, and no real human can help but be a disappointment.
If we could somehow, hypothetically see videotape of the real Jesus walking and talking (provided by aliens or a time machine or whatever other device would serve the hypothesis). I think a lot of people would be crushed. He couldn’t possibly live up to expectations, and I think that might even be true of a lot of rationalists who would not expect to see anything supernatural or miraculous. It seems to me that they still tend to idealize him.
I think there are assumptions, almost unconscious assumptions a lot of HJ scholars make about Jesus which I’m not sure are warranted.
For example. they generally assume that Jesus was self-possessed. That he had a plan and knew what he was doing. That he had consistent and specific goals or intentions and that his actions reflected a coherent agenda, even if he may not have anticipated that agenda not working. Can we say that for sure, though? Do we know that Jesus always had a plan, or an agenda,
 or that he wasn’t just rolling with external events or maybe suggestions from others?
I also think they usually assume that Jesus was incorruptible or that there couldn’t have been a valid reason his followers turned on him. Maybe Jesus started letting things go to his head. Started going Hollywood. Started liking the parties with the rich guys and loose women, Started getting a little fancy with the wardrobe maybe. Both Mark and John say that Judas was unhappy with Jesus for spending money on ointment instead of the poor. Maybe Judas was right.
No real Jesus could be ideal. Personally I think seeing any real Jesus would be necessarily fascinating, no matter what he was like. The most ironic thing about him, in my opinion, was that the poor guy had no idea who he was.

 
 

 stevenbollinger
 February 8, 2013 at 6:20 pm
If the typical mythicist is someone like Godfrey, then you’re not being too harsh. And I agree wholeheartedly with your last paragraph.
Reply

 Matthew
 February 8, 2013 at 6:31 pm
Dr. Hoffmann,
I am looking forward to your book. I am especially looking forward to your discussion of myth and legend. I was thinking about the problem of “Social Memory” and story-telling in the gospels. I am curious about something: is propaganda a form of social memory? I got to thinking of the postmortem appearance stories of Jesus in the gospels and wondered if they can be considered propaganda. I recall seeing Maurice Casey discuss Richard Burridge’s fascinating book on gospel genre and I wondered if ‘bios’ could be considered propaganda or if propaganda is a subgenre of ‘bios’. Even if miracle stories like the postmortem stories of the risen Jesus aren’t legends or somewhat legendary, then they could qualify as propaganda.
Your post is excellent. The problem with mythicism is that it has become the Angry Apostate’s weapon against the Christian Church. I, too, went through a Angry Apostate phase in my life but I never could give up the historical Jesus. Jesus always seemed way too plausible as a historical figure to me and I couldn’t, for the life of me, imagine how anonymous groups managed to merge together, for what unkown reasons to craft a historical Jesus from preexisting myths. I have always believed that there was a historical Jesus for the sole reason of parsimony. A historical Jesus explained the most data with the fewest assumptions and unanswered questions.
Reply

 Ed Jones
 February 12, 2013 at 11:03 pm
Dr. Matthews, you may find the post: Debunkikng Christianity – A viable solution to the “Jesus {Puzzle” to e of interest. Note the LINK and the eight comment.
Reply

 Ed Jones
 February 12, 2013 at 11:06 pm
Correction: Debunking Cristianity -

 
 

 Clarice O'Callaghan
 February 8, 2013 at 6:40 pm
Mr. Hoffmann,
I’ve wondered for a long time why it is so important to certain people that Jesus did exist?
Sorry about misspelling your name above :-(
Reply

 Dwight Jones
 February 8, 2013 at 7:14 pm
As our agent in the Middle Kingdom, is there a parallel existence conundrum around Confucius, that might that inform us?
Class project: Discuss the historicity of Confucius and Christ as humanist philosophers.
Reply

 Jim Farrell
 February 8, 2013 at 8:23 pm
I come from a background of being a devout Roman Catholic, to deciding that the evidence suggests that Jesus of Nazareth wasn’t God, but was a real, historical human being, to being a “mythicist”. The reason? The best explanation of the available evidence. I don’t have a “need” for Jesus to be a mythical figure – it is the evaluation of ALL of the evidence (not just bits and pieces picked up from various writings) that convinces me that Jesus of Nazareth did not exist.
A sober approach to the Pauline Epistles sets out a Christ Jesus who is not seen as having lived on earth in the recent past, but one who seems to fulfil his soteriological role in the heavens. The gospels in my view are best explained as a developing literary construction of a figure discovered by re-reading and re-interpreting scripture. None of this would prevent there being “Christians” in Rome in the 50s and 60s CE – it merely means that we may have to redefine the meaning of the term “Christian”, just as Theophilus of Antioch gives a different definition of the term to that of a “follower of Christ”.
There is nothing wide-eyed and raving in my approach to the subject, even if I am an amateur. I am working on developing my skills in NT Greek and other elements of the subject simply with the view of putting myself in a better position for deepening my appreciation of the evidence. I am always open to rational argument putting the other point of view (something you have never brought to the arena as far as I am aware, Mr. Hoffman). I am always prepared to listen to other arguments, and give them due consideration. So far, none have come close to explaining more of the problems with the traditional construct of Christian beginnings tham Jesus Mythicism.
Jim Farrell
Reply

 steph
 February 8, 2013 at 9:23 pm
That’s quite an achievement, greater than that of any other person I know. So now that you have “evaluat[ed] ALL of the evidence” you have found the best explanation to be that Jesus did not exist. So what is the best explanation of the myth?
Reply

 Clarice O'Callaghan
 February 8, 2013 at 9:46 pm
I’d say superstitious pre-science, as above. Faith without reason. What’s the best explanation for an HJ?


 steph
 February 8, 2013 at 10:55 pm
As you will see, I was quoting Jim and you were not addressed Clarice. In any case you have not provided an explanation for a the stories about Jesus being written. You haven’t said anything except give your brief definition of a ‘myth’. Explanations need to engage with the evidence and argument and are demonstrated in books, not in short blog comments. Try Casey’s Jesus of Nazareth perhaps published in 2010. Try Geza Vermes and EP Sanders on the historical Jesus. Try Justin Meggitt and James Crossley on issues to do with Jesus.


 Jim Farrell
 February 22, 2013 at 5:59 pm
The best explanation is that given by “paul” himself. In re-reading the scriptures, he re-interpreted the “Messiah” or “Christ” figure to be, not a human king of the Jews, but a spiritual “redeemer” of all of humanity.
It is striking that nowhere does “paul” feel the need to explain that Jesus flesh, if he was “born of woman” was different from the rest of “flesh”, or humanity, “flesh that “Paul” notes in many places is weak and sinful. How could God send his “Son” in actual flesh if that flesh is weak and sinful? “Paul” never tries to tell us what was diofferent about Jesus’ flesh that made it not “sinful”. However, at Romans 8:3, he does tell us that “Gos sent His Son in the LIKENESS of sinful flesh” (emphasis mine), which clearly suggests that “Paul” didn’t see Jesus as being ana ctual human being at all.


 steph
 February 22, 2013 at 7:10 pm
Jim – If I say you are like the man who tells stories this doesn’t suggest you aren’t a man but it doesn’t say whether or not you tell stories as well. So Paul believed God sent Jesus like a sinful man but Jesus didn’t sin, and he sent him in order to condemn sins of men through his own son who was a man. You are thinking in twenty first century terms. You are in the wrong culture (and language). It is not at all ‘striking’ that Paul wouldn’t feel it necessary to describe Jesus’ life, little about which he would have known in any case. Without post enlightenment mythicists denying his existence, there was no need for Paul to write ‘yes he did’. His life wasn’t contested, it was assumed. He was not writing about the life of Jesus. He was writing letters to communities concerning the future, not past, of the church, relating to the members’ of those churches behaviour and conduct. Paul does not give ‘the best explanation’ for mythicism. You give the most common mythicist reason for mythicism being that Paul doesn’t talk about Jesus in his letters. He never knew him Jim. Perhaps the church members did and they shared their stories with Paul but Paul taught them how to behave.


 muller403
 February 24, 2013 at 10:47 pm
To Jim,
 The word “likeness” (Greek homoiōma) is used in Ro 8:3 & Php 2:7, likely to indicate that “sinful flesh” or “man” is not the normal condition for the Son, which is “heavenly”. And “in the likeness of sinful flesh” or “in the likeness of men” is meant to imply just that.
Ancient writers used “likeness” when a god becomes human on earth, either in a docetist (instant) way or **through childbirth**.
 Here are two examples for god to “born of woman” incarnation:
a) Herodotus, ‘Histories’, Book 7, Chapter 56 “When Xerxes had passed over to Europe, he viewed his army crossing under the lash. Seven days and seven nights it was in crossing, with no pause. It is said that when Xerxes had now crossed the Hellespont, a man of the Hellespont cried, “O Zeus, why have you taken the **likeness** of a Persian man and changed your name to Xerxes, leading the whole world with you to remove Hellas from its place? You could have done that without these means.”
Certainly Herodotus and any other person would know Xerxes was a real man. Furthermore, the comment is not prompted by the nature of the Persian king’s body, but because of the enormous size of his army. Anyway, it shows that “likeness” can be used for an incarnation from a god to a “born of woman” human being.
b) ‘The Ascension of Isaiah’ 4:2 “After it is consummated, Beliar the great ruler, the king of this world, will descend, who hath ruled it since it came into being; yea, he will descent from his firmament in the **likeness** of a man, a lawless king, the slayer of his mother: …”
This relates to emperor Nero, who had his mother Agrippina killed. Once again, the author used “likeness” about the alleged incarnation of a heavenly deity to a real man.
Cordially, Bernard


 steph
 February 25, 2013 at 3:28 am
On the contrary Bernard. Ancient writers used homoios in a number of ways. Meaning ‘like’, and ‘resembling’ synonymous with the Latin ‘similis’ as is clear in the entry of Liddell and Scott linked to below. Birds of a feather flock together, like minds agree, always the same, that in which a person is like another. All these use homoios. For accurate references see Liddell and Scott:
http://nlp.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?greek.display=GreekXLit&arabic.display=UnicodeC&language=trans&navbar.display=show&doc=Perseus:text:1999.04.0058:entry%3Do(/moios
In particular the central point is that Paul thought Jesus was in the likeness of sinful flesh because he was not sinful not because he was not in the flesh. This should be especially clear in the comments immediately following on Romans 8.3. Bernard, you have done just what these mythicists love to do and taken two passages, including Philippians 2.7, out of their context in Paul and interpreted them against a pagan background instead. This demonstrates no understanding of culture or history (or historical literary interpretation) at all.

 

 Tim O'Neill
 February 8, 2013 at 10:44 pm
“A sober approach to the Pauline Epistles sets out a Christ Jesus who is not seen as having lived on earth in the recent past”
Does this “sober” reading include reading the bits where Paul says Jesus had a “human nature”, says he was “born of woman”, says he was descended from the human King David and mentions chatting to his brother in Jerusalem? Let me guess – you wave all that away via something like Earl “self-published polemicist” Doherty’s ad hoc contrivances. Very “sober”. “Sober” as a newt.
Reply

 Geoff
 February 11, 2013 at 10:16 pm
Regarding his brother, need I quote RJH to demonstrate that it is not a foregone conclusion that Gal 1:19 is referring to a sibling of Jesus of Nazareth? I could, of course.


 Jim Farrell
 February 22, 2013 at 6:01 pm
See above response to Steph. The “sober “reading of “paul” includes those elements, as well as the elements where “paul” says specifically that “God sent His Son in the LIKENESS of sinful flesh”, not as actual flesh (Romans 8:3, emphasis mine).
So much more sober than your approach, it would seem.


 Tim O'Neill
 February 22, 2013 at 7:57 pm
And Steph’s reply skewers that little ad hoc work around nicely. This “sober” reading of yours has all the sobriety of a drunk rolling in a gutter.

 
 

 Clarice O'Callaghan
 February 8, 2013 at 11:04 pm
Steph, obviously the stories about Jesus were written just as the stories about other god-men at the time and BCE. No mystery there. Think.
Reply

 steph
 February 8, 2013 at 11:16 pm
Oh. So the Roman emperors for example, didn’t exist!
Reply

 Clarice O'Callaghan
 February 8, 2013 at 11:21 pm
Where did that come from? Of course they did.


 steph
 February 8, 2013 at 11:31 pm
Oh. So now you’re implying of ‘of course’ Jesus existed. As you demand, ‘think’, Clarice.

 
 

 Con Kominos
 February 9, 2013 at 12:02 am
Hi Joe. After reading your blog the only thing that I can offer to the discussion is that you have every right to be a Christ denier denier.
Reply

 steph
 February 9, 2013 at 2:33 am
The subject under examination is a first century Jewish Jesus. “Christ”, (anointed one – by God) is the result of storytelling around a historical figure.
Reply

 Geoff
 February 10, 2013 at 8:54 am
I only see ancient evidence of a “Jesus Christ.” Where is your evidence for this plain old Jesus?


 steph
 February 11, 2013 at 7:20 pm
From the beginning to the end of the story in Mark, the earliest gospel, there is evidence which, supported with arguments, develop a very Jewish, human Jesus. These arguments are laid out in books. Such books have been published by Casey, Vermes, Sanders and Allison. Mythicists dismiss them all because they deny everything complicated. The story in Mark, the earliest gospel, has John the Baptist baptise Jesus. Later redaction in later gospels gradually subordinates John because a godman wouldn’t be subordinate to anyone. A very humanlike struggle is apparent in Jesus in Mark’s Garden of Gethsemane, which decreases through the gospels until by John the whole story is completely written out. The cry on the cross is one of despair in Mark. A godman story wouldn’t be made up with despairing godmen. Later redaction in later gospels writes this out and Jesus is more than willing to give up his spirit, because tradition was considering his divinity. The term Christ occurs only 7 times in the Gospel of Mark. This is the oldest of the Gospels. Most of the seven occurrences are obviously secondary. The picture of Jesus which emerges from considering the oldest traditions in Mark is clearly that of a human being. Furthermore, the arguments are corroborated by external evidence when it is developed into a whole coherent argument. The mythicist head bursts as he expects all answers to be sufficiently supplied in soundbites and complains when he’s told he has to consult books with arguments of cumulative weight which he declares must be wrong as he fires forth predictable and rapid responses from the sure-fire atheist cookbook.


 steph
 February 13, 2013 at 7:57 pm
Facts, Geoff? What facts? You have presented part of the later accretion (in English) from the story in Mark. This is redaction which has been demonstrated in the secondary literature such as that which I directed you to. They present argument supported by manuscript and other evidence to explain the process of storytelling attached to a historical figure. The story which emerges from Mark beneath the later redaction, is of a human being and this is more clearly available in Mark than the later gospels which have been developed further.
You are in the wrong culture like all mythtics. In first century Judaism a heavenly voice saying to Jesus ‘You are my beloved son in you I am well pleased’ means that Jesus is having a vision in which God is telling him that he had an important task for him to do. All faithful Jews were supposed to be sons of God which is the same thing as Christians saying today ‘children of God’. As a first century Jew, this would be what the historical Jesus thought. He was not a deluded Messiah either as this term was not yet in normal usage. Of course the development of Christology is an important aspect of scholarship which you show no sign of having read. I operate on the process of method. I have presented an outline, not an argument. There is no tautology. Your description of it as tautological also shows that you are not familiar with the main secondary literature. Your assumption that the original Jesus did not exist and is presented from nowhere as Jesus Christ, demonstrates a twenty first century mentality, not a first century cultural process of tradition retelling. The Jesus ‘project’ whatever that is, is not ‘suspect’. However your comprehension skills and demands are suspect.

 
 

 sailor1031
 February 9, 2013 at 12:18 pm
Next they’ll be telling us that Haile Selassie didn’t exist. It seems to my poor brain to be simpler to posit a historical figure who becomes the centre of myth and legend. Not that it matters a hill of beans; proving there never was a Yeshue isn’t going to change human nature.
Reply

 steph
 February 9, 2013 at 9:31 pm
The historicity of a Jewish male in the first century, does not prove the existence of any god. And in this particular case it would demonstrate that a god-man is not historical reality but mythmaking. It is a question of history, not theology. Your ‘poor brain’, I suspect has found it ‘simpler’ to deny everything and say ‘myth’.
Reply

 sailor1031
 February 11, 2013 at 7:03 pm
That is hardly what I wrote. I would think it clear that just as Haile Selassie was a real person around whom many myths and legends grew up, so was Yeshue bar Yussef. I do not “deny everything and say myth” at all!. Perhaps you should reread my original post.


 Geoff
 February 11, 2013 at 10:24 pm
This is to sailor, not steph. But couldn’t you also say, just as Robin Hood or King Arthur are characters of questionable historicity around whom legends and myths have accreted, so is Jesus?


 sailor1031
 February 13, 2013 at 8:11 am
To Geoff: You could certainly say that. I don’t know anything about Robin Hood. Arthur on the other hand is possibly based on a real figure – the ‘comes britanniae’, a war leader in late and post-roman times in Britain. But there wasn’t anything written for centuries and the wildest of legends had plenty of ime to accumulate.
In the case of Yeshue we have documents, based possibly on slightly earlier documents or verbal history or both, circulating within a few decades of Yeshue’s alleged death. I think it likely, that as in the case of Haile Selassie, the stories all gelled around an actual figure rather than that a number of different sources of complete myth suddenly arose for no good reason. Could be I’m wrong, but the historical figure just seems more plausible to me. And there’s always the stories about that bald-faced liar Saul of Tarsus actually meeting people that had known Yeshue…….
In any case historical figure or not, it’s not going to change human nature.

 
 

 stevenbollinger
 February 10, 2013 at 10:22 am
Is there really one category into which both G A Wells and Neil Godfrey can meaningfully be placed? If we’re going to call one of them a mythicist, shouldn’t we use a different description for the other?
As far as Godfrey is concerned, and many other of the usual suspects at Vridar and FTB, you’ve certainly nailed them, but so what? Why mass your artillery against fleas? Unless perhaps it’s just because there are so many of them. But really, how much is there to say, in the last analysis, about such simplemindedness? (I’m reminded somewhat of my brief time commenting on those sites, when I asked people like Carrier and Myers why they bothered to debate fundamentalists. Then tended to ignore me when I asked this. You’ve diagnosed some of their reasons for going after the fundies above, and in other recent posts. You and others, describing the phenomenon of “fundamentalist atheism.” Only very recently did another motive for Carrier and Myers to debate the fundies occur to me: they get paid to do so. Not much, probably, but everybody has to make ends meet: http://thewrongmonkey.blogspot.com/2013/01/sequel-to-my-blog-post-dont-play-their.html )
Back to the mythicist label: its application really has been quite imprecise. I wouldn’t mourn the term if it went away altogether. Sometimes it’s used to describe anyone and everyone who is less than absolutely certain of Jesus’
historical existence. Which of course includes you.
Reply

 Ed Jones
 February 11, 2013 at 3:35 pm
On post-Easter Jesus traditions:
Our sole sufficient evicence for knowledge of the Jesus of history is the original and originating faith and witness of the apostles. This apostolic witness began with the event of the key disciples returning to Jerusalem soon after the execution (within weeks) purposing to again take up the sayings of their revered Master. This marked the beginning of post-Easter Jesus traditions with the Jerusalem Jesus Movement from which we obtained the “Sermon on the Mount” (Matt: 5:3-7:27) our most cecrtain source containing apostolic witness to Jesus. This is not found in the writings of the NT, the letters of Paul, the Gospels, as well as the later writings of the NT. The reason: soon after the beginning of the Jesus Movement, a second movement began with Jerusalem Hellenist grooup who took up the notion that the significance of the Jersus event was the salvific efects of the death and resurrection. Soon we find Paul, first as persecutor, then joining this group from which he obtained his Christ myth kerygma, takikng it to the Gentile world to become Gentile Christianity, meeting with ready success. As winners in the struggle for dominance over against the Jesus Movement, they were able to declare it heresy to wipe it from the pages of history. The writings of the NT were written by followers of Paul,not followers of Jesus. As Eric Zuesse’s Christ’s Ventriloquist said it: The religion of the NT had nothing to do with the person Jesus of history.
Reply

 Geoff
 February 12, 2013 at 8:28 am
“It offers very little: it makes the pretty obvious point that the existence of God and the existence of Jesus are two different things unless (a) you believe Jesus is God or (b) you believe that a Jesus who did not exist cannot have been God, which might also have some impact on some ideas of God as well.”
I agree with this statement. One of the issues I see though is that there is confusion regarding the “agenda” of so-called mythicists. You repeat it here and it is implicit in the title of your post. Mythicists argue that early Christians believed in a celestial Jesus, not a non-existent Jesus. Jesus to the early Christians, like modern Christians, lived in heaven. No different than modern Christians today. I would argue that ancient Christians believed that Jesus had been crucified on earth in some mythical past. I would argue further that to the vast majority of Christians, ancient Jerusalem of the Gospels is also a mythical past. The belief-systems are the same and the question is not “Did Jesus Exist” which is irrelevant. The question, here, is Did the earliest Christians believe in a martyr figure of the recent past? Answering that with an uncritical yes is to put blinders on to the other possibilities.
Reply

 rjosephhoffmann
 February 12, 2013 at 9:13 am
What is the HJ (presumably Historical Jesus) thesis and why is it limiting, since the postulation of human existence is a pretty usual thing. I have never met you and know you only from your cyberscribble, but I have no reason to doubt your existence. Perhaps you mean the theories imposed on that existence by theology? But That is a different matter and not at all what is under discussion here. Even in debate one begins with defining the terms to be discussed; and I find no such willingness among mythtics to do that– just demands for evidence (also undefined) that will satisfy their false assumption that we possess the kind of bedrock empirical material that would prove the case of the historical existence of a figure for whom such material would be available. I know that sentence will take some reading, so read it twice. I have found that reading things comprehensively is a general weakness among mythicists, as well as among hardcore believers. You do “get,” do you not, that an argument for an historical Jesus eo ipso excludes Christology, but cannot exclude the way in which Christology developed?
Reply

 vinnyjh57
 February 12, 2013 at 11:06 am
I have read that sentence several times and I still cannot make heads or tails of it. If such material would be available, why is it false to assume that we possess it?


 steph
 February 12, 2013 at 7:06 pm
@Vinny – hahahahahaha.


 vinnyjh57
 February 12, 2013 at 10:11 pm
Steph,
Why is that funny?


 steph
 February 12, 2013 at 10:42 pm
Availability of empirical evidence. Bedrock – mythicists.


 Mark Erickson
 April 22, 2013 at 1:04 am
I have found writing for comprehension is a comprehensive failing of yours.


 steph
 April 22, 2013 at 4:32 am
Mark. A great deal of time has passed during which much conversation ensued. After all this time, today the irony of your innocently inadvertent confession expressing your comprehension deficit, is striking – but unsurprising…

 
 

 muller403
 February 14, 2013 at 1:02 pm
I notice Clarice O’Callaghan asked doctor Hoffmann:
“I’ve wondered for a long time why it is so important to certain people that Jesus did exist?”
First, I think that was partly answered on this blog by Matthew:
“A historical Jesus explained the most data with the fewest assumptions and unanswered questions.”
And also, on Clarice’s own forum (JesusMysteries) by GR Gaudreau:
“I’ve been thinking a lot about Occam’s Razor lately, and when I see all of
 the complicated twists and turns some have to take to explain why Jesus
 didn’t exist, it just sours the cream for me.”
As a non-believer, non-religious, non-Christian, yes, I am ashamed that some other atheists goes into all kinds of ridicule non-sense in order to sketch theories with no HJ in order to explain the beginning of Christianity.
But I think these “absolutely_no_HJ” theories are largely motivated, not only by anti-Christian feelings, but also by repulsion of most HJ descriptions. Even if some of them came from non-believer like Ehrman, they are, even expurgated (but with their charismatic teacher outlook and a HJ presented as the real founder of a sect/movement/religion) way too close of a Christian HJ (and false, according to my studies). They are inviting non-believers to accept non-HJ schemes as the only option away from these “loaded” HJs.
I feel bad that my option of an ultra minimalist HJ, NOT a teacher, NOT charismatic, NOT the creator of Christian beliefs, is not considered, sometimes not even known. However, it does explain the lack of external evidence, many silences from Paul and the so-called messianic secret in gMark, among many others things. But because of the immediate context, and using the OT as authority, and claiming revelations from above, and looking at Philo’s works, it was easy, from a poor uneducated Galilean executed and mocked/charged as “king of the Jew”, to start a new sect. Then the myths started to come …
Cordially, Bernard
Reply

 steph
 February 14, 2013 at 8:24 pm
“CARR” ….. you’re in the wrong culture like all mythtics. Ideas evolve, so does language, language is translated… possible exception: mythtics’ ideas and language, which begin and remain rooted firmly in the twenty-first century along with the extent of their views of cultural environment.
Reply

 Matthew
 February 19, 2013 at 4:04 pm
The question of the historical Jesus is strictly important to a fundamentalist atheist. For those who would examine the structural context behind the message, it becomes important what the original function of that message resonates. In the words of Jesus we find things that are expressed at the very core of who we are as human beings. Making water into wine at the request of his mother, creating food for people to eat, raising friends from the dead. We can debate ad nauseam the historical accounts of Jesus, but in the end the real question is what you do with the claims of Jesus. Islam and Judaism share the same question. Judaism wants you to embrace ethical living and eschatology of a future Messiah. Islam wants you to embrace the teachings of Mohammed, and the future Mahdi. At the core of what Jesus wants us to embrace are essential love for God, and a nonsectarian love for others. Whether you passionately deny Christ, you cannot deny the passion of his message. You can only deny its origin.
Reply


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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient


St Paul’s Valentine
by rjosephhoffmann

appy February 14th in the year of Our Lord 2013! 
Valentine if he existed was a third century martyr who died on the date associated with his feast on the Via Flamina outside Rome.  Because the Church exaggerated both the number and the style of martyr-deaths, his name was removed from the official calendar of the Roman church in 1969, but his feast is still kept as a regional festival.
The “Golden Legend” of Jacobus de Voraigne compiled about 1260 and one of the most-read books of the High Middle Ages, gives sufficient details of the saints for each day of the liturgical year to inspire a homily on each occasion. The very brief vita of St Valentine has him refusing to deny Christ before the “Emperor Claudius” in the year 280. Before his head was cut off, this Valentine restored sight and hearing to the daughter of his jailer.  Jacobus makes a play with the etymology of “Valentine”, “as containing valour.”  In any case, the English (Anglican) and even the Lutheran church have maintained his feast day for centuries, and in the Middle Ages his valour was considered a model for the emerging doctrine of courtly love–hence the association with romantic attachment.

hristianity  may be unique among the world’s religions in its emphasis on love, an emphasis, alas,  that has not been borne out in the works and deeds of the imperial and later global Church.  But it is undeniable that the early Christians sought to distinguish themselves in the empire by works of kindness and charity (caritas, the root for our word charity is one of several Latin words for love and the King James biblical translators preferred it).
Even the pagan critics of the church, like Celsus and Minucius Felix, found this public celebration of tenderness cloying and opposite to the highly formalized religious practices of the day. In  formalized Catholicism, after the fourth century, the expression of love would be reduced to the single liturgical moment called the “kiss of peace”–the Pax or en philemati agapes–exchanged between the celebrants of the Eucharist and excluding the worshipers entirely. As time went by, the “kiss” (osculum) was exchanged for a feigned embrace, and in modern services, including the Roman Catholic, a Hollywood handshake between members of the post-Mass donut crowd, thereby achieving a new low in cultural transformation from the sublime to the pedestrian.   Where hath love gone?
But back to the basic: The model for the kiss of peace is a “hymn” (a prose poem) written by St Paul in the mid first century.  It is perhaps the best known hymn in the Christian tradition,  often admired, sometimes copied,  never equaled for its intuitive flow.
Its immediate occasion is a divided Christian church in the Greek city of Corinth that had fallen into fighting over what “gifts” (charismata) make someone a good Christian.  The debate and the nature of the quarrel are hopelessly distant from our time, but what survives is Paul’s warning that almost any other “gift” is inferior to the power of love. His logic is as simple as the John Lennon’s  ”Imagine“: Love cures divisions, so must be superior to any other virtue or gift.
Here is the Greek text, followed by my English rendition, and the classic “Jacobean” translation from the 1611 (“King James”)  Bible:

SBLGk: καὶ ἔτι καθ’ ὑπερβολὴν ὁδὸν ὑμῖν δείκνυμι. 1Ἐὰν ταῖς γλώσσαις τῶν ἀνθρώπων λαλῶ καὶ τῶν ἀγγέλων, ἀγάπην δὲ μὴ ἔχω, γέγονα χαλκὸς ἠχῶν ἢ κύμβαλον ἀλαλάζον. 2 καὶ ἐὰν ἔχω προφητείαν καὶ εἰδῶ τὰ μυστήρια πάντα καὶ πᾶσαν τὴν γνῶσιν, καὶ ἐὰν ἔχω πᾶσαν τὴν πίστιν ὥστε ὄρη μεθιστάναι, ἀγάπην δὲ μὴ ἔχω, οὐθέν εἰμι. 3 καὶ ἐὰν ψωμίσω πάντα τὰ ὑπάρχοντά μου, καὶ ἐὰν παραδῶ τὸ σῶμά μου, ἵνα καυθήσομαι, ἀγάπην δὲ μὴ ἔχω, οὐδὲν ὠφελοῦμαι.
4 Ἡ ἀγάπη μακροθυμεῖ, χρηστεύεται ἡ ἀγάπη, οὐ ζηλοῖ ἡ ἀγάπη, οὐ περπερεύεται, οὐ φυσιοῦται, 5 οὐκ ἀσχημονεῖ, οὐ ζητεῖ τὰ ἑαυτῆς, οὐ παροξύνεται, οὐ λογίζεται τὸ κακόν, 6 οὐ χαίρει ἐπὶ τῇ ἀδικίᾳ, συγχαίρει δὲ τῇ ἀληθείᾳ· 7 πάντα στέγει, πάντα πιστεύει, πάντα ἐλπίζει, πάντα ὑπομένει.
8 Ἡ ἀγάπη οὐδέποτε πίπτει. εἴτε δὲ προφητεῖαι, καταργηθήσονται· εἴτε γλῶσσαι, παύσονται· εἴτε γνῶσις, καταργηθήσεται. 9 ἐκ μέρους γὰρ γινώσκομεν καὶ ἐκ μέρους προφητεύομεν·10 ὅταν δὲ ἔλθῃ τὸ τέλειον, τὸ ἐκ μέρους καταργηθήσεται. 11 ὅτε ἤμην νήπιος, ἐλάλουν ὡς νήπιος, ἐφρόνουν ὡς νήπιος, ἐλογιζόμην ὡς νήπιος· ὅτε γέγονα ἀνήρ, κατήργηκα τὰ τοῦ νηπίου. 12 βλέπομεν γὰρ ἄρτι δι’ ἐσόπτρου ἐν αἰνίγματι, τότε δὲ πρόσωπον πρὸς πρόσωπον· ἄρτι γινώσκω ἐκ μέρους, τότε δὲ ἐπιγνώσομαι καθὼς καὶ ἐπεγνώσθην. 13 νυνὶ δὲ μένει πίστις, ἐλπίς, ἀγάπη· τὰ τρία ταῦτα, μείζων δὲ τούτων ἡ ἀγάπη. [Διώκετε τὴν ἀγάπην]
Rjh: 2013:
[12.31b: Now I will show you the best way of all.]  13.1 I may speak the language of  men, or of angels, but without love I am a sounding brass, a clanging cymbal. I may have the gift of prophecy, and know every hidden truth; I may have faith strong enough to move mountains, but if I have no love, I am nothing. I may give all that that I have to the poor, even give my body to be burnt, but without love I am worthless.
Love is patient. Love is kind. Love has no jealousy. Love is never proud, never vain. It is not rude or selfish. It does not easily take offense. It does not keep score of wrongs. It does not gloat over other people’s failings. It seeks the truth and delights in the truth. There is nothing love cannot face. There is no limit to its faith, its hope, its possibility.
Love will never come to an end. You speak about prophets?  They will have their day.  Ecstasy and visions? The visions will end. Knowledge? It will fade away. Because what we call knowledge and truth are partial, and the partial vanishes when wholeness comes.
When I was a child, my speech, my thoughts, my outlook were childish. When I grew up, I was finished with childish things.  Now we see only puzzling reflections, as in a mirror—darkly–but in the end we shall see the truth face to face.  What I know now is incomplete, but in the end it will be complete, like God’s knowledge of me.  There are three things that last forever: faith, hope, and love, but greatest of these is love. Put love first.
KJV, 1611*
Yet shew I unto you a more excellent way. Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.2 And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing. 3 And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing. 4 Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, 5 Doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil;6 Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; 7 Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. 8 Charity never faileth: but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away. 9 For we know in part, and we prophesy in part. 10 But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away. 11 When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. 12 For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. 13 And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.
*The word “charity”, from caritas is a  poor translation of the Greek word ἀγάπη (love). The 1611 translators associated “Christian charity” with acts of kindness (much the same as our modern definition of the word) and so preferred it to the more precise Greek idea of an outward display of affection and care between people, symbolized by a kiss.  Paul mentions this action five times in his letters, and St Augustine says in an Easter sermon,  ”After this [prayer], the ‘Peace be with you’ is said, and the Christians embrace one another with the holy kiss. This is a sign of peace; as the lips indicate, let peace be made in your conscience, that is, when your lips draw near to those of your brother, do not let your heart withdraw from his.”
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Published: February 14, 2013
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12 Responses to “St Paul’s Valentine”

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» Happy Valentine’s Day–and Who Was that Saint Again? TaborBlog says:
 February 14, 2013 at 10:24 am
[...] http://rjosephhoffmann.wordpress.com/2013/02/14/st-pauls-valentine/ [...]
Reply

 rjosephhoffmann
 February 14, 2013 at 3:45 pm
I do love that sonnet. I think SS was influenced by the predecessor to the 1611, called the Geneva as the KJV had just begun to circulate when he died in 1616 http://www.amazon.com/Shakespeare-Bible-Oxford-Topics/dp/0198184395
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 ROO BOOKAROO
 February 14, 2013 at 1:44 pm
It is striking that so many lines in Shxpr’s sonnets were directly inspired by this passage. Shxpr had been raised on the rhetoric of the Bible.
Including famous Sonnet #116
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
 Admit impediments. Love is not love
 Which alters when it alteration finds,
 Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
 That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
 It is the star to every wandering bark,
 Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
 Within his bending sickle’s compass come:
 Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
 But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
 I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
Reply

 steph
 February 14, 2013 at 9:02 pm
I’ve ‘read’ it for the first time. And re-read and re-read. It’s beautiful, real and raw with such indescribably real passion. I believe your interpretation is truer to Paul, for then and now. And this IS what love is. KJV’s translation, as always, fails.
Reply

 Liakos
 February 15, 2013 at 7:22 am
Mr.Steph, I may be Greek (Orthodox Greek nontheless) but even I have heard that the KJV’s translation is heralded as “the most influential version,of the most influential book in the most influential language.”
Reply

 steph
 February 15, 2013 at 8:19 pm
Liakos: Yes. The KJV has stood its ground for 500 years, celebrating that anniversary in 2011 with tremendous celebrations and conferences and scholarship dedicated to it. All translations however, and this one from the Greek New Testament and Hebrew text, are interpretation of another language. Not only do languages evolve as English has during those 500 years, King James had instructed his 47 translators, all members of the Church of England, to guarantee that the new version would conform to the ecclesiology, reflecting the episcopal structure of the Church of England and its belief in an ordained clergy. This bias is demonstrated in translation. It is of much interest to me, as it has a long and fascinating history and has been called the most influential version of the most influential book in the world, and it has also contributed 257 idioms to English. Nevertheless its former monopoly in the English-speaking world has diminished (the Church of England recommends six other versions in addition to it). It is still the most popular translation in the United States, especially among Evangelicals. And I would argue that, even with regard to its archaic English, it fails to do justice to the Greek text. Above, with the epistle of Paul, it clearly fails to do justice to the sense and depth of feeling, with its woodenness. Joe’s interpretation captures the depth of Paul’s feeling incisively with far greater clarity.
Reply
 

 Immunophilosopher
 February 15, 2013 at 8:19 am
I’m curious about your starting comment RE: exaggeration of the number of early Christian martyrs. I’ve heard numerous estimates for the actual number from a variety of sources, but most of those were either from Christian apologists trying to big up the numbers or counter-apologetics trying to minimise them.
Is there any nonpartisan academic research into this area? I’d be fascinated to have a reference for this, if you have one.
Kind Regards,
Immunophilosopher
Reply

 stevenbollinger
 February 16, 2013 at 9:45 am
It’s hard to think of anyone who doesn’t have any partisan tendencies one way or another on the subject of Christianity. (Except for me, of course. [Ha ha.]) I’m reminded of that spy thriller cliche: “Trust no-one.” Or more practically: take into account that almost everyone may have some biases. Some seem to be trying much harder than others to be objective (or so it seems to me, but of course I may be biased), but I know of no official objectivity scoreboard.
Joe seems to be making an effort. I also would be interested in any studies of Christian martyrdom he might want to recommend.
The Martyrologium Romanum was compiled from earlier accounts in the 16th century and was (is?) the official Catholic account of the early Christian martyrs, and an example of the exaggeration to which Joe refers.
The Acta Sanctorum contain source material on saints, including martyrs. They’re arranged according to the feast day of the saint. Many volumes of them are visible online here. There may well be some collections of source materials concentrating on early martyrs of which I’m unaware.
Reply

 steph
 February 17, 2013 at 3:31 am
For people who recognise the necessity of the knowledge of history, for enabling us to gain more understanding of who we are today and how we should proceed in the future, the search for what happened, what people thought and why they might have thought what they did, objectivity is imperative for accuracy. If by the twentieth century even the Roman Church recognised the bias of the earlier counts and accounts of martyrdom and chopped the Saint off Valentine, this surely demonstrates they’ve moved to a place in history that recognises this too. They have demonstrated a desire to include only ‘real’ people who had really died in the name of Christianity on the list of martyrs. But then what were the criteria chosen which determined that poor Valentine didn’t belong. What criteria did they use to determine who was ‘real’ and historical and what criteria did they use to determine a ‘Christian’ martyr from a non-Christian martyr. These criteria might demonstrate their biases…And what were their biases – did they include those early martyrs whose historical existence beyond tradition of their martyrdom is only assumed by the appearance of their names in the Church canon. The historical existence of some of these may or may not be historical but if the Church considers the bible infallible… I don’t consider the bible to be infallible and consider the historicity of some of those biblical martyrs more difficult to determine and my criterion for identification of ‘Christian’ would probably only be the martyr’s own claim to faith as such. I’m biased. I’m not absolutely certain that the criteria I choose are the best or couldn’t be improved so any list I made would have to add a concession ‘give or take one or three’. But if we’re not concerned with determining if any non-Christians have been killed by Christians (perhaps we should be) as some more vocal atheists seem to be, nor immersed in the Church, or belief or anti belief, wouldn’t we have ‘less’ bias and does bias come down to a matter of degree? But perhaps that’s bias too. I wonder if any of those ‘martyrs’ were killed by … ‘Christians’… What a tangled web of uncertainties some of history is.

 

 stevenbollinger
 February 17, 2013 at 9:49 am
Trying again to post the link to the Acta sanctorum: http://archive.org/search.php?sort=title&query=%28contributor%3A%28Falvey%20Memorial%20Library%2C%20Villanova%20University%29%29%20AND%20-mediatype%3Acollection%20AND%20firstTitle:A
Reply
 

 Jeff
 February 17, 2013 at 11:39 am
“If he existed?” Looks like we have a Valentine-denier here. I guess I should write 100 posts about how stupid you are for being a Valentine mythtic without actually bothering to articulate any specific point in the argument over whether he was real or not.
Reply

 rjosephhoffmann
 February 17, 2013 at 12:29 pm
Of course he existed; he has a feast day doesn’t he?
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Ah! Bitter Love
by rjosephhoffmann




Fate eventually discloses
And my friends agree:
Women with pinched and waspish noses
Aren’t my cup of tea.

I loved you in the summer time
I loved you in the autumn,
I loved you when the years declined
To amplify your bottom.

I loved you when the winter sun
Set early its orison.
And so did seven other men
You’d only just set eyes on.

We live in reckless times my heart.
The moral, then, of course is,
Never finish what you start
And never scare the horses.
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Published: February 23, 2013
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Beyond the Secular City
by rjosephhoffmann

 Reblogged from The New Oxonian:

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It has been forty six years since Harvey Cox was made famous by a book called The Secular City.
I’m sure people read it—they certainly bought it--but apparently very few people took it to heart. It was famous for being famous, had an untidy thesis and worst of all did not prominently take on the topic its title promised: the secularization of American life.
Read more… 1,344 more words

In the wake oe Election 2012, it is time to get serious about secularism and humanism again. One thing for sure, Congress won't.

Published: March 5, 2013
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Beyond the Secular City
by rjosephhoffmann


It has been forty six years since Harvey Cox was made famous by a book called The Secular City.
I’m sure people read it—they certainly bought it–but apparently very few people took it to heart. It was famous for being famous, had an untidy thesis and worst of all did not prominently take on the topic its title promised: the secularization of American life. It was dazzling, intellectually promiscuous, and energetic, much like its author, a “village Baptist” come to Harvard.
And it was an extended broadside against the death of God theologians who then dominated the covers of Time and Newsweek and whose shelf-life, after the initial shock of the new, did not amount to a decade.

No one could quite make out what they wanted God to be, so the thought that he was dead turned out to be something of a consolation. “Now,” I remember thinking one day after reading a certain book by Thomas Altizer, “if only the theologians would stop writing obituaries.”
It is a shame that The Secular City got so much press because when it was written secularization was a real  phenomenon. God was not only in retreat at Harvard, Yale, Chicago, and even Emory, but the great social programs of the era seemed to suggest that people were looking for this-worldly solutions to urban blight, poverty, domestic illiteracy, racism, war and a dozen other issues that competed for attention. The jury is still out on all of those issues, from blight to birthers.
In an odd way, Cox’s book could have been written by Joseph Ratzinger who is constantly invoking “authentic Christianity” in “secular Europe.”. In fact,Cox was fresh back from a German stint when he wrote it and decided that the cure for many of the ills of American society was a new spirit of “authentic Christianity,” the first symptom of infection with the virus existentialus immoderatus. Cox did not mean revival in the Billy Graham style. That was an option throughout the twentieth century and, remarkably, affected politics from Truman to Obama. Like every freshly minted theologian, Cox believed that the the cure for nihilism (which was the jumping off a cliff option of the era) was not just any faith but (again) authentic faith. The kind of faith that found affirmation in negation. That sort of garbage.

In a 1990 article in Christian Century, Cox said he had written the book to stress that neither religious revivial nor secularism are unmixed blessings, that the thesis of The Secular City was “that God is first the Lord of history and only then the Head of the Church.”

This means that God can be just as present in the secular as in the religious realms of life, and we unduly cramp the divine presence by confining it to some specially delineated spiritual or ecclesial sector. This idea has two implications. First, it suggests that people of faith need not flee from the allegedly godless contemporary world. God came into this world, and that is where we belong as well. But second, it also means that not all that is ‘spiritual’ is good for the spirit.
Written to be quoted by liberal pastors, when I read this passage today it sounds like a vintage sixties tract, which in many ways it was. It is the language of someone who has drunk too deeply from the theology of Karl Barth (a real hazard of American theology of the era) and whose main talent was not serious theology but impersonation. Even the suggestion that “people of faith need not flee from the godless contemporary world” rings empty: who was chasing them? What answers were they afraid to hear?
The Secular City makes for depressing reading for another reason: because we are now twenty years beyond the twenty five year retrospective of its appearance, and we are not saved. There is plenty of religious revival. There is an awakened interest in atheism, that seems neither informed nor profound. But neither phenomenon is the point, any more than the shock value of the Death of God “movement” was the point in the swinging sixties.

The point is, we need to be talking about secularism. Of course, that includes a discussion of issues, and the Constitution, and the right of gays to marry, and a dozen cognate matters that respond well to secular approaches. But simple talk about those issues–and I will add various Pride Movements to the list–threatens to drown out the voice of what my former colleague, Austin Dacey, has called “The Secular Conscience.” That is what matters, and that is what we should be talking about. I have no doubt that people who are afflicted by various forms of discrimination have found a better friend in secularism than in the church, mosque and synagogue. That is why it is time to give our friend the time it deserves.
We do not need to be religious to realize that Father John Neuhaus (The Naked Public Square, the book Cox might have wanted to write) was right on the money when he said that the world is dying of metaphysical boredom. Neither fervently religious people nor ardently non-religious people, it seems to me, have the tonic for this peculiarly modern disease.

Be secular.
In the midst of the most degrading sexual scandal of modern history, the Catholic church still cleaves to the banner of moral authority in the name of this lord of History and head of the Church, while preaching a “gospel of life.” Our political world is dominated by office seekers who, to get elected, must swear fealty to religious principles they have never examined. Our teachers still find Darwin suspicious reading (or suspicious on hearsay) and evolution “just a theory.” Science illiteracy and religious illiteracy—always the Bobbsey twins of ignorance, are arguably worse in 2011 than they were in 1965 when Cox sounded his muddled alarm.
Something else was going on in the sixties, however, of far greater consequence and, this being America, of lesser note at the time. Prometheus Books was founded by Paul Kurtz—a voice for humanism, secularism and free inquiry in an age hounded by the reactionary religious (aka “Moral) majority of the era. Kurtz went on to found the Council for Secular Humanism to advocate for non-religious morality and decision making; the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSICOP) to push for critical thinking in matters of science, and the flagship organizations, the Council for Secular Humanism and later the Center for Inquiry.
The mission and objectives of these organisations was crystal clear. They were dedicated to the advancement of science and reason. To make them more clear, he founded two magazines that are still going strong and are unique in their support of evangelical common sense: Free Inquiry, and The Skeptical Inquirer. In 1984, in response to explicit threats to the First Amendment and to encourage the free and open discussion of religion in the public square, he organized the Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion.
Over the years, these organizations have grown against the odds and moved against the tide flung against progress by the Lord of History.
In 2010, after a humiliating setback in the Center for Inquiry, which led finally to his resignation, an undaunted Kurtz founded an organization whose name expresses better than any previous one what the unfaithed and unchurched and humanistic minority of this country need to support their habit of secular thought: The Institute for Science and Human Values.

The Institute will be an engine for a process that Kurtz and others put into place forty years ago. It is unequivocal in lobbying for a secular and humanistic worldview, grounded in science, supported by inquiry, and skeptical of the claim of any movement or group to possess the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
I am proud to associate myself with the Institute and its programs, its new publication (The Human Prospect) and its Forum. I think that every person who regards herself or himself as secular will want to support it too.
The new Secularism and the City Forum invites you to share your story, your commitments, and your thoughts. You may be an atheist, a faitheist, a skeptic, or a Freethinking None. But we hope to see you on the forum to register your thoughts.
The transition between the Death of God and the Secular Era, despite a few setbacks, begins now.
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Published: March 3, 2011
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Tags: atheism : humanism : Paul Kurtz : Skepticism : Center for Inquiry : Institute for Science and Human Values : Secular City : Secularism and the City Forum : Death of God ..
13 Responses to “Beyond the Secular City”

.
 steph
 March 3, 2011 at 7:48 pm
I support the ISHV with everything I can give and do for it, every positive ounce of energy I have. Welcome to the future, pop the bubbly, congratulations: The Secularism and the City forum is a brilliant and inspiring idea and the ISHV is vitally important for humanity and the environment. With the greatest respect and kudos to Paul Kurtz, your good self, and everyone involved.
x
Reply

 James Croft
 March 3, 2011 at 10:10 pm
This post has made me reevaluate my skepticism toward the ISHV, and I hope to contribute something toward it in the future. This is the best post of yours I;ve had the pleasure of reading!
Reply

 Argelia (Argie) Tejada Segor (aka Argelia Tejada Yangüela)
 March 3, 2011 at 11:53 pm
I am pleased to see R Joseph Hoffmann join this cause. People believe against all evidence that outside religion humans will end in catastrophic immorality. There has never been a greater need to demystify this perception.
Reply

 Thamizhan
 March 4, 2011 at 6:58 am
This indeed is the need of the hour. The common man (includes both man and woman equally) is torn between making a living, keeping the family happy, analyzing the politicians and understanding the religious truth ! Left alone he/she will do a wonderful job.But society wants god and religion as does political life.It is good the younger generation are free of some of these musts and are going for their wants.It is in the time of their sorrow,health and vulnerability the religion plays a vulture. If we can address those needs secular happy life will become a reality for many.
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 Seth Strong
 March 4, 2011 at 8:45 am
It sounds relevant to me.
Reply

 steph
 March 4, 2011 at 1:13 pm
The wonderful thing about the articulated sense in this post, and now our anticipation of progress creating the new secular era, is that it is beyond belief and concerned with science and humanity. I think it is entirely consistent with the scholarship and ideas Joe has expressed in previous posts.
Reply

 Sheldon Gottlieb
 March 4, 2011 at 1:41 pm
It is an honor and a pleasure to be associated with Paul Kurtz in his new venture. Society is in desperate need for an organization that promotes science, skepticism, humanism and secularism. Such a need becomes more relevant and more urgent when one views the myriad religiously based hates that permeate American society, Western society, the Arab/Muslim world, etc. including the United Nations and the senseless waste of human life and other scarce resources on the wars based thereon.
Reply

 Paul LaClair
 March 4, 2011 at 7:01 pm
I’m in. How can I help out?
Reply

 rjosephhoffmann
 March 4, 2011 at 7:03 pm
Hi Paul: That’s great. I am forwarding your comment to Nathan Bupp and we’ll find a way to exploit you and your talents!
Reply
 

 rjosephhoffmann
 March 5, 2013 at 5:15 pm
Reblogged this on The New Oxonian and commented:
In the wake oe Election 2012, it is time to get serious about secularism and humanism again. One thing for sure, Congress won’t.
Reply

 stevenbollinger
 March 5, 2013 at 6:57 pm
In both of his Inaugural addresses, Obama mentioned atheists as being non-evil human beings deserving of a place in American society. That’s not much, but it’s closer to a welcome than anything any other US President has said right out loud in public, and much friendlier than Bush Sr doubting whether we should be considered citizens.
Reply
 

 jsegor23
 March 5, 2013 at 6:19 pm
When my wife, Argelia (Argie) Tejada became the CFI Coordinator for Miami she did so because of Paul Kurtz’s emphasis on a world ethic. She was surprised and disappointed to find out that many of the people that Paul hired did not share this emphasis. We both finally left CFI because of this. We thought that Paul’s effort to start a new organization at his advanced age was something of an ego trip and that it would not outlast him. I am surprised to find that it is still alive and will look into it.
It is one thing to talk about secularism and another to put yourself on the line to advance it. Argie is presently in the Dominican Republic helping to organize a secular movement that will end the Catholic Church’s centuries old position as the official church. The Church has always allied itself with dictators such as the tyrant Trujillo and with the current crop of outrageously corrupt politicians. The Church siphons off an enormous amount of money that could better be used for public education and other beneficial activities. It also imposes its ideology to the detriment of many, especially of women. Argie’s effort is not without danger and I await her safe return with trepidation.
Reply

 Dwight Jones
 March 6, 2013 at 10:04 am
I do maintain that the real problem is that humanism is not being presented, under its own flag, as a an idea-rich alternative to orthodox religion. So many issues that you mention in this post are around species governance – militarism, women’s rights, corruption, poverty – and have only a tangential or default relationship to religion.
Example: there is a battle going on in Washington now for community spectrum (WiFi) that would enable the poor to participate in the Internet revolution. Solar power, free Wifi and and old 5W tablet can greatly improve the standard of living in the dwellings of poor families – but who represents them? AT&T/Verizon et al are closing the noose and there are not enough humanist apologists who even realize its importance.
Flogging old priests and letting 66,000 troops continue to rape Afghanistan for the 10th time is not humanism. The world needs another Christ figure who becomes revered for a new morality based on integrity, just as the original taught compassion. There will be a sea change, but the wind has to shift first.
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Pope St Francis
by rjosephhoffmann

As we wait for the media to make Pope Francis into its own image of a “people’s Pope” I thought I would offer a few thoughts.  I have no special insight.  I am a lapsed Catholic who, when most recently asked if I was “practicing,” replied that I had given up practicing when I felt I reached a sufficient level of perfection and could go no further with it.
Francis of Assisi, to use CNN”S favourite adjective, is an iconic saint. That means everyone knows a little bit about him, even protestants who normally can’t be bothered with names like Boniface and Thomas Aquinas.  I haven’t checked the registry today, but my recollection is that there haven’t been popes named Thomas either.  Peter is off limits, so too the names of the apostles with the exception of lots of Johns and Pauls and a few Marks. –Odd in the institution that invented the theory of apostolic succession but ended up with names Like Zosimus, Celestine, Pius, and (hee hee) Hilarius.  But that is a quibble.
So what about Francis?  Francis was a thirteenth century hippie who talked to birds, had delusions of spiritual communion so intense that he bled, and  was neither pastoral nor especially generous.  He was dirty, sickly, a coward, spiritually selfish, weird, a poor administrator, a beggar who lived off others’ charity and left his own order in a shambles of rival sects that made little impact on the consolidating authority of Rome, then heavily into the regal trappings of an imperial papacy. Those who wish to read good but sanitized versions of these interpretations may wish to have a look at the recent biographies of Dominican priest Augustine Thompson (Francis of Assisi, A New Biography) and, from the French to English, Andre Vauchez’s Francis of Assisi: The Life and Afterlife of a Medieval Saint.
It is not that Francis that this Francis wants to evoke.  It is the Francis legend: that Francis, the Francis of Catholic piety and garden statues, loved birds, wore a brown robe as he strolled in the evening composing nature poems, and in his spare time loved the poor.  The crucial part of the legend which is almost certainly crucially false is the bit where Pope Innocent I, in a vision, dreamed he saw a monk holding in his hands the Basilica of St John Lateran  (the pope’s own church), and decided it was God’s will for him to approve the monk’s new order.   As a symbol of their obedience to his authority, however, the friars were required to be “tonsured” ( a patch of their hair removed from their pate), signifying they would not preach heresy.
This Francis, a pope,  is said to prefer the simple white cassock and to eschew gold, ermine and red slippers.  Offered those trappings immediately after his election, he is reported to have said to an attendant, “No, the carnival is over.”  But this may just be a rumour being spread by traditionalist Catholics.  Who could know?
What I do know is this.  The least offensive thing about Benedict XVI is that he fulfilled the central office of the papacy, which is to be a teacher.  That is the job description. Loving the poor and being concerned about the plight of the environment are noble things, and everybody should care about those things.  But that is not what popes can do best. The councils of the modern secular state are where poverty alleviation and environmental protection take place, not in a baroque office under the ever-blue skies of eternal Rome.
The unavoidable fact is, the Church is only strong in a world where the poor and the hungry are a majority.  A church of well-educated men and women who manage their incomes well and plan their families by using contraception and, in a pinch, abortion—that kind of world has no use for popes.
Loving the poor is code for needing the poor, the uneducated, the disillusioned.  Those poor no longer live, primarily,  in Europe and increasingly not in North America.  They live below the equator, in Africa, parts of South America, the southern Atlantic and the Pacific. That is where the church is strongest, because it is also where superstition is the strongest.  These Catholics do not need to be taught the doctrine of the Church.  They don’t need (or even like) Latin masses. They believe in simplest terms that Jesus is God, that Mary is his Mother, that priests have magical power, and that when they die, if they are saved, they will go heaven and live forever. They pray these things in their own language and they sing about them to the strumming of untuned guitars and marimbas. They want to feel loved, and to feel compassion.  No one can fault people for that. I certainly don’t.
I do not even believe that the Church conspires to keep them in this state.  The difficulty for Catholicism throughout history has been how to lift many  people up intellectually and then keep them in the walls once they are lifted. A former priest teacher of mine (who left his order about five years after my high school graduation to become a social worker) once put it simply: people who need bread don’t need a lecture on transsubstantiation.  The ironic outcome of Catholic “education,” including my own, has been to show people the world that scholar-priests, philosophers, and theologians helped bring into existence—a world of serious thought, questions, and solutions—and then to ask them to choose faith instead. A rather grim reversal of Plato’s Allegory.
Benedict’s failed attempt was to call people back to the smart Church and to that world.  Francis will be satisfied with the nostrum:  Have faith—prefer faith.  If you have any insight beyond that, good for you. Odd for a member of a religious order that is not especially known for its faith-based initiatives.
And just for the banal, persona-shaping media, this also has to be said.   When it comes to this pope “reforming” the papacy: No.  This pope will be even more adamant in opposing birth control, abortion, a new definition of marriage, the relaxation of priestly celibacy, and women’s ordination.  The Church has certainly and frequently called for social justice, but when it gets right down to it, they have benefited from poverty and ignorance.  The very survival of the church depends on it.  A smart church, European-style, is an empty church. Rome is not naïve about this.  If simplicity is the PR campaign they need to increase numbers, then simplicity, not complex theological dicta, it will be.
That is the kind of Francis this Francis has to be.  If he saves a few birds and trees in the process and preaches peace to the choir, that is fine and good.  But there will be no dramatic change here—just a reassertion of the medieval “pro-life” social values and the interfering sexual politics of his predecessors, going back to Paul VI, the pope who issued Humanae Vitae condemning contraception as intrinsically opposed to the will of God.
Paul VI had a tough time smiling.  When he did, he only managed to look as if the laxative was working..  This pope has a broad and winning smile.  But what he is selling is the same used car.
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Published: March 16, 2013
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11 Responses to “Pope St Francis”

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 Fr. Augustine Thompson O.P.
 March 17, 2013 at 12:26 am
I don’t think you read my biography of Francis. Or, if you did, you did not understand it.
And I think I know because I wrote that book.
–Fr. Augustine Thompson O.P.
Reply

 rjosephhoffmann
 March 17, 2013 at 2:30 am
It was a very good book and I apologize for giving the impression that my view was yours! That is unforgivable, and I have revised this bit accordingly.
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 Franklin Percival
 March 17, 2013 at 5:49 am
Thank you for furthering my education.
Reply

 neodecaussade
 March 17, 2013 at 3:24 pm
Reblogged this on Neodecaussade’s Weblog and commented:
 This is the type of discussion we need to have at this time of Papal transition.
Reply

 James Ridgway
 March 18, 2013 at 2:41 am
Reblogged this on JamesRidgway.net and commented:
 An excellent post on the new pope’s choice of name, by one of my former lecturers.
Reply

 Maria
 March 25, 2013 at 11:26 am
Such a load of prejudiced and ignorant rubbish! The author of this article needs to read a few more biographies of St. Francis as well as some primary sources, then he might begin to understand what anyone following in his steps might have to offer our world. And of course, as a former Catholic, he should know that the aim of the Church is never to keep people in poverty. In fact, it plays a major role is defending the poor and lifting them out of poverty via education, medical care and developement projects. Likewise, the author of this article should inform himself about what abortion is doing to women, about modern alternatives to artificial conception and about the suffering of children living within the confines of liberal interpretations of marriage – all of which is available via emphirical research and in social and medical journals. Contrary to his claims, what the Catholic Church teaches is a healthy and inspiring alternative to abortion, artificial contraception and “gay marriage”. Oh, and by the way, Pope Benedict is known as the “green pope” because of his initiatives, eg. solar panels in the Vatican.
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 steph
 March 25, 2013 at 9:37 pm
You make a lot of very silly false accusations and assumptions about the author who is a highly distinguished professor of linguistics, theology and a biblical historian. Your own prejudice betrays you Maria. Jesus probably said something like this, as have other wise men too. : τί δὲ βλέπεις τὸ κάρφος τὸ ἐν τῷ ὀφθαλμῷ τοῦ ἀδελφοῦ σου, τὴν δὲ ἐν τῷ σῷ ὀφθαλμῷ δοκὸν οὐ κατανοεῖς. Your last statement is golden. Is catching a helicopter for a lunch date ‘green’ Maria?
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 Maria
 March 25, 2013 at 3:03 pm
Very interesting. I see that my wholesome and informed critique of your article did not get beyond the moderator…
Reply

 steph
 March 25, 2013 at 9:29 pm
‘wholesome and informed’ – very amusing…
Reply
 

 Insight
 April 12, 2013 at 3:59 pm
Is Pope Francis really a reformer? Is he really such an outsider? His parents, after all, were Italian immigrants in Argentina. Will Francis stand up to the Italian clerics in the Curia? IHas the media overstated the REFORMER? For more, pls see my essay at: http://deligentia.wordpress.com/2013/03/15/pope-francis-a-reformer/
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 Terry B
 April 24, 2013 at 3:30 pm
Quote
“They pray these things in their own language and they sing about them to the strumming of untuned guitars and marimbas.”
Why should they not “pray these things in their own language”? And why do you presume that their guitars are “untuned”? I do not mind cynicism but I, and many “from below the equator” object very strongly to such narrow minded ignorance from the US of A. It is no wonder that ‘Yanquis’ have such a bad name below the equator. You certainly do nothing to improve relationships – but then you are a philosopher, so maybe there is an excuse!
 However an apology would be in order but I am not holding my breath.
TerryB
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Prayer of Pope St Francis
by rjosephhoffmann


Lord, make me an instrument of political persuasion:
Where there is pomp let me feign humility;
Where there is skepticism, sincerity;
Where there is tradition, anything that looks new and comes in white,
Where there is certainty, relativism;
Where there is light, gray;
Where there is doctrine, opinion.
O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much
Do as be seen to be doing;
Change things as to pray for changes;
Be Pope as to be one of the boys who happens to be Pope;
Teach anything clearly as to listen to absolute drivel from nincompoops in ten languages, including Chinese, and pretend to take it seriously
For it is in pretending that we are convincing.
It is in forgiving everyone anything that we look good,
And it is in  chucking it all up in about eight years, more or less, that I am saved…
Amen.

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Published: March 24, 2013
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3 Responses to “Prayer of Pope St Francis”

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 steph
 March 24, 2013 at 2:40 am
I think you overheard him praying in the Garden to have so accurately written it down. I bet he peeped when he prayed, pretending. Did he?
Reply

 diamondbolt
 March 24, 2013 at 2:41 am
Big R
You must be joking.
Joseph
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 Franklin Percival
 March 25, 2013 at 4:27 am
Another dose of much needed cynicism – you do not disappoint, Mr Hoffmann.
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Pope and Circumstance
by rjosephhoffmann


Of course I have no business saying so, but I think Pope St Francis is a bore.  From the moment he said he wouldn’t wear the ruby red slippers, I thought the guy was a fraud.  Then came the news that he’d ordered a Vespa (joke), wouldn’t live in the papal apartments, preferred washing the feet of tattooed prostitutes and criminals to those of his fellow priests on Maundy Thursday, and liked being called Bishop Francis (Why not just Jorge?)  instead of Your Holiness.
What about “Your Silliness”?   I have nothing against simplifying the world’s largest bureaucracy, being attentive to the needs of the gazillion Catholics in the southern reaches of the globe who now make up the largest active segment of the Church’s population, or eschewing the more flagrant symbols of office that Benedict XVI seemed to enjoy.  –Confidentially, though, I like my popes to look like popes and not like an ad for Clorox.  A little red as an accent colour reminds me the popes have blood, and sins, and aren’t simply parading around like perpetual virgins.

The problem with Francis is that he already looks like a guitar mass and a paper hymnal.  There is something Old Vatican II about him that makes me want to bang my head against the wall.  He has begun to sound like those Jesuits before him that gave us thirty years of tuneless tripe that tightlipped Catholic congregations refused to sing. In a scary, bad-memory kind of way he looks like those liberal priests who liked their liturgies (in the strict sense) vulgar, their chalices wooden, their genuflections optional and their altars square. For the sake of relevance OV-II style, it helped to make the congregation stand when they should kneel and put the tabernacle to one side in an ecclesiastical game of Where’s Waldo?  That is the “context” Francis fits into away down south in Argie.
The idea he is anything new just shows you how quickly you can forget about how old and stale Vatican II had become by the time Benedict XVI replaced the drooling and Parkinson’s ravaged John Paul II, himself soon to be sainted for presiding over the total dissolution of Catholic liturgy and priestly training while the rest of the world looked on oblivious (and oddly forgiving) of his sins and limitations.
What is saddest about Francis is that he may honestly believe one gesture is worth a thousand bells.  He may believe that the Catholic church is a church of the poor, or he may, more cannily, know that the future of the Church depends on a demographic that is largely poor and looks at a pope in red velvet and ermine-trimmed mozetta and sweet lacey surplice beneath as out of touch with the nitty gritty of the Church Militant—the old name for those of us here below, working out our salvation in an era of sexting and American Idol.
If Francis believes that his gestures are significant he is merely ignorant.  If he fails to recognize that Benedict brought the Church back from a forty year decline into liturgical torpor that fell past the pedestrian into the ditch of banality, then he is both ignorant and malignant. At age 74, he may be too old or too diffident or (dare I say it) too new world to realize that people like a little paprika with their potatoes, and so far he is all stodge and no excitement.  I think it was Steinbeck who said that no American thinks he is poor; he thinks he is a temporarily embarrassed millionaire.  Most Catholics, for the same reason, like a pope who isn’t afraid to strut a bit, as long as underneath the strutting they sense compassion and integrity.  To be honest, Francis is doing his own kind of strutting for the cameras, and I am not at all sure the integrity is there.
After a while, even the media are going to get sick of watching him be one of the guys.  When we see him auctioning off treasures of the Vatican Museum or trying to hock the keys of the kingdom for a sensible padlock, we’ll know his moment in the limelight is over.  But that, probably, will never happen.  Francis will be too hard pressed to find new, meaningful gestures that seem to tweak his papacy as a papacy for the little guy without really doing much of anything.  My own feeling, as a devout lapsed Catholic, is that if you’re not going to do much of anything, do it in style.
I am not sure what walk this pope is walking or talk he is talking because gestures, of course, are just that.  They cost him nothing and change nothing that may need to be changed.  The great virtue of his predecessor was that Benedict “knew” the Church in both real and historical terms.  Francis has all the marks of a diocesan ordinary who thinks what worked in Buenos Aires will work globally.  Benedict was all about recreating an authentic Catholicism that transcended the local, because Catholicism is, after all, by name and self-understanding, a global faith.
In pinpointing the life and ministry (and obsessions) of a thirteenth century monk as the way forward for the church universal, Francis runs the risk of becoming an artifact of Vatican II, a bit of nostalgia , repackaged as The Latest Thing.  Shaw infamously teased about the teaching of St Paul that the conversion of barbarians to Christianity was the conversion of Christianity to barbarity.  Francis’s determination to create a Church of the poor will impoverish the Church is ways still to be seen.
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Published: March 29, 2013
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5 Responses to “Pope and Circumstance”

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 steph
 March 29, 2013 at 3:26 am
Impeccable points. What benefit are his pretentious gestures to the poor? Will he do anything to alleviate poverty in the world? He’s hoping his dramatic and ‘radical’ tradition breaking displays are distracting the world enough to make them forget the Church scandals, sex, marriage, contraception and ordination of women… So far he seems to have been successful in that. I’m dreading him scrapping Latin in Rome and calling for a more universal language to spread the ‘good news’ … like English or Chinese. I’m guessing less than a decade before we can be free from Silliness.
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 jamesdtabor
 March 29, 2013 at 10:17 am
Ah yes, if you watched the Showtime series on The Borgias we know what a “real” Pope should be like and look like and act like–Jeremy Irons as Rodrigo Borgia!! Oh for the days of old!
Reply

 Dominic
 March 29, 2013 at 3:05 pm
This piece is excellent. It describes exactly how I feel.
Reply

 Franklin Percival
 March 30, 2013 at 3:07 pm
I love the sentiment you express.
Perhaps it’s time to let the whole religion as temporal power thing wither while the rest of humanity gets on with the serious business of finding out how to run ourselves in equilibrium with the planet we call home.
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 Terry B.
 April 21, 2013 at 12:08 pm
Your comments on Pope Francis in this and previous articles do not go down very well with me! They may get applause from your fellow cynics in the U.S. of A. but for someone who has lived and worked with the poor in Argentina they come over as snide and ignorant. “Untuned guitars” indeed! The poor guitar players in the Argentine Chaco could teach your north american “guitarists” how to play properly.
 If your comments are an example of how athiests treat others, then I am glad that I am still a Christian!!
Terry
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The Baltimore Catechism Annotated
by rjosephhoffmann


Q: Who is God?
A.: God is the supreme being, infinitely perfect, who made all things and keeps them in existence.
“Supreme” …….. having nothing above it,
“being” …………..an isness that can’t be compared
“infinite” ………..with nothing to love it,
“perfect” …………has never been scared.
“who made”…….i.e., fashioned, created
“all things”………cats, dogs, thunder, and mist
“keeps them” ….controls, and is fated
“in existence”.….to perpetually shake his big fist.
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Published: May 9, 2013
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Deep-end Dawkins
by rjosephhoffmann

“Put the kids in the basement Mother, there’s one of them scientist fellers at the door.”
Religion as Child Abuse
Short of saying, “The sun is shining today,” I’m not one to make scientific pronouncements.  I’m too afraid that a physicist who happens to be passing by will say, “Actually, no.  The sun may appear to be shining to you, but it does not shine. It gives off radiant energy in the form of heat and light. In fact using the formula (32 x 106) / (3.46 x 1016) = 9.25 x 10-10 where the area through which the sun’s radiation is pouring = 4 (pi) R2 = 3.46 x 1016 square miles only about  -90.3 dB, or one billionth of the sun’s radiation reaches the earth.  So ‘shining’ is not the word you want.”
Naturally you would not follow a correction like that with “Have a nice day,” let alone speculate about the chance of rain.
I was puzzling over assertions and pronouncements recently when I read that Richard Dawkins, a scientist who probably knows as much about radiation and energy as he does about biology and evolution, said that the teaching of religion amounts to child abuse.
Apparently he did not have in mind the coifed, grim-faced nuns who thwacked my hands with wooden rulers for getting math problems wrong (math being like catechism: there are only right answers and wrong answers). He was talking about religion in general and religious training of all flavors.  Like other new atheists, but unlike scientists in their realm, Dawkins doesn’t think in terms of “species” of religious belief: there’s just one big cavernous genus into which everything can be piled.  Religion.  That makes analysis a lot easier to do, because general (from genus) statements are much easier to make than specific (from species) ones.
Dawkins can defend the use of generalization (categorization) by saying that while science needs to be specific because it deals with facts, theology (religion tarted up as an academic pursuit) is one big gasbag with no facts in it, so better to call it what it is.
I am not going to rehash the familiar cavil that Dawkins is not a theologian and thus has no right to say anything about theology.
That’s absurd.  Most priests and ministers aren’t “theologians” either: they have been through three or so years of seminary and have not been fazed by serious theological study. Increasingly, they are linguistically inept, philosophically unformed and critically dumb.  That doesn’t stop them from climbing into a pulpit every Sunday and sharing the air with thousands of bored listeners, eager to get their souls washed and on to a KFC extra crispy traditional special.  I don’t think we should call Richard Dawkins any less of a theologian than they are.  Plus, while a priest gets a paycheck for exhibiting his ignorance, Dawkins works as a theologian for free—sort of pro bono—for which he should be commended.
I also don’t buy the idea that science makes no claim on religion.  Of course it does.  If it didn’t we could still believe in a lot of stuff that the evolution of ideas—including scientific ideas—has proved wrong.

Religion: A Dead Horse that Won’t Lie Down?
Most religious people aren’t worried any more that Galileo was right and the Church was wrong, something it shamefacedly confessed in 1992 with a nice letter of apology from the late Pope.  (Worry more about the masses of folk, religious and non-, who don’t know what the fuss was all about).  My many smart, sort-of-religious friends find Darwin’s theories and modern cosmological theory completely sensible, if not compatible with Genesis.  They manage to go to church (sometimes) and still use their library cards without fear of being exposed in the village square as double-dealers. They see the scientific view as the only rational explanation of how our world got here and how we got to be in it.   To think this way, they have to think that much of what they read in the Bible and what they might have learned in Sunday school is mythology and legend, very little of it historical (in the modern sense of the word) and some of it, at a different level of discussion, morally reprehensible.   This is not all they–or I –see: they also see poetry, tragedy, political intrigue, lessons for kings and servants, folk wisdom, flashes of brilliance, the darkness of hopeless wars and greed—and much more, some of it awful
I still need a brisk walk when I read the story of Jephthah in Judges 11 (he kills his daughter, on a promise to God) and the story of the Levite in Judges 19 (he carves his not-quite-dead girlfriend into twelve bits, after throwing her outside to be pack-raped by some love hungry teenagers, then sends a part of her to every tribe of Israel).   You hardly find stuff like that anymore, even on Discovery Channel.
The freethought websites now offer handy links to these “toxic texts” so that the unaware can be made wary, the assumption (correctly) being that no one actually reads the Bible and barely knows what’s inside it.  Leaving aside the fact that an unread book might not be psychologically traumatic to a non-reader, however, there’s also the fact that all ancient literature is violent.  –Ever read the story of the slaying of Hector in Iliad 22?  Of course you haven’t.  That’s because it was probably required on your school syllabus.  But unchanging human nature has always liked images of violence (including violent sex) and war, and its occurrence in religious texts from our distant past shouldn’t surprise us.  That “occurrence” says very little that is shocking about religion, but it does say something about what we like.  While the Greeks thought that the gods were prettier than us, both they and the Hebrews thought God was the sum total of our worst and best features, failings, and moral lapses.  The idea of God’s mathematical perfection and philosophical consistency is a construction of the Middle Ages: it isn’t there in the text because if wasn’t there in life, and one thing the ancients weren’t shy about was the grittiness of human existence.
Except  for some people named Ogletree down in Butte, Texas, who live in barricaded trailers and have twelve wives and eat dog because Leviticus permits it, there aren’t many people who become crazy because religion made them crazy or violent because religion made them violent.  In fact, the most recent research, funded by the Lilly Foundation,  shows the opposite: that religion performs a socializing function that is often missing in a purely secular or value-free environment.  If the Ogletree family is crazy they were crazy already. Even their Methodist neighbors think so—not to mention the liberal Episcopalians in Houston who only read about such sideshows when they read the Ogletrees have accidentally blown themselves up while preparing a fireworks display to announce the coming of the apocalypse.
The vast majority of Christians—even “American” Christians, the ones Richard Dawkins touts as the epitome of stupid and damaged–are “message people.” They like their religion lite and attractively packaged.   The most liberal of them won’t raise an eyebrow when you tell them the Bible is a collection of stories from the distant past and reflects the culture and values and wrong ideas we used to have—deficient moral ideas, bad ideas about fairness and justice and women (and men) and creation and nature. They might not blanch, either, when you say to them that God behaves like a scoundrel, a rough draft for all the petty despots (not to be confused with pretty depots) of the ancient Near East, that the Bible (and the Quran) justifies war and celebrates violence, that it reflects not the golden age of God’s people but a society we would find vomitously primitive if we had to live in it.
Most Christians either only “sort of” or do not believe that God labored for six days to make the world, that Mary was a perpetual virgin, that Jesus walked on water, rose from the dead, ascended into heaven, or is coming back to earth before the warranty on the Ford pickup runs out.  Oddly, many believe in God and might even believe that in some weird, undefined way (not that definitions are historically lacking) Jesus was his son or at least a player.  The American polls—Pew, Gallup, Barna Group, etc.—show only that most religious people are religiously confused, not dangerous.  It is why I have been arguing—for a long time—that what people need is more critical study about religion—not more physics and chemistry and exhortations about religion’s destructive potential.  If the proper study of mankind is man as the poet once said, the proper study of religion is the study of religion, not biology.
Undiscovered Philosophy? Unknown Bible ‘Facts’?
But many religious folk I know are also people who wonder why, after accepting all that they accept,  atheists need to evangelize on street corners or deface billboards and buses with signs that say, “Wake Up Fools: The Emperor is Stark Naked.”  When I read The God Delusion I wondered (and I am not the only one) how much reading in the philosophy of religion Professor Dawkins actually did before he leapt into print with his attacks on arguments—like those of Thomas Aquinas—that philosophers have been talking about and dismantling for six hundred years.  My answer to myself ranges from not very much to none at all.
The remarkable thing about The God Delusion was that it could ignore the entire history of philosophical critique and discussion, as though its author was the first to notice the weaknesses in medieval logic.  The Renaissance?  The Enlightenment?  Pico?   Bacon? Erasmus? Footnotes?  Attacking 13th century thinking in the early 21st was little bit like pointing out that a windmill can’t turn without wind.
The book gained a following because many of the people who read it were as ignorant of the history of religion and theology (which is “about nothing at all”) as Dawkins himself: trained in that peculiar Oxbridge system where before he was seventeen he had to choose which subject to read at university, he is the epitome of the narrowly trained, humanities-deficient guy who thinks literature and music are just fine as long as you recognize they don’t actually teach you anything.  Languages, history, philosophy, and assorted other subjects can ride in the back of the bus as long as science does the driving.  Atheists had long been seeking an intellectual messiah and in Richard Dawkins they found their Jesus.
The basic fallacy of Dawkins and his cohort from the beginning was a stubborn commitment to anachronism, as though he and his atheist buddies were the first to recognize the literal contradictions, the bloody-mindedness, historical inaccuracies, textual problems, and scientific primitivism of the Bible.  Dawkins’s fans (especially his ardent, religiously depressed American fans) considered him an “authority” –an innovator, even–for pointing, however vaguely and generally, to these things, and saying in exasperation (repeatedly)
 “I ask you, how can any reasonably intelligent man or woman believe this shit?”
The obvious problem with that applause line, in addition to it being a false dilemma, is that reasonably intelligent men and women have been talking about that shit for centuries.
Dawkins creates his own delusion when he asks his audiences to think that a five hundred year history of historical scholarship and a two century -old history of textual scholarship—much of it done, by the way, in Oxford lecture rooms and cloisters—has never taken place, never been incorporated into the (non-existent) discipline of theology.
The questioning of biblical authority didn’t start with Dawkins, or with Darwin, or even with Galileo, and the latter two barely questioned it at all: it has its own chain of development that starts as far back as Augustine and the church fathers, and is never quiet after that.
Augustine wrote that if a Christian takes the Bible literally he should not be surprised if a non-Christian laughs.  The philosopher Origen complains that the Greek anti-Christian writer Celsus had no appreciation of allegory and imagery, going as far as to say that the story of the temptation of Jesus by the devil is literally false and absurd because there is no point high enough on earth from which Jesus might have seen “all the kingdoms of the world” (Matthew 4.8)”   The Christian thinkers are followed in this by Muslim writers like Averroes (ibn Rushd) who says that the ones who take the sacred text of the Quran in its literal sense should not be permitted to quote it.  Last I looked, Augustine, Origen, and Averroes were still respected names in the history of theology, and Averroes also in the history of science—especially medicine, physics and astronomy, where his Arabic translations of Greek works preserved the scientific tradition for rediscovery in the west.
One of the reasons the sacred texts were locked up in inaccessible languages like Greek and Latin and classical Arabic for so long, Professor Dawkins might want to recall, is that the church and the mosque wanted to create a professional class of well-educated interpreters who would prevent the slide into emotionalism and fundamentalism that happened at the time of the Reformation, which in turn began as a movement against superstition and the supernaturalism of medieval Catholicism.   Yet, writes Dawkins, “The achievements of theologians don’t do anything, don’t affect anything, don’t mean anything.  What makes anyone think that theology is a subject at all?”
But they have done, and affected and meant immensely important things to the history of learning, because theology prior to the “partition” of knowledge in the post-Renaissance era encompassed  almost every area of learning.  Because its central questions were the big questions of God, man, and existence, there is scarcely an area where it did not affect the course of knowledge and discovery—not always for the good, but not always for the bad either.  As it stands–as it looks–Dawkins’s statement goes beyond customary outrageousness to simple, self-satisfied, unexamined historical ignorance.
In fact, it is safer to say that the problem all along has not been the Bible and religion as some bugaboo or ticking bomb, but the use of the Bible as proof-text—for a favorite idea, doctrine, political theory, or social or moral position. That is occasionally still a problem—whether we’re talking about abortion or “just war” or gay marriage.  But science has not solved these questions for us and the Bible did not create them: it reflects attitudes (sometimes—rarely–rules about them) that are culturally locked and loaded.  Science did not destroy biblical authority: the cumulative weight of history, archaeology, linguistics, political theory, and ethical self-awareness did.  Humanism (rightly defined) did.
In fact, “science” as the new atheists use the term, as an iconic form of truth,  was late to the game: Wycliffe, Biddle, Miguel Servetus and Erasmus did more harm to the “claims” of Christianity before the dawn of the sixteenth century than Darwin did three hundred years later.   Paine and Jefferson were harder on the idea of “revelation” than Darwin himself (and predate him).  Newton never doubted “the booke,” though he didn’t derive his laws from it; and the poster boy of free-thought saints, Galileo, lay buried in the same tomb with his eldest daughter, Sister Maria Celeste, in Florence.  The complexity of the relationship between religion (especially Christianity) and religion is not exactly infinite, but it is a lot more intricate than Professor Dawkins’s sloganeering makes it
If Dawkins wants to see religion cured, and the Ogletrees liberated from their trailer-park of superstition, he needs to get with the news that the critical and scientific study of religion is the “cure” he wants, not pep talks and rallies in which religion becomes simply the incarnation of human stupidity and religious people told to snap out of their intractable dullness .
The Bible Doesn’t Measure Up
The new atheists, to the extent that name still means anything six years on,  like their religion simple and funny. The Bible preaches bad morals that come from the lying mouth of a God who, if he were one of us, would be locked away for child abuse and rape.  After all, he defiles a virgin, gets another man to take the blame, arranges for his son to be killed, and threatens people with everlasting punishment if they disobey even the smallest of his rules.  Remember Noah? Nice.   Jesus, I was gratified to learn recently in an email from yet another atheist adept, was probably a pedophile himself.  That is, if he existed.  If he didn’t he was a mythical pedophile, which is even worse, because they are much harder to convict.  If God is all-knowing, why did he put the prostate near the urethra?  If God is all good, why can’t he give us the recipe to cure AIDS and cancer? Theologians call these little dilemmas “theodicy,” but in the hands of the new atheists they are simply idiocy, one-liners for the pep rallies and meet-ups that have become the mainstay of new atheist culture.
It’s hard to appeal for clear-headedness in this environment because the atheist faithful, like the religious faithful, have their own defenses and survival strategies.  (I’ve discussed these, often and soberly, on this site: look around).  They also have a messiah with a distinguished career in science, an Oxford doctorate, and a message they take as gospel.
But the problem is this: the Bible  cant’ be evaluated on the basis of how it measures up to modern science, any more than the Iliad you never read, or the Mayan Calendar, or even Aristotle’s Treatise on Animal Bodies or  Galileo’s Sidereus Nuncius.  If modern science is perpetually in a state of self-correction and development, ancient literature is not. The slack we cut it is the slack required by the distance between us and them.  To an enormous extent, progress, even in the sciences, developed from the recognition that the ancient texts had it wrong—foremost the Bible.  Its value to science has been “antithetical” and indirect but it has had its place.   Of course we know more than the writers and tellers of biblical and Quranic stories knew; that is what makes us modern and them dead.  And one of the things we know is that it is mainly myth.  The question scholars ask about these texts is what do we learn about our past, early culture, the development of language, ideas, law, nature, ethics—and scientific thinking.
Not to respect antiquity is not smart; it is not bright; it is to be woefully indifferent as to how we became intelligent human beings—people like, if not quite as smart as, Richard Dawkins.  The atheist error that originates in Dawkins’s anti-religion polemic is to treat the Bible as though it has  intellectual standing in our own time, mistaking the fundamentalist yahoo’s limited understanding of the Bible as the totality of its relevance to human history.
The religion-fundamentalist error is that the Bible is true in our time and context. The Dawkins delusion is that the fundamentalist position can be answered as you would answer a set of propositions: P1: Jesus rose from the dead.  P2 No he didn’t because people don’t rise from the dead, etc.  If the conversation persists along those lines the Bible comes off as all wrong, all useless, and (because it encourages magical thinking and superstition) potentially harmful.
But the real answer—P3—will be lost in the shuffle:  Jesus lived at a time when people were thought to rise from the dead.  Or The story of the god of Genesis emerged at a time when the people of Mesopotamia worked in clay and fashioned figurines; that’s how Adam got his name.  Serious historical investigation (which, I admit, is compromised by media sensationalism: just look at the average cable lineup) has a wonderful way of desuperstitionizing existence.  Tell people the history of a thing and the miraculous and the incredible melt away: in fact, modern evolutionary studies and modern cosmologies are both histories.  My original statement about the sun shining is an historical statement, because the photons that hit my eyes were created within the sun tens of thousands of years before they were emitted and (in about eight minutes) travelled to earth.  People who are smart about those subjects will understand that the Bible deserves its history, and people need to learn it to learn about themselves.
Abuse?
And that brings me to my final point.  Dawkins’s suggestion that religious “indoctrination” is abusive is another one of those sloppy, unsupported and naïve statements that is designed merely to be outrageous, so extreme that I wonder if he actually wants to be remembered for saying it.  His protégé, the emotional and blusteringly self-promoting Lawrence Krauss wrote, 
“If you’re introducing it (creationism or Intelligent Design) as reality, if you’re telling your kids the world is 6,000 years old, and they shouldn’t believe scientists because there is no way humans are related to other animals, and don’t believe any of that stuff you learned in school, or take you kids of out of school because they are learning something, then it is like the Taliban at some level, which is an extreme form of child abuse.”
The Taliban and creationism?—perfect fit. Of course, it doesn’t get “simpler” than this, or more wrong.  Dawkins himself has been more careful, saying that religious indoctrination can be as “bad as child abuse” and that no child should be taught to accept the beliefs—Catholic, Muslim, Jewish—of his parents without being taught at the same time to question the claims made by religion.
And what claims are those?  The Bible is not a collection of claims.  It does not claim God made the world; it tells a creation story.  It does not claim Jesus rose from the dead, it tells a few stories, none of them consistent, about a resurrection.  Religion is not a collection of propositions.  True, certain churches and sects systematize their teaching as dogma and doctrine, but a large number of the faithful have no idea what those doctrines are (ask a pious Christian to explain the trinity).  I suspect most Roman Catholics believe that their Church’s teaching on abortion is an article of faith—maybe a core article: it isn’t; it’s merely social teaching based on a compendium of vague biblical references and ancient quotations.  Sad to say, it’s the ones that almost no one believes any more that occupy the core; trinity, the divinity of Jesus, the virgin birth, Eucharist  (the real presence), the Assumption of Mary (she went bodily upwards to heaven), original sin, sacraments, the plenary inspiration of scripture.  But here too, indeed especially here,  it is hard to say that the preaching of things no one quite understands or agrees with can be abusive. In most confessions, the door to the church swings both ways, although, alas, that’s not always true of the mosque.
However you frame it, religion did not develop as a set of logical conclusions.  The sacred texts of the world evolved from human experience and imagination, and (as a little anthropology can show), practices whose origins are often difficult to pin down.
Now that the age of priestcraft has passed and people can read for themselves, we have to rely on the ability of a reader to judge what’s true and what’s not, what is revolting and what is beautiful—like a psalm or hymn.  If Johnny can’t read and can’t think, religion isn’t the issue–and better science classes won’t help him.  One of the greatest proponents of this ironically was Luther, the father of the protestant reformation, whose Treatise of the Freedom of a Christian is one of the most eloquent defenses of freedom of conscience ever written.  It inspired the intellectualism and individualism of the seventeenth century and (though Luther would have regretted it) the conscientious objections to religion that characterized the age of reason.
To say the obvious, we live in a moment shaped by modernity and experience.  The fundamental worldview of the modern period is scientific, even if people who live in the twenty first century are ignorant of their own basic presuppositions, even if they can’t explain relativity, or particle theory, and think Higgs Boson is a pub in Wantage. I would agree that any parent or teacher who kept Johnny from learning math and science, to the extent he can learn it, would be abusive.  But the most we can do is teach him: after that he’s on his own.  A great help in that process would be to teach him about religion as well as about math, science, geography and history.  Why don’t the new atheists (and religious women and men) push for that—for insisting on a religious literacy that saves our children from the risk of thinking that myth and reality have the same epistemological standing.
What might help the most recalcitrantly stupid of religious people, of all sects, is not to be shouted down but to be persuaded that like everything else the existence of their faith  and the sacred books they read have a history.  And to teach them about that–fairly and knowledgably, not as a sequence of falsifiable “claims.” You won’t win the baptized over by calling them idiots, any more than the high school math teacher you despised got you to be a good student by telling you that you were destined to clean latrines.
Tell them God and his book have a history too. Make them learn it. It’s a process, not a war.
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Published: May 11, 2013
Filed Under: Uncategorized
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18 Responses to “Deep-end Dawkins”

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 Dwight Jones
 May 11, 2013 at 11:33 am
Looks like the Yosemite Sam of critical thinking is back in action; great to see such superb use of the vernacular for dealing with the peculiar..
A problem is emerging for Dawkins’ tidy little science/religion cosmos, in the form of Group Evolution as posited by E.O. Wilson, who reversed his previous stand made in Sociobiology, that ascribed human behaviour to “selfish genes” sneaking into subsequent generations through altruism. This was a workaround to account for the apparent contradictions related to self-interest. genetic succession and survival.
Dr. Wilson has now concluded that cooperation within Groups is the main reason our species has been so successful. He says morals are derived from Group associations, that “sins” warn and are born of the Individual’s greedy walk through life. (So indeed does much of Confucianism).
It indeed follows then that “religion performs a socializing function” as you mention, to the horror of Dawkins and his all-science boys. Humans are an infant species, and organized religion is just a few thousands years old. Yet in that interval, under religion’s Group influences we have unquestionably advanced to somewhat less barbaric status, long before the ascendancy of science.
True humanism consolidates science with religion, as two paths to the same city, recognizing the latter as our (admittedly florid) Group history in large part, with science as a positioner for individuals if intellectually referencing themselves in this process.
Militarists are legacy Groups that perpetuate Group vs Group acrimony for their own purpose, ergo Christian vs Muslim, and we can anticipate an amicable melding under humanism of all religions under its envelope.
The Internet will be everybody’s alma mater, and humanism shall make all things whole for this species. There – it is written – so believe it and go back outside and play nice with the other kids.
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 Peter Smith
 May 11, 2013 at 12:42 pm
I may be a card carrying Catholic (an ex-atheist to boot) but I much enjoy your writing. It is entertaining, lucid and always pertinent. Bonus points for your take-down of Richard Dawkins, but then he is such an easy target.
I have recommended to our parish priest that we use the God Delusion as a text book since it so beautifully exposes the weaknesses of atheist claims.
I sincerely hope you do not turn your talents to writing a similar book, you would be a most formidable opponent.
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 decourse
 May 12, 2013 at 10:40 pm
Using TGD as a book to expose the weaknesses of “atheist claims” is kind of like using Frank Turek to expose the weaknesses of “Christian claims”.
Besides, the fact that we’re talking about “claims” at all is a large part of the problem. Since when have “claims” been the selling point of religion?
I think the answer is in the article: that’s a medieval idea, too. Certainly, to call it a “biblical” idea is an act of eisegesis.
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 Peter Smith
 May 13, 2013 at 3:01 am
At least we are agreed that RD is not an intellectual giant but despite his intellectual stature, he is influential, hence the necessity for a Dawkins Delusion seminar.


 rjosephhoffmann
 May 13, 2013 at 4:59 am
Yet recently named by Prospect Magazine at the top of the world’s leading intellectuals (65 in all), but to wit, David Wolpe’s comment on the preposterous list in a recent Huffington Post article:
“Dawkins on biology is an elegant, lucid and even enchanting explicator of science. Dawkins on religion is historically uninformed, outrageously partisan and morally obtuse. If Dawkins is indeed our best, the life of the mind is in a precarious state.” http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rabbi-david-wolpe/is-richard-dawkins-really-the-worlds-leading-intellectual_b_3226638.html


 Peter Smith
 May 13, 2013 at 5:49 am
Quite so. Polls reveal the biases and prejudices of the subjects of a biased sampling procedure. They say nothing about real ability but a lot about fickle social influence. Putting Dawkins at the top of the list speaks volumes for the biases and prejudices of Prospect readership.
The most useful methodology is that followed by Charles Murray in his book Human Accomplishment. Pages 122 to 142 give a summary of the real intellectual giants. Fast forward one hundred years and by contrast, Dawkins will be a forgotten footnote in a dusty tome locked away in the damp basement of an obscure provincial library.


 Pseudonym
 May 16, 2013 at 8:32 am
“Intellectual giant” is probably a title that is only granted posthumously.
In my opinion, Dawkins is certainly a decent public intellectual, when he’s talking about a topic on which he is an expert. On religion, he is proud of his ignorance, which wouldn’t be a problem if he didn’t subsequently express strong opinions on that particular topic.

 
 

 nicola
 May 11, 2013 at 5:02 pm
That was really interesting, thank you, although the story of Jephthah made me feel really quite sick. You must be an excellent teacher.
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 neodecaussade
 May 11, 2013 at 6:37 pm
Reblogged this on Neodecaussade’s Weblog and commented:
 This is a good read.
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 Townmouse
 May 12, 2013 at 7:36 am
Jo – I love your writing and the way you express yourself with such wit and clarity, making it accessible to everyone. It make me realise how lucky I was all those years ago to have you as a tutor at Westminster College. And Nicola is right – you were/are an excellent teacher. You should do a weekend course at Gladstone’s Library called The Dawkins Delusion. People would flock . . .
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 scotteus
 May 12, 2013 at 5:00 pm
Interesting, if Dawkins can claim or suggest that reglion is child-abuse, then someone else can say this essay is ‘intellectual abuse’ of its readers.
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 rjosephhoffmann
 May 12, 2013 at 5:34 pm
That would be a permissible “claim,” sure.
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 scotteus
 May 12, 2013 at 6:23 pm
I’ll happily take the abuse. Actually, how much do I owe you for the classes? (;

 
 

 stephanie louise fisher
 May 12, 2013 at 8:06 pm
I’m so delighted Dawkins concedes that the teaching of religion can be beneficial. According to Dawkins there is value in teaching children ‘about’ religion – but wait – only as long as scorn is poured on its claims! For a Christian or Muslim to bring up their children as Christian or Muslim and therefore according to their values (all of which he assumes is indoctrination – that is, teaching someone to accept doctrines uncritically – in his typical general sweep) is effectively tantamount to ‘child abuse’ according to Dawkins because Dawkins disagrees with all religious ‘claims’. Horrible as sexual abuse (by priests) no doubt was, says Dawkins, the damage was arguably less than the long-term psychological damage inflicted by bringing the child up Catholic in the first place. Sexual abuse, says Dawkins, might by “yucky” but not as bad as bringing a child up and saying ‘God loves you’ and ‘love your enemies and neighbours’ and ‘look after the sick’. (To be fair Dawkins has a fixation on his belief that all ‘religion’ teaches children they will burn in a great big underground fire pit). According to Dawkins all religious parents must be guilty of emotional abuse of their children (unless they tell their children to accept atheism … uncritically). But Dawkins is making a claim that religion is ‘wrong’ (whatever that means) because Dawkins doesn’t believe anything. Yet he believes that children should be told what to think about religion rather than encouraged to develop their critical tools. Isn’t that hypocritical? According to the principles made up by Dawkins’ and his misapplication of the term, wouldn’t telling children how to think be tantamount to ‘child abuse’? Imagine a world full of obedient little Dawkins clones. Clones … clowns… I don’t believe Dawkins knows much about ‘religion’ or ‘claims’ or what religious people believe or how they teach their children.
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 Ken
 May 14, 2013 at 10:33 pm
“Imagine a world full of obedient little Dawkins clones…”
You’ll find plenty in your local atheist “Meetup” group, a misfortune that befell me when I belonged to such a group a while back.
Reply
 

 decourse
 May 12, 2013 at 10:08 pm
To be fair to Dawkins, his remarks about child abuse originally arose in the context of The Troubles in Northern Ireland, where words like “Protestant” and “Catholic” were used basically as gang symbols. He argued that indoctrinating children with that was a form of child abuse.
At the time, I thought that argument made some kind of sense. After all, instilling children with any kind of identity specifically intended to support “us and them” bigotry is child abuse. I’m reminded of the phenomenon of assigning children to a gang affiliation based on which street they live in; I find it hard not to call that “child abuse” too.
This is part of what annoys me about Richard Dawkins. There’s a germ of a very good idea in here, which could be developed into something useful in the hands of someone with some appreciation for the humanities and/or the social sciences. But he seems determined not to do that.
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 Jim Linville
 May 14, 2013 at 3:51 pm
Prof. Hoffmann,
 Thanks for excellent bit of commentary. I just finished leading a seminar at the University of Lethbridge (turn north at the Montana border) on the “New Atheists and Religious Studies” A few of the students were pretty strong fans of Dawkins and company and I think they successfully talked themselves out of it. I didn’t assign any blog posts as reading but I will probably do the seminar again in a year or two, and this one (and a few others or yours) are on the list of things to consider.
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 Stevie
 May 16, 2013 at 10:52 am
I am so very glad to read this; I have just returned from Athens, via Mumbai, and endured the horror of what was supposed to be an expert commentary on the 100 miles or so of the Suez Canal as we sailed up it.
It turned out to be mostly about Moses. I might not have minded so much were it not for the fact that I was born in Egypt, and can prove it, which is more than can be said for Moses.
So I was in need of assistance in regaining my equilibrium, and you have provided it: thank you!
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Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient


Religiophobia
by rjosephhoffmann

 Reblogged from The New Oxonian:

Click to visit the original post
Two pieces in the last three days have opened my eyes to a new reality.  Being opened to a new reality doesn't happen every day, probably because as you get older there are fewer realities that are actually new.  Just things you have forgotten that seem new when you rediscover them.
One article which was good enough to repost in its entirety came from…
Read more… 1,153 more words

Blasts from the Past Two Years

Published: May 16, 2013
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Religiophobia
by rjosephhoffmann


Two pieces in the last three days have opened my eyes to a new reality.  Being opened to a new reality doesn’t happen every day, probably because as you get older there are fewer realities that are actually new.  Just things you have forgotten that seem new when you rediscover them.
One article which was good enough to repost in its entirety came from Jacques Berlinerblau, who often says wise things and should be heeded when he does.  Jacques has commented frequently on the need for secularists and even atheists to learn table manners and not rely simply on the assumed rectitude of their position while trying to influence people and win converts.
They could learn a lesson from that old time religion, Christianity, where instead of just shouting at people, like John the Baptist did (and look what happened to him), St Paul professed to become all things to all men in order to win souls to his cause.  Eventually, that strategy made Christianity the majority faith of the Roman empire.
Of course, the atheists old and new don’t believe there are souls to be won.  But there are political values at stake, and elections, and demographics which atheists and “seculars” do claim to care about.  But so far Americn secularism hasn’t had the savvy to know how to preach its gospel in a way that (really) ups the numbers.
For Berlinerblau, this has something to do with an historical incompetence at every level of the secular movment: Without naming names that could be named, he cites

“…a colossal failure of leadership and strategic vision. Those who advocated on its behalf in the 1970s and ’80s had little understanding of who their irate, coalescing adversaries actually were. In the secular mindset these “Fundies” were just a bunch of yokels, sitting on their front porches, cleaning their guns to the musical accompaniment of Pa strumming the gutbucket. In reality, however, the movement had scads of charismatic and savvy, if not incendiary, leaders. …Secular leadership, by contrast, was static and moribund.
Which brings me to the second piece, by E J Dionne, a truly liberal soul.  The always bluff Freedom from Religion Foundation, which sees itself as a “radical” conservator of First Amendment rights, has outed liberal Catholics for being hypocrites and challenged them to do the right thing: leave the Church.  Writes Dionne:

Recently, a group called [the FFRF] ran a full-page ad in The Washington Post cast as an “open letter to ‘liberal’ and ‘nominal’ Catholics.” Its headline commanded: “It’s Time to Quit the Catholic Church.”
The ad included the usual criticism of Catholicism, but I was most struck by this paragraph: “If you think you can change the church from within — get it to lighten up on birth control, gay rights, marriage equality, embryonic stem-cell research — you’re deluding yourself. By remaining a ‘good Catholic,’ you are doing ‘bad’ to women’s rights. You are an enabler. And it’s got to stop.”
Yes, it does sound just like the nun who told you to give up looking at dirty magazines during math class. Or maybe I have given away too much of my eighth grade year at St Joseph School.

But there is a pattern here that displays itself, as in neon lights, through the shouting.  I have commented more than three times on this site about the ugliness of the American Atheists’ (and others’) billboard campaigns and the way atheism itself is promoted by using a strategy that depends, basically, on repeating one hundred times the mantra:  “Wake Up Stupid: Nobody is at Home Up There.”
This is supported by the infinitely reasonable proposition that if there is no Santa Claus, no big bad wolf, and no such thing as ghosts, there is no Sky Fairy either. Anyone who says there is is just using up the oxygen that smart people need to grow brain cells.

But guess what?  Many people who would call themselves religious–like E J Dionne, and even the resoundingly secular Jacques Berlinerblau–are not at all stupid.  And they wonder why the advocates of freethought and secularism don’t get that.  Why is a secularism that flows from principles of religious tolerance more suspect than a secularism that flows from atheist suppositions?  It is a good question, because in those countries where a dogmatic atheism has been imposed from the top, tolerance has not fared well.  Restrictive practices based on the godlike perfection of the state–witness Chen Guangcheng– have.
And that leads me to conclude: there is a troubling religiophobia going on here.  The shouters and ultimatum-givers are not just in favor of separation of church and state, or freedom of (or from) religion, or secularism or the right not to believe in God and say so openly.
There is profound stress and anxiety about religion in these movements.
Why?
Is this a teenage anger pathology that comes from a passive fear of the gods? A bad church experience that stems from the awakening that Pastor Bob (or Sister Mary Therese) lied to you about…everything? The possibility that despite social approval of your atheism, your private doubts sometimes clash with that approval and put unreasonable and seductive thoughts in your head–a hankering for a ten o’lock sermon or a quick Mass at St Aloysius?
Probably none of the above.  It’s probably more easily explained as your anxiety over the existence of what you have come to believe is SPS–Stupid People Syndrome:  your feeling that the co-existence of atheists and believers has only been paralleled in human history by the brief co-existence of Neanderthal and modern humans.  And it would, after all, be so much easier if social disapproval could be generalized and society were rid of religion once and for all–its lures and seductions driven from the world and the gods into the fiery pit.   Maybe then you could get some sleep.  And stop being so Angry.

Homo Religiosus
Until the day that happens and the First Amendment is repealed, which is what the solution would require, reading Seneca and a little Marcus Aurelius or Lucretius on the gods would help:  They had this phobia mastered long before Christian thinkers like Boethius took up the question.   The gods are lazy blighters who don’t care about you. They only care about themselves. You are on your own.
The point is, religiophobia leads to aggression and aggression often manifests itself in stupidity and rash behavior.  I am not certain, given the religious perspective that God takes care of everything, that religion exhibits fear in quite the same way–which is a poor way of saying that fear of the gods (theophobia) is different from fear that there are no gods (religiophobia).
Oh, I know: you atheists out there will tell me I am making things up and that every atheist has the courage of his convictions and isn’t afraid of the big bad wolf or the big old sky fairy or any of those things.  And I say: Good for you, Pinocchio.  Then stop worrying about what goes on in the heads of religious women and men, or their being hypocrites for believing some of the things you no longer believe.
–And read some Seneca.
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Published: May 14, 2012
Filed Under: Uncategorized
Tags: atheism : Catholic Church : E J Dionne : First Amendment : Freedom from Religion : human values : humanism : humanism. Jacques Berlinerblau : New Humanism : R. Joseph Hoffmann : religion : secularism : separation clause ..
30 Responses to “Religiophobia”

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 James
 May 14, 2012 at 1:35 pm
As always, a thought provoking piece, for which thank you. I would however take issue with your last paragraph. AS an atheist I have absolutely no problem with those who choose to adhere to one or other religion, and I see no reason why what goes on in their heads should frighten me. But in a civilised secular society, I am troubled by the sometimes none too subtle way that many try to influence the legislature to favour their religiously inspired view of the World, when it flies in the face of 21st Century values shared by the majority..
Reply

 Sabio Lantz
 May 14, 2012 at 2:42 pm
Secularity flowing from tolerance sounds like the best option. But I must admit, I think all sorts of voices are beneficial.
Reply

 Lisa Guinther
 May 14, 2012 at 4:26 pm
Marvelous post!
I have taken St. Paul’s words to heart (1 Cor. 9:22) therefore, as an Evangelical, I have amazing conversations with the philosophy professors at the college I am attending. One recent comment was, “Usually Evangelicals are so defensive…” I find that in these discussions I learn more about how to answer questions of my own, while trying to answer the questions posed to me by Atheists.
God bless!
Reply

 Jeffrey Shallit
 May 16, 2012 at 2:02 am
Fascinating how so many of the comments on this site praise you and your writing. But that’s because you relentlessly censor those who take issue with your poor reasoning and soporific writing.
Reply

 stephanie louise fisher
 May 17, 2012 at 8:18 pm
Poor Jeffrey, Fascinating that your own erroneous comment is evidence of your bitter and malicious envy. Not only this but you’re hopelessly incompetent and while you feign an impression of daring and courage, reality exposes you as pitifully foolhardy. I suggest that Professor Hoffmann has many appreciate readers who have a more sophisticated understanding of life, an ability to think laterally and relish his wit, eloquence and incisive accuracy.
As Martin Luther wrote, in ‘Rebaptism’ ironically, “you are like butter in sunshine …. or spittle.”
Reply

 rjosephhoffmann
 May 17, 2012 at 8:23 pm
Ah Jeffrey… Thought you would be in bed reading me at this late hour
Reply
 

 N
 May 17, 2012 at 3:20 am
Dr Hoffman
Your fellow atheist, computer scientist Dr Shallit has a post on you: More stupidity from Hoffman
http://recursed.blogspot.com.au/
Reply

 stephanie louise fisher
 May 17, 2012 at 8:31 pm
Atheists love to adopt people who can think critically, imaginatively and creatively, as their own. Poor Jeffrey the atheist, despite his jealousy, is uncontrollably compelled to try and claim Professor Hoffmann as part of the gang. Martin Luther says, condemning Jeffrey’s erroneous, dull, empty and slanderous misrepresentation of Hoffmann which Jeffrey is compelled to type bold fearing otherwise of exposing his own feeble insignificance and fear and slobbishness, “He does nothing more than latch on to a small word and smear over with his spittle as he pleases, but meanwhile he does not take into account other texts which overthrow he who smear and spits, so that he is up-ended with all four limbs in the air. So here, after he has raved and smeared for a long time… like the ostrich, the foolish bird which thinks it is wholly concealed when it gets its neck under a branch.” (Against the Heavenly Prophets)
Reply

 Jeffrey Shallit
 May 31, 2013 at 9:38 am
Yet, oddly enough, neither Hoffman nor his verbose defenders actually feel compelled to address the points I made.


 steph
 May 31, 2013 at 8:37 pm
Point? You didn’t make one. Pointless.

 
 

 Beau Quilter
 May 21, 2012 at 2:31 pm
“in those countries where a dogmatic atheism has been imposed from the top, tolerance has not fared well.”
In those countries where ANY ideology has been imposed from the top, tolerance has not fared well! And the most common historical examples one can find are those of religious ideologies imposed by governments.
Reply

 rjosephhoffmann
 May 21, 2012 at 3:11 pm
“the most common historical examples one can find are those of religious ideologies imposed by governments.” no–Just the ones you would like to focus on,.
Reply

 Beau Quilter
 May 21, 2012 at 5:16 pm
I’m sorry, Mr. Hoffman, but your response is simply not true. You cannot deny, that most governments throughout history have been theocracies, largely intolerant of other ideologies.

 
 

 Beau Quilter
 May 21, 2012 at 2:38 pm
The real problem with this silly treatise is that the phobias, angers, and intolerances that Hoffman is projecting on New Atheism, are vastly more prevalent in religious groups.
Matthew 7:5
 Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.
Reply

 rjosephhoffmann
 May 21, 2012 at 3:13 pm
Thank you for quoting Matthew: would you think it might be applied to the atheist critique of religion as well, or was it just a favourite of yours from you Church of God in Christ days when the devil bit you?
Reply

 Beau Quilter
 May 21, 2012 at 5:20 pm
In fact, you’ll find that the toughest critics of atheists are other atheists.
It’s just ridiculously clear that all you accuse atheists of – spreading their ideology by billboard, aggressive behavior towards other ideologies – the religious in this nation are far, far more guilty of.


 rjosephhoffmann
 May 21, 2012 at 5:24 pm
I do deny this because it is false; if your major premise is that all governments in history have exhibited intolerance, I might agree, or that governments that have been theocracies have been intolerant–sure. But that is not what you are saying. By historical standards, ancient Rome was neither tolerant and in some was was theocratic, at least during the empire. Your categories are askew.


 rjosephhoffmann
 May 21, 2012 at 5:26 pm
I am also interested in atheists who care about atheism not repeating the idiocies of the born again. And I do not see a great deal of internal critique going on within the atheist community–or if there is, you should welcome mine.

 
 

 Beau Quilter
 May 21, 2012 at 2:46 pm
“Then stop worrying about what goes on in the heads of religious women and men, or their being hypocrites for believing some of the things you no longer believe.”
If what went on in the heads of religious women and men, stayed in their heads, there would be nothing to worry about. Unfortunately, what goes on in religious heads floods out into the public arena:
into legislative efforts to put creationism in science classrooms
 into efforts to ban/impede stem cell research
 into impartial political interference in the middle east
 into ridiculous attempts to legislate morality
to name just a few areas.
Reply

All Things to All Men says:
 May 23, 2012 at 5:01 am
[...] document.getElementById("fb-root").appendChild(e); }()); R. Joseph Hoffman over at the The New Oxonian has another entry in the “why are atheists so rude” genre. There’s not much to [...]
Reply

 reyjacobs
 June 14, 2012 at 10:49 pm
“They could learn a lesson from that old time religion, Christianity, where instead of just shouting at people, like John the Baptist did (and look what happened to him), St Paul professed to become all things to all men in order to win souls to his cause. “
I’m sure Paul shouted plenty. He threatens the Corinthians (1 Cor 4:21) and says “How do you want me to come? in love? or with a stick?” I wonder how he ended up going. Probably he went with the stick and beat their brains in for their behaving morally and thinking they should live right rather than just be saved by faith alone. What a douche that Paul.
Reply

 rjosephhoffmann
 June 15, 2012 at 12:25 am
Hhahaha are you sure he existed?
Reply

 reyjacobs
 June 15, 2012 at 9:47 pm
Actually I have expressed my Paul mythicism many times. I believe he was a mere literary character created by Marcion and that the original epistles were written by Marcion in the name of this fictional character, and that when the Catholics finally accepted “Paul” about 160 or so, they edited those epistles of this fictional “Paul” to make them more orthodox and created the pastorals and the book of Acts to historicize this fictional character.


 rjosephhoffmann
 June 17, 2012 at 12:25 pm
@Reyjacobs: I applaud your mythtic consistency. Let me test your tactics: Confronted with the following text which is dated around 95 and doesn’t usually get a lot of attention except by evangelicals and fundies who think bishops were invented after Satan took over Rome, what do you say:
1Clem 47:1
Take up the epistle of the blessed Paul the Apostle.
1Clem 47:2
 What wrote he first unto you in the beginning of the Gospel?
1Clem 47:3
 Of a truth he charged you in the Spirit concerning himself and Cephas
 and Apollos, because that even then ye had made parties.
1Clem 47:4
 Yet that making of parties brought less sin upon you; for ye were
 partisans of Apostles that were highly reputed, and of a man approved
 in their sight.
1Clem 47:5
 But now mark ye, who they are that have perverted you and diminished
 the glory of your renowned love for the brotherhood.
1Clem 47:6
 It is shameful, dearly beloved, yes, utterly shameful and unworthy of
 your conduct in Christ, that it should be reported that the very
 steadfast and ancient Church of the Corinthians, for the sake of one
 or two persons, maketh sedition against its presbyters.
1Clem 47:7
 And this report hath reached not only us, but them also which differ
 from us, so that ye even heap blasphemies on the Name of the Lord by
 reason of your folly, and moreover create peril for yourselves.
 etc.
Even if poeople accepted my early dating for Marcion (and most don’t) he would have been about 10 years old when this was written. or do you think he wrote it? or that a nameless forger wrote for no reason? To “create” Paul? Why would anyone do that? And if it is an epistle from the end of the 1st century, and as it suggests the failure of Paul’s mission to Corinth, of which there is earlier literary evidence, and as the author seems to know a bit about the letter and the mission (but doesn’t seem to have the text in front of him), how do you construe that? Applying Occam’s razor to evidence doesn’t mean slashing the neck of common sense; and frankly, the view that Paul is made up is merely silly and not even provocative. Give me your own scenario that would explain the necessity for the Paul myth–I know several and want to see if yours is an improvement on the whole sorry lot.


 reyjacobs
 June 17, 2012 at 11:07 pm
Ah 1st Clement! This Clement guy is writing to Corinth from Rome to admonish a bunch of unruly youngsters to obey their bishops. And he decides the best way to keep the attention of the youth is to spend 30 chapters yammering on about things totally off topic, and waste all his time quoting every passage from the Pauline corpus he can possibly squeeze in. By the time he gets to the matter at hand, the youths have already put down his “letter” and so he accomplishes nothing. Well, nothing except convincing credulous moderns that orthodox ministers in 95 utilized the Pauline epistles! Come one, this “letter” is obviously a forger. In fact, scholarship in the early 1900s (or was it the late 1800s?) said as much. But then fundamentalists entered scholarship and reversed the decision for no other reason than that they need to false letter to prove that Paul wasn’t made up by Marcion! Anyone who knows the history of scholarship on this letter knows that, even if they (like me) can’t remember precisely any more whether it was in the late 1800s or early 1900s that the scholarly consensus was that it was spurious.


 rjosephhoffmann
 June 18, 2012 at 5:01 pm
Reyjacobs: “… this “letter” is obviously a forger.” Of course, just like Paul is made up. You have future as a young earth creationist given the way you do science by tossing all the embarrassing rocks aside. I know a teensy bit about Marcion; please solve the mystery for me, as I asked: when did he make Paul up and why? Was it so that mythtics could say that Paul’s silence proves Jesus is a figment?


 rjosephhoffmann
 June 18, 2012 at 5:47 pm
Not that it matters but you may be thinking about 2 Clement, which is almost universally regarded as later and by a different writer, just as 1st Clement is regarded as authentic by almost everyone. Why do you not answer my question about Marcion being about 10 years old when it was composed, that is, if my very early date for Marcion is correct? And you say he quotes–he almost never quotes–which is one of the reasons the epistle is dated early. He “alludes” to historical situations at Corinth he seems to know first hand, and historically, which means that while he knew what Paul was up against, he doesn’t seem to have a complete text of a Corinthian letter and he doesn’t know Paul’s solution to the Corinthian controversy–which Marcion certainly did. Bloody hell, you are ready to make pronouncements on these things and show no evidence of ever having read them. Have you?


 reyjacobs
 June 18, 2012 at 8:51 pm
If you know as much about Marcion as you think you do then you know why he would create the Paulina and invent Paul. He needed a source of tradition different from and independent of the 12, and since it didn’t exist, he created it.
As to Marcion only being 10 in 95, obviously when I said 1st Clement is a forgery I meant it was written much later, probably about 160-170 in point of fact. And no I’m not confusing 1st and 2nd Clement.
You’ll find a fairly decent and humorous explanation of why Paul’s epistles are clearly forged here : http://www.jesusneverexisted.com/epistles2.htm


 rjosephhoffmann
 June 19, 2012 at 6:33 am
@reyjacobs: Ah! Thanks. It’s perfectly clear now.

 
 

 rjosephhoffmann
 May 16, 2013 at 6:09 am
Reblogged this on The New Oxonian and commented:
Blasts from the Past Two Years
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Catholics and the Contraceptive Conscience
by rjosephhoffmann

 Reblogged from The New Oxonian:

Click to visit the original post
The Catholic bishops think that they have a right to an opinion about contraception and abortion.  They do.  They also think that when they speak in the name of their Church, as custodians of its moral philosophy, to people who want to listen, they have a right to be heard.  They do.
Unfortunately they think as well  that when they are heard they deserve deference and to be obeyed. 
Read more… 1,465 more words

A Reblog

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