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Posted by: mikwut ® 12/14/2002, 01:06:17 Author Profile Mail author |
I was visiting the archives recently to read over some of my exchanges with Craig C. when I was actively posting on the board. The way I always came to the board was to go to google and search rpcman. After posting for sometime I would search mikwut and usually a few of my active posts would come up and I could get to the board. Well I searched mikwut to go to the archives and a post by Martin where he mentioned my name came up. He was discussing the historical Jesus and the boat argument I had brought up with him in the past, and contrary to my better intentions I ended up reading it and a few other posts, and following the links Martin provided. I told myself I wasn’t going to return but Martin’s pushing the Myth idea weighed on my mind. I have been posting a little bit on the ZLMB board as of late and I thought to get it out my system I would start a thread over there on the historical Jesus. I had thoroughly researched this idea several years ago and I stay abreast, and have come to some conclusions. But, then I got to thinking, what the heck, and so here’s a response to Martin’s historical Jesus. Ironically, I also read an interesting exchange with Martin, Alf and Cal as well concerning Magic and Mormonism in which I will make some comments in conclusion because as irony would have it -it teaches a valuable lesson concerning this same topic. Before I get into the meat of it I would like to say that I like Martin, I like him a lot, I enjoyed my time I spent dialoguing with him and the rest of the 2Think group. I find him ironically engaging, thorough, and fun to dialogue with. I think he is funny and entertaining and makes his points in a wonderfully powerful and succinct way, he really makes this board. He is committed to his position and knows it well. But with this issue he is wrong. And this issue with Martin baffles me. I don’t understand why someone like Martin finds it having any legs at all instead of a complete embarrassment for skeptics. I don’t portend that any of my arguments against Martin are my own, I am simply articulating the majority stance of professional historians and anthropologists, many of which are not Christians themselves. Concerning the length, I took all night and today to write and paste all of this and I am afraid there is no other way. The mythicists pile on nonsense and each piece of nonsense takes a lot to respond to. So yes it is long, but it still could go on for many many times this length. When I studied the issue almost a decade ago I always conceptualized it as the best example of what C.S. Lewis dramatized in Pilgrim’s Regress. Argument would just get parroted over and over again until it began to appear as truth to some fringe folks. Here is a short piece that made me always think of the Jesus Mythologizers:
You see he is trying to argue. Now tell me, someone, what is argument?’
The tired old shoe of the mythical Jesus is just like the people C.S. Lewis depicted locked in a prison of regurgitation. Just think how radically far afield the mythicists are, even the scholars that dismiss the resurrection and supernatural elements in Jesus’ life in the Jesus Seminar don’t even throw the myth crackpots one bone, it isn’t even worth refuting for most scholars. Why? Because it already has. Even if we do grant the wildly outrageous view that the "Jesus-myth" has equal explanatory power then the simple idea that the Gospels relay real history with a historical person at their center, it would be rejected by simplicity. But, as I will explain, it doesn’t even get close to being on par with the historicity of Jesus so there is no need to even decide using simplicity since it fails to explain the vast majority of the details - passion of the few, triumph in closed locales, resistance to modification by subsequent cultures, uniformity in variegated sources, stretching silence arguments to credulity’s limit, depending on outdated, outmoded and already refuted sources and materials, attempting to logically connect it to myth which is not necessarily connected so doubling the errors - it never even makes it to the playing field with a historical Jesus. Just one wrong step by the mythicists in dismissing evidence through conspiracy or forgery or whatever creative means they employ sinks the whole ship. The most parsimonius and plausible explanation BY FAR for rational people and for the origin of Christianity in this regard is that Jesus actually existed. The Jesus Myth is a vastly minority view in scholarly circles and it is overwhelmingly propounded by NON-historians, for example G.A. Wells is a Professor of German and the most complex thinker but he himself has recently backtracked and stated that if the Q hypothesis is correct it would refute his mythical Jesus. Arthur Drews is a mathematician, Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy have never been published in any scholarly journal and don’t have any credentials they are New Age Spiritualists who can’t tolerate anyone being told your wrong. Martins other recommendations are old and tired rationalist atheists that have been refuted for almost a century and are quite frankly out of date. Doherty is educated and the closest to a real scholar but since he only regurgitates what has already been researched by the other low brows its hard to accept him as anything but an historian in coming to his ideas. I am sure he has inflenced Martin a great deal due his switching the older idea of a myth being in existence for many years before Christianity was even born to Doherty hypothesizing that Paul’s “spiritual” Jesus is actually the Jesus of history in total, but Martin seems to conflate Wells and Doherty and a few other crackpot fringees into his own idea that includes the savior myths and Paul’s spiritualizing akin to the old and refuted Arthur Drews with a little of everything that is currently chic thrown in the pot and stirred, something very strange as Doherty himself dismisses the longer tradition before Christianity. The melding of mystery religions and pagan thought to create the Jesus Myth is of course chic in these conspiracy circles due to the Nag Hammadi library and Dead Sea Scrolls entering popular books and thought more and more - but none of these scholars have the second important ingredient either, any real anthropological or mythical critical studies degrees or expertise. A huge gulf. Now, I don’t mention that the Myth idea is the minority view as proof positive that Martin is wrong but for two reasons I point it out. One, whenever we go outside the consensus of scholarly opinion we should walk very carefully. Secondly, Martin always cautions us himself concerning the importance of peer review because I believe consensus doesn’t amount to evidence per se but is based on evidence. As I mentioned to Martin when I was actively posting this whole idea has been peer reviewed extensively, one can go to any university with a quality periodicals section and have the librarians help them do a search of the articles of “Does Jesus Exist” in theological journals. Martins reasoning for not going further because 10-20,000 words is necessary is easily substantiated against him and is a serious problem here, each piece of “evidence” the mythologizers come up with has entire articles written just concerning it - it becomes an undaunting task. I have great disdain for the egoists and wackos such as G.A. Wells, Michael Martin, Freke and Gandy and Doherty for continually spitting out the same regurgitated arguments over and over and over after serious scholars gave it a fair hearing some thirty years ago, the same disdain Martin has for religious zealotry and charlatans and creationists. It is shock jock nonbelief in its crudest form. Before going into each of Martins arguments I would make a suggestion to those that are serious about this topic. The first book you should read because of its fantastic and enjoyable readability and what you will learn from it is Dead Certainties (Unwarranted Speculations) by Simon Schama, this book has nothing specifically to do with the Jesus Myth but it shows in an even entertaining way how with a little literary mix, historical constructivism can run wild in complex and sophisticated constructions that are not the least bit warranted but are consistent. The book is read by any undergraduate student before receiving a degree in history, and there is a reason why and Martin is making it very clear. The sources I quote from can then be researched and those books give a never-ending list of books and articles to consult, the periodicals are the best place to close the lid on this. I think it will become evident to honest people that misrepresenting the evidence, arguing from silence and creative inventive theories don’t make proof of anything and shouldn’t be considered history. Secondly, I would recommend Robin Lane Fox’s Pagan’s and Christians for a good overview of the religious landscape for the time in which Martin builds his myth idea. It again, doesn’t directly confront the mythical Jesus but rather takes the historical one for granted but you will see great inconsistencies once your familiar with a little of the landscape in how the mythicists construct the case. Great contortions take place for the case for a mythical Jesus to be made. For example, I read how Martin propounded one of the popular mythologizers ridiculous stretches concerning Justin’s Dialogue with Trypho where he attempted to make a case that something akin to his argument was being made anciently which is laughable, this whole idea is a few hundred years old and was born in the midst of hyper skepticism towards everything religious. He even uses the same forceful and proof positive language the mytholgizers use, listen to him make his point so adamantly, and then listen to proper context that SO EASILY is seen by anyone who has actually read the dialogue themselves. [Martin] 4) Positive evidence that shows that some early non-Christians knew that "Jesus" was a fabricated myth invented by early Christians.
Pay close attention to Martin’s pychological tactics with phrases like, “despair of modern historists”, “over and over again they laughed out loud”, “dynamite to historicists claims”, “most ignore the important work” and the like. None of it substantiated and all of it is completely false and right in line with his mythicist brethrens verbiage - how many Oxford or Cambridge scholars do you EVER read with such unabashed language? All of the major historians address the manipulative contortion of Trypho by mythicists cartoon portrayal of the dialogue. Trypho who was a skeptical Jew concerning Christianity when speaking with Justin states as follows: "When I had said this, my beloved friends, those who were with Trypho laughed; but he, smiling, says, "I approve of your other remarks, and admire the eagerness with which you study divine things; but it were better for you still to abide in the philosophy of Plato, or of some other man, cultivating endurance, self-control, and moderation, rather than be deceived by false words, and follow the opinions of men of no reputation. For if you remain in that mode of philosophy, and live blamelessly, a hope of a better destiny were left to you; but when you have forsaken God, and reposed confidence in man, what safety still awaits you? If, then, you are willing to listen to me (for I have already considered you a friend), first be circumcised, then observe what ordinances have been enacted with respect to the Sabbath, and the feasts, and the new moons of God; and, in a word, do all things which have been written in the law: and then perhaps you shall obtain mercy from God. But Christ--if He has indeed been born, and exists anywhere--is unknown, and does not even know Himself, and has no power until Elias come to anoint Him, and make Him manifest to all. And you, having accepted a groundless report, invent a Christ for yourselves, and for his sake are inconsiderately perishing." Martin through smoke and mirrors attempts to make the statement appear like someone thinking his mythicist theory 1900 years ago, but such is folly and total misrepresentation of the facts. Throughout the entire debate with Justin the historicity of Jesus is taken for granted. Here are a just a couple of hundreds of examples:
The entire dialogue would hardly make any sense at all if Trypho believed anything like the Christians inventing a man of history. What Trypho meant in the trumped and parroted statement Martin is twisting, and which is clear to anyone who has read the dialogue, (probably, like me, for more constructive purposes than historical hocus pocus) is that the title “Christ” is being taken by the Christians and unwarrantedly given to Jesus, a man of history, but Trypho argues the Messiah has not come IN Jesus, or Jesus the man of history as taken for granted in the entire dialogue is not the Christ or the Messiah, he is simply telling Christians they are believing a false Christ not that they made up a historical one and are perpetuating a mythic fraud or any related theme thereof. So bad does this argument take Trypho’s words out of context it should put a serious mark on the integrity of this entire enterprise. None of Trypho’s other arguments make any sense if Martin’s contortion were valid such as the argument that Trypho makes parallel many other Jews, that the body of Jesus had been removed to refute the empty tomb argument. I truly laughed out loud when Martin quoted this because it was killed, buried, forgotten decades ago. I anxiously await any other ancient attempts he can make at this type of so called positive evidence. I assume he began with his smoking gun, lets hope not. |
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Evidence is lacking? Re: Mythical Jesus - A Mythical Idea! -- mikwut Top of thread Archive
Posted by: mikwut ®
12/14/2002, 01:14:29
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[Martin] Yes! An important part of what I'm saying is that there is no legitimate evidence at all that points to a historical Jesus.
Nonsense, unless you contort and strangle the evidence beyond all recognition. Martin is then incredibly better informed, more objective and a better historian than historians like Martin Hengel, Ian Wilson, Graham Stanton, Walter Wagner, or skeptical nonbelievers like Robin Lane Fox or Michael Grant, who certainly has no theological axe to grind, and who indicates that there is more evidence for the existence of Jesus than there is for a large number of famous pagan personages - yet no one would dare to argue their non-existence (Michael Grant, Greek and Roman Historican: Information and MisInformation. London 1995) or John Meier who notes that what we know about Alexander the Great could fit on only a few sheets of paper; yet no one doubts that Alexander existed (John P. Meier - A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus.) Interestingly, I read a paper from a friend about 12 years ago who was working on his doctorate where he constructed a plausible argument for the non-existence of Alexander the Great using the same methods that are employed by the Jesus Myth crowd, it was really all Barbarians and the embarassment brought about the great Alexander myth with a famous philosopher by his side to boot to avoid the humiliation of being conquered - I wonder if Martin buys that too. I wonder if he now should join Mormonism because the same data he uses can consistently be argued for the Mormon apostasy. I have also read a similar sophisticated manipulation to show Hannibal is not a historical person. Charlesworth has written that "Jesus did exist; and we know more about him than about almost any Palestinian Jew before 70 C.E (James Charlesworth - Jesus Within Judaism) E.P. Sanders nearly says the same, “We know a lot about Jesus, vastly more than about John the Baptist, Theudas, Judas the Galilean, or any of the other figures whose names we have from approximately the same date and place. (The Historical Figure of Jesus. Penguin Press, 1993). On the Crucifixion, A. E. Harvey writes: "It would be no exaggeration to say that this event is better attested, and supported by a more impressive array of evidence, than any other event of comparable importance of which we have knowledge from the ancient world." (A.E. Harvey Jesus and the Constraints of History, Philadelphia: Westminster) James Dunn provides an anecdote referring to Wells' construction, he writes:
"The alternative thesis is that within thirty years there had evolved such a coherent and consistent complex of traditions about a non-existent figure such as we have in the sources of the Gospels is just too implausible. It involves too many complex and speculative hypotheses, in contrast to the much simpler explanation that there was a Jesus who said and did more or less what the first three Gospels attribute to him. The fact of Christianity's beginnings and the character of its earliest tradition is such that we could only deny the existence of Jesus by hypothesizing the existence of some other figure who was a sufficient cause of Chrstianity's beginnings - another figure who on careful reflection would probably come out very like Jesus! James Dunn The Evidence for Jesus."
The hardened skeptic and Emeritus Professor of History, Morton Smith wrote:
"I don't think the arguments in (Wells') book deserve detailed refutation."
"...he argues mainly from silence."
"...many (of his arguments) are incorrect, far too many to discuss in this space."
"He presents us with a piece of private mythology that I find incredible beyond anything in the Gospels."[Martin] Not that I expect you meekly to accept everything I say on the subject without question, but as in the case of the complex issue of the influences to Pauline thought in which you were previously making some spurious comments of no real consequence because the subject was so wholly unfamiliar to you, the issues surrounding the historicity of Jesus are so incredibly deep and thorny and elaborate that it is often enormously difficult to adequately respond to your questions in less than 10,000 words. And I just will NOT go to those lengths, not even for you. You very much need to do a great deal of your own homework before you can fully discuss the intricacies with me or even to understand why your and other traditionalist Christian observations only appear to make sense on the surface and are in actually deeply flawed. (more about this at the very end.) But this time, I'll make something of an exception...
Oh, the irony, the delicious irony!!! I wonder Martin, I could provide you with several deep and thorny issues that would take many words for responses that make another construction that appears to make sense on the surface something completely different as well. In fact my best examples come from the radical post modern revisionist historicity. I knew you had a little postmodernism in you. ;).
[Martin] As for Tacitus' alleged reference to "Christ" and Pilate, those claims are utterly without merit, especially for advancing the case of a historical Jesus. You need to dig deeper to understand just how worthless that passage of Tacitus' Annals really is.
Do you know what the word "provenance" means? A text's provenance refers to its source of origin, who wrote it, when and where it was written, it's history, it's history of possession, it's history of being referenced by other writers, whether and how much it was modified by later writers, whether any or all of its passages have been forged or interpolated, and the length of time between when the original was written and the date of the oldest extant copies.
The quotation in question that is alleged by some to have been written by Tacitus has an exceedingly poor provenance. This tells us right off the bat that it is not at all trustworthy.
Even in the most flattering case, it is not a first century contemporary source, and contrary to your later remark and completely in line with my brief comments elsewhere, it in no way refers to or confirms any historical Jesus! But first let's examine some details...
The passage in question which is ostensibly Tacitus' is claimed at least by conservative Christian scholars to have been written during the second or third decade of the second century (~110-120). But there's no good reason at all to think Tacitus was the actual author of that passage and there's excellent reason to believe that it was a deliberate Christian insertion done much later to sell the pro-Christian myth of the existence of extensive first century Christian martyrdoms.
That is because the passage in question states the utterly non-credible assertion that Nero martyred a "vast multitude" of Christians around 64 AD in an alleged effort to turn the blame from the great fire upon them. Thus, the passage it its own disproof of legitimacy! Christianity would have been a very tiny cult in Rome at that time from which it would have been physically impossible to extract a "vast multitude" for martyrdom! Furthermore, Rome was exceptionally tolerant of any and all religious beliefs and they bent over backwards to accommodate the Jews in particular (and there is no question at all that nearly all Christians of that time were Jews first and foremost). It's been pointed out by archaeologists and historians quite astutely that there is absolutely zero evidence that any structure any larger than a regular house existed for communal Christian worship at the time, which would never have been the case had there been "vast multitudes" of Christians in Rome at the time.
But it gets even worse!
This alleged persecution of Christians by Nero would have been an extremely noteworthy historical event which, had it actually taken place, it would have been carefully recorded by all contemporary historians, both Jewish and Roman, and the news deliberately spread far and wide precisely because Nero would have wanted it extremely well known throughout the empire that it was the alleged Christians who were to blame for the fire and not himself. Yet not a single historian -- not Josephus and not Philo -- ever reported anything like it! It is almost certainly a fraud.
Not only that, regarding the provenance I mentioned to above, no one made reference to this alleged 1'st century passage until after the 15'th century! Let me ask you: Is it more likely that the passage was fraudulently inserted in the 15'th century, or that no one -- not even the most fervent pro-Christian apologist who would have jumped for joy to have reported it -- ever noticed it for fourteen centuries??
(I'd also like to point out that an important book published in 1878 reported that the entire Annals of Tacitus was the complete fabrication in the 15'th century, forged then by the first modern person to "discover" it, Italian writer Poggio Bracciolini.)
The complete absence of the passage and any reference to it throughout all of history until the 15'th century is damning proof that the passage didn't exist prior to then. Neither Eusebius nor any other Christian writer or apologist -- not even Tertullian who often quoted Tacitus at length -- EVER heard of any such passage as the one in question! It's even more certainly a fraud in light of these facts.
But let's play stupid and ignorant like the conservative Christian historicist apologists of our own day and pretend that the passage of Tacitus to which you refer was a legitimate product of that second century quasi-historical writer. What does it actually say about Jesus? Nothing, of course! But what about someone named "Christos" and Pilate?
The passage speaks of a "founder" named "Christos". Think about that, Vicki! You and other modern Christians claim that the name of the purported founder of Christianity is alleged to have been Jesus, not "Christ"! "Christ" is not a name at all, it is a title: "The anointed one"! It's roughly equivalent to referring to a religion being founded by "King" or "Sir". It is dubious in and of itself. Apply your reasoning skills to that point, please. Isn't it FAR more logical that (assuming legitimacy of the passage) Tacitus simply worked backwards from the name "Christians" and simply assumed that the group was founded by the name highlighted in the name of the religion, "Christos/Christus"? Just as the Mohammedan religion (as it was most commonly called until fairly recently in the English-speaking world) was founded by Mohammed?
But what of the reference to Pilate? That also turns out upon examination to convincingly self-destruct your historicist thesis! For in the passage in question, it speaks of "Christos'" crucifixion at the behest of "the procurator, Pontius Pilate"! But Pilate was NOT a procurator at the time the alleged "Jesus" would have been crucified!
So how are we to explain that a famous early second century historian like Tacitus was so ludicrously wrong? If we stay with the ignorant conservative Christian pretense that the passage is a legitimate second century report, then the only possible explanation is that Tacitus did NOT get his information from any reliable historical source, but rather simply repeated what he had heard indirectly from Christians of their own foundation myth!! And that's why he blathered on so cluelessly about "Christos" and a "procurator" named Pilate (who was actually a prefect at the alleged time of the alleged crucifixion of the alleged "Jesus")
And then there's this fact, which has always been about the only one to penetrate your often misdirected and over-active defenses in the past: The alleged Tacitus passage contradicts the New Testament! Read Acts 28:30-31:
For two whole years Paul stayed there in his own rented house and welcomed all who came to see him.
Boldly and without hindrance he preached the kingdom of God and taught about the Lord Jesus Christ.
In other words, right during the time (~ 64-66 AD) when Nero was allegedly slaughtering "vast multitudes" of Christians, Paul was "boldly and without hindrance" preaching Christianity with nary a mention of this alleged terrible plague of Nero's martyrdom of "vast multitude"! So which do you want to believe, Vicki? The Bible or "Tacitus"?The passage is obviously fraudulent, Vicki. Disregard it (and all like it) utterly and completely. There really are NO legitimate, independent, extra-biblical sources that validate or even speak of any historical Jesus. You need to accept that as a certain fact.
- - - - - -
Now, regarding the archaeological finding of a artifact bearing the name of Pilate, BFD: big friggin' deal! I had already addressed that kind of thing previously. I wish you would read more carefully!
You seem to have some crazy notion that just because the Jesus stories are pure myth, it would "follow" that no word or name or anything else whatsoever can possibly be true or accurate! That's such a silly idea, don't you agree? As I said before, we can walk down Baker Street in London and see flat 221-B, but who on Earth would be so naive and clueless as to think that is evidence of the biological existence of Sherlock Holmes!As I've also already said, the New Testament myth-developers not uncommonly referred to very well-known and legitimately historical people, institutions, and events. Everyone in the area knew who Pilate was, who Herod was, who Julius, Tiberius, Claudius, Nero, etc., etc., etc. were and so these mysticists used these names as part of their myth-making. That's all there is to it! No mystery there at all, and certainly no evidence for a historical Jesus!
3. In your post (the one I printed out) you state that the "references to the supernatural deity named Christ are in no legitimate sense extra-biblical references to a historical Jesus." Martin, in the quotes by Tacitus he appears to refer to a physical Jesus, one that was "condemned to death" and "executed". How do you see these as references to deity? Are there additional ref's to Jesus by Tacitus?"
I've already addressed that above, of course. Nowhere does even the fraudulent passage in Tacitus refer to any Jesus! The passage speaks only of a "Christos" and whose alleged reference to an alleged crucifixion are entirely like Paul's purely divine, heavenly crucifixion of the supernatural deity "Christ".
[End Martin]Concerning the passage being a forgery contrary to what Martin implies very, very few historians would assert that this passage is a forgery, in all the relevant Oxford and Cambridge published books I find none. The evidence is strongly in favor of the genuineness of this passage. The passage is in perfect Tacitean style (see Dorey, T.A. ed. Tacitus. London: Routledge, 1969). The passage appears in every known copy of the Annals (although there are very few copies of it, and none dates earlier than the 11th century - which eliminates Martins ridiculous notion of a 15th century forgery (Dorey)), and the anti-Christian tone is so strong that it is extremely unlikely that a Christian could have written it. Indeed, the Tacitean polemic against Christianity is so strong that it was one of two things Tacitus was condemned for in the sixteenth century. [Dorey, page 149].
The gang that Martin is fond of in this issue certainly enjoys the forgery route because this one piece of evidence does indeed bring down the whole house of cards. Concerning the Church Fathers not mentioning the passage all one needs to read is the entire passage from which the quote comes from and find how disfavorable the whole thing is towards Christians - why would a Church Father quote such a unfavorable source to Jesus and Christianity as a whole? As well, Tacitus wrote for a very limited audience of his peers. The Annals very likely were not even in the Church’s hands at such an early date. When one reads actual historians on this subject the idea of it being some kind of Christian Forgery is as ridiculous as the fifteenth-century conspiracy thought line. (For an indepth reading see Ronald Syme, Tacitus. Oxford: Clarendon)Concerning Tacitus’ reliability which Martin also questions, the answer here is: Absolutely! The Tacitean literature is full of praise for the accuracy, care, critical capability, and trustworthiness of the work of Tacitus.
Let's look at a number of quotes from scholars in the Tacitean camp:
Syme, who was regarded as one of the foremost Tacitean scholars, says "the prime quality of Cornelius Tacitus is distrust. It was needed if a man were to write about the Caesars." He adds that Tacitus "was no stranger to industrious investigation" and his "diligence was exemplary."
Chilver indicates that "for Tacitus scepticism was inescapable is not to be doubted."
The Tacitian scholar, Martin, though noting difficulties about discerning Tacitus' exact sources, says that "It is clear, then, that Tacitus read widely and that the idea that he was an uncritical follower of a single source is quite untenable."
Grant, while charging Tacitus with bias, error, and "unfair selectivity" in various areas (especially associated with the Emperor Tiberius), nevertheless agrees that Tacitus "was careful to contrast what had been handed down orally with the literary tradition." Elsewhere he notes that "There is no doubt that (Tacitus) took a great deal of care in selecting his material."
Dudley notes that despite problems in discerning what sources Tacitus used, "it may be said with some confidence that the view that Tacitus followed a single authority no longer commands support."
Mellor observes that although he made use of other sources, including friends like Pliny, Tacitus "does not slavishly follow, as some of his Roman predecessors did, the vagaries of his sources." He adds (ibid., 31-2) that, "If research is the consultation and evaluation of sources, there can be little doubt that Tacitus engaged in serious research though it is not often apparent in the smooth flow of his narrative." Tacitus "consulted both obscure and obvious sources," and "distinguishes fact from rumor with a scrupulosity rare in any ancient historian."
Benario tells us that Tacitus "chose judiciously among his sources, totally dependent upon none, and very often, at crucial points, ignored the consensus of his predecessors to impose his own viewpoint and his own judgment."
Wellesley remarks that investigation "very seldom shows (Tacitus) to be false to fact" and that archaeology has shown that "only once or twice is Tacitus found guilty of a small slip." He adds: "When the sources differ and the truth is hard to decipher, (Tacitus) takes refuge in ambiguous language or the balance of alternative and sometimes spiteful variants," rather than doing original research to determine which option is the truth. We may note that there is no such ambiguous language in the Christus cite.
Finally, Momigliano, while pointing out that Tacitus was of course "not a researcher in the modern sense," nevertheless says that he was "a writer whose reliability cannot be seriously questioned." He cites only one possible major error by Tacitus, but puts it down to him relying on a trusted predecessor rather than official records.Concerning the objection of Tacitus using procurator instead of prefect, this was a favorite objection by Wells, but Chilton and Evans write, "(t)his 'error' should not be taken as evidence that Tacitus' information is faulty." Two reasons may be cited for this:
1. Evidence indicates that there was a certain fluidity in the usage of these terms.
2. Tacitus may have been anachronizing on purpose.
We should first consider the difference between these two titles. A procurator, as the word implies, was a financial administrator who acted as the emperor's personal agent. A prefect was a military official.
1. What evidence is there for the easy interchange of these terms? Meier notes that in a "backwater province" like Judea, there was probably not much difference between the two roles. This assertion is backed up by literary evidence. Philo and Josephus were not consistent in the usage of the terms either: Josephus calls Pilate a "procurator" in Antiquities 18.5.6, the story about Pilate bringing images into Jerusalem. In practical terms, "both the procurators and prefects in Judea had the power to execute criminals who were not Roman citizens." Practically, in this context, "A difference that is no difference, is no difference." (For what it is worth, the Secular Web's Richard Carrier has now stated: "It seems evident from all the source material available that the post was always a prefecture, and also a procuratorship. Pilate was almost certainly holding both posts simultaneously, a practice that was likely established from the start when Judaea was annexed in 6 A.D. And since it is more insulting (to an elitist like Tacitus and his readers) to be a procurator, and even more insulting to be executed by one, it is likely Tacitus chose that office out of his well-known sense of malicious wit. Tacitus was also a routine employer of variatio, deliberately seeking nonstandard ways of saying things (it is one of several markers of Tacitean style). So there is nothing unusual about his choice here."
2. Tacitus may have used an anachronistic term for his own reasons. The first reason may have been to avoid confusion. Sanders, cites inscriptional evidence that the position held by Pilate was called "prefect " in 6-41 A.D., but "procurator" in the years 44-66, so he deduces that Tacitus was simply using the term with which his readers would be most familiar. (This is a far better point than we may realize: Being that Tacitus' readers were - like he had been - members of the Senate and holders of political office, we must suppose that this "error" escaped not only Tacitus' attention, but theirs as well! We may as well suggest that a United States Senate historian's error of the same rank would pass without comment!)The second reason for this use of terminology may be deliberate anachronizing on Tacitus' part. Kraus and Woodman note that Tacitus often uses "archaizing, rare, or obsolete vocabulary" and also "avoids, varies, or 'misuses' technical terms." They do not cite the prefect/procurator issue specifically, but it is worth asking, in light of this comment, if the usage might not have been simply part of Tacitus' normal practice. (In fact, Harris does indeed suggest a conscious [or unconscious] anachronizing.)
All of the above, therefore - along with the fact that this is not cited by Tactiean scholars as a problem - shows that there is certainly no grounds for charging Tacitus with error or degrading the reference to Jesus because of the alleged procurator/prefect mixup.
And what about Tacitus reference to ‘Christos’, again it is no objection at all, Wells also offers this objection, it is not considered at all problematic by any Tacitean or other historian. Rather than find some deficiency in Tacitus because of this, it is more plausible to recognize that Tacitus would use the name with which his readers would be most familiar - and that would not necessarily be the name that Jesus was executed under. Furthermore, simply referring to "Jesus" would not explain how it is that Jesus' followers were named Christians; Van Voorst further makes the point that Tacitus is actually issuing a subtle corrective here! The text of the oldest manuscript, and most likely reading, spells "Christians" with an e ("Chrestians"). In naming "Christ," Tacitus "is correcting, in a way typical of his style of economy, the misunderstanding of the 'crowd' (vulgus) by stating that the 'founder of this name'...is Christus, not the common name given by the crowd, Chrestus...he calls attention by his somewhat unusual phrase to the nomen of the movement in order to link it directly--and correctly--to the name of Christ."
It should be further added that the NT itself tended towards the direction of using "Christ" as though it were a proper name, and that Tacitus (and Pliny as well) may be reflecting this.
[Martin] (Another part is that Jesus/Joshua wasn't intended to represent a historical personage, but that's a matter for the 15-20 thousand word post I will most likely never submit here.)
This is a completely unwarranted assumption and I will have more to say concerning it. Maybe, and I still only offer maybe, if we lived 150 years ago and if most of our sources are old and dead we could warrant such a false belief but I am remiss as to how anyone can today, particularly a refined and thorough skeptic such as Martin. C.S. Lewis decades and decades ago gave his statement in Mere Christianity concerning how familiar he is with myth, fable and legend and that the Gospels were nothing close for this very reason and he didn’t even have the new understanding of the likes of say Mircea Eliade at his disposal. He mentioned this in one sentence to dismiss this type of sloppy thinking. The Jesus myth propounders are notorious for using the word myth but never show the Jesus Myth in stark comparison to other myths outside of general similarities like Dying and Rising Savior myths such as Mithra and Krishna for which I will cover shortly. But those familiar with the REAL mythic world see an enormous difference here. “The world of the Gospels is so different from anything I encounter in the mythic world I need not further comment” (Thomas Stone, The Recurring Cycle of Dying Savior Myths) Taking the nice and cozy abstract idea of “hey there were spiritual and mythic beliefs at the same time, and hey here is a list of 12 disciple leaders, born of virgin Saviors, etc.. so Christianity must be one of those” into a historical concrete idea has never been done and Martins seeming confidence is the emperor with no clothes.
[Martin] Josephus is the only alleged contemporary extra-biblical source of a reference to one or another New Testament "Jesus", and even if one strips away what even most ultra-conservative biblical scholars admit was a blatant Christian forgery,
This is false. Most scholars, liberal and conservative a like hold to the theory that it is a interpolation and don’t do as the minority and Martin do in throwing the baby out with the bathwater. See J.P. Meier, Jesus in Josephus: A Modest Proposal or Rethinking the Historical Jesus chapte 3. For an extensive bibliography on this passage see W. Bauer, “The Alleged Testimony of Josephus in New Testament Apocrypha, Hennecke and Schneemelcher Fortress. Also the History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ, ed. G. Vermes and F. Millar Edinburgh. Interestly the way the scholars fall on this issue is strikingly similar to the way the scholars fall concerning fragments from the Dead Sea Scrolls being from the Gospel of Mark and Dating to the year 50 AD, the majority of scholars reject such a hypothesis but a small minority accepts it. So I wonder, what a quandry Martin is in, if he goes with the minority on throwing out Josephus altogether then why not accept the dates of the Gospel of Mark to the year 50 making his syncretization theory also answered.
[Martin] what is left was clearly not written by Josephus. This noted historian wrote of quite a number of different Jesuses (it was a common name of the day), but in each case he either clearly identified the Jesus in question by parentage and other explicit means
such as when he states, “the so called Christ” perhaps.
[Martin] or else he emphasized that he could not be more specific and explained why he couldn't be. Neither of these is true of the two alleged "references" to Jesus in his works, so neither of them can be considered legitimate.
Well, this is sophisticated research and judgment indeed! Just think this model out loud and figure how many historical sources from yesterday, 5 years ago, 2000 years could be easily proved a fraud because the writer didn’t follow a preconceived superficial pattern the debunker has determined.
All of the other alleged extra-biblical "references" are either late and explicitly pro-Christian (such as Irenaeus, the second century "heresy" stomper) or else are late and refer not to any historical Jesus but rather to Christians and/or their worship of and belief in Christ. This latter category of alleged references by Tacitus, Pliny the Younger, and Suetonius cannot be construed as references to Jesus. (Need I emphasize that references to the supernatural deity named Christ are in no legitimate sense extra-biblical references to a historical Jesus?) And the alleged Talmudic references are very late and what's worse, they are mutually contradictory and must be rejected as legitimate evidence.
Mythogizers are so quick to show how every reference is just forgery or conspiracy and readily just throw them all out of hand without ever quoting or dismissing what the Josephus, Tacitian, Pliny, Seutonius scholars themselves say on the subject. I will cover the other historians and the Talmud later on, but first off his fallacy (which his sources use as well) is to lump all these references to Jesus together and quickly discard them with conspiracy and forgery charges all with absolute statements of beyond doubt. They are mostly separate sources in space and time. No historian treats ALL of the primary sources as equal but contrary to what Martin thinks Tacitus and Josephus are considered strong evidence for the historical reality of Jesus and crackpots screaming and yelling conspiracy doesn’t change real scholars reasons why. The only historian who we might expect to mention Jesus is Josephus, a Jew who wrote a history of his people up to 66AD, which is called 'Jewish Antiquities'. In fact, Josephus does mention Jesus twice and so Jesus Mythers have to devote a lot of attention to attacking the relevant passages. Their job is made easier because Josephus, a Pharisee, probably felt nothing but contempt for Jesus which meant later Christians tried to 'correct' his negative wording.
Most historians clearly state the relevant passages are extrapolations. The majority opinion on Josephus is that the parts of the passage from book 18 of 'Jewish Antiquities' which are in parentheses below are the additions of a Christian scribe trying to make Jesus appear in a better light.
Now there was about this time Jesus, a wise man, (if it be lawful to call him a man); for he was a doer of wonderful works, a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure. He drew over to him both many of the Jews and many of the Gentiles. (He was the Christ). And when Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal men amongst us, had condemned him to the cross, those that loved him at the first did not forsake him; (for he appeared to them alive again the third day; as the divine prophets had foretold these and ten thousand other wonderful things concerning him). And the tribe of Christians, so named from him, are not extinct at this day.
Josephus, Jewish Antiquities, 18, 3, 3
To support this idea we can look at the works of the Christian father Origen who was writing in the mid-third century. This was while Christianity was still a minor cult with no power or influence. It was generally ignored by the authorities as long as it kept its head down. Therefore there is no way that Christians this early could have either corkscrewed Josephus so that no undoctored copies were available or got away with quoting something from Josephus that was not there. We have no reason to suppose that a sharp guy like Origen would even have tried and so can be sure that the copy of Josephus he read and quoted from was unamended by earlier Christians. We can be doubly sure of this because Origen flatly contradicts the modern version of Josephus where the Jewish historian is made to say Jesus was the Messiah. Origen makes clear he said no such thing.
What use would the early fathers have had for a passage in Josephus saying Jesus was not the Messiah? An educated Jew saying this would not be helpful in an apologetic sense as it would demonstrate that the prophecies in the Old Testament were not nearly as clear cut as early Christians would have liked to have believed. And because no one ever challenged Jesus' existence, they never had reason to point to a critical Jewish source to prove he did. Hence Josephus was not quoted by the few earlier Christian writers.
So what exactly did Origen say? Here are two passages which say basically the same thing and which reinforce each other:
And to so great a reputation among the people for righteousness did this James rise, that Flavius Josephus, who wrote the "Antiquities of the Jews" in twenty books, when wishing to exhibit the cause why the people suffered so great misfortunes that even the temple was razed to the ground, said, that these things happened to them in accordance with the wrath of God in consequence of the things which they had dared to do against James the brother of Jesus who is called Christ. And the wonderful thing is, that, though he did not accept Jesus as Christ, he yet gave testimony that the righteousness of James was so great; and he says that the people thought that they had suffered these things because of James.
Origen - Matthew X, XVII
For in the 18th book of his Antiquities of the Jews, Josephus bears witness to John as having been a Baptist, and as promising purification to those who underwent the rite. Now this writer, although not believing in Jesus as the Christ, in seeking after the cause of the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the temple, whereas he ought to have said that the conspiracy against Jesus was the cause of these calamities befalling the people, since they put to death Christ, who was a prophet, says nevertheless-being, although against his will, not far from the truth - that these disasters happened to the Jews as a punishment for the death of James the Just, who was a brother of Jesus (called Christ) - the Jews having put him to death, although he was a man most distinguished for his justice.
Origen, - Against Celsus I, XLVII
This tells us that the later passage about 'James, brother of Jesus called Christ' certainly existed in Josephus in Origen's time because he uses the phrase 'called Christ' twice. It cannot be a Christian interpolation as they called James either 'James the Just' or 'James the Brother of the Lord'. The reference to 'James, brother of Jesus called Christ' is still found in Antiquities 20 and this by itself torpedoes the idea that Jesus never existed. The ridiculous idea that Christians were going around doctoring copies of Josephus while they were still a persecuted minority is just laughable. Origen also says that Josephus did not believe Jesus was the Messiah so our present day passage on Jesus in Antiquities 18 cannot have existed although the passing reference to Jesus in Antiquities 20 is further evidence that he was actually mentioned in less flattering terms.[Martin] I hold that there is every reason to believe -- and no legitimate reason to doubt -
That alone should raise many a skeptical eyebrow for sure. It is strikingly overbalanced.
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What about Savior myths? Re: Evidence is lacking? -- mikwut Top of thread Archive
Posted by: mikwut ®
12/14/2002, 01:25:33
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Of course the overwhelming preponderance of the evidence points to a first century BCE pre-Christian “movement”, you didn’t do research you just read popularizers and mythologizers. The current model used for this type of comparison attempts looking for 'numerous, complex, detailed' similarities, which reveal underlying parallels, and Christianity fails every tool. Martin has lumped several mythic categories together here so I will address the relevant categories. First, are the Dying and Rising Gods such as Adonis, Baal, Marduk, Osiris, Tammuz and Eshmun, a scholar named Frazier is the champion of the mythicists generalities here, his book The Golden Bough has thoroughly been discredited by the modern scholars I have named here such as Burkert, it is something of a classic for the fringee myth crowd and like fundamentalists no falsification of it will ever satisfy them. The next crackpot fringees like to use is Kersey Graves who published in 1985 The World’s sixteen Crucified Saviors which so general it is abstract and ANYTHING could be claimed to be a precursor of the supposed mythical Christ. Walter Burkert of Harvard whom I cannot recommend enough is referring to this category when he states, “The Frazerian construct of a general ‘Oriental’ vegetation god who periodically dies and rises from the dead has been discredited by more recent scholarship. There is no evidence for a resurrection of Attis; even Osiris remains with the dead; and if Persephone returns to the world every year, a joyous event for gods and men, the initiates do not follow her. There is a dimension of death in all of the mystery initiations, but the concept of rebirth or resurrection of either gods or mystai is anything but explicit” (Ancient Mystery Cults. Walter Burkert. Harvard:1987). From, Classical Mythology (6th ed), Mark Morford and Robert Lenardon. Longman:1999we read, “Despite its faults, Sir J. G. Frazer's The Golden Bough remains a pioneering monument in the field. It is full of comparative data on kingship and ritual, but its value is lessened by Frazer's ritualist interpretation of myth and by his eagerness to establish dubious analogies between myths of primitive tribes and classical myths” The category of Dying and Rising Savior Myths was popular for atheists a century ago but scholarship has moved on. I would reccommend the following scholars for reading and refuting in total any and all supposed borrowing of Christianity of these other religions: Walter Burkert of Harvard, and Charles Pengrase, and M. L. West. From their work we learn that similarity of general motifs is not enough to "prove anything"; we must have "complex structures" (e.g., 'system of deities', 'narrative structure').
1. Ideally, we would need to establish the historical link first, before looking for borrowings.
2. Differences between structures/stories/complexes do not disprove influence, as long as the parallels are 'too numerous' and 'too striking'.
3. Parallels must be 'striking' (i.e., unexpected, 'odd', difficult to account for).
4. Some/many parallels/parallel motifs are superficial (i.e., identical on the surface), and 'prove nothing'.
5. Parallels that can be used to support the possibility of influence need to be numerous.
6. Parallels that can be used to support the possibility of influence need to be complex (i.e., with multiple parts and interrelationships).
7. Parallels that can be used to support the possibility of influence need to be detailed.
8. The details in alleged parallels must have the same "conceptual usage" reflected in them (e.g., they must be used with the same meaning).
9. The parallels must have the same ' ideas underlying them'.
10. The similar ideas in alleged parallels must be 'central features' in the material--and not just isolated or peripheral elements.
11. Details which are completely unexpected (to the point of being unexplainable apart from borrowing) are strong evidence for borrowing
12. Details which are almost irrelevant to the new context, but which have function in the old context are strong evidence for borrowingThe Scholars would take categories where many parallels exist but on other neutral ground have established that no borrowings could have taken place and then determined the criteria. Christianity’s parallels are rather benign. With this in mind here are some quotes on the influence of the Dying and Rising Gods.
Mircea Eliade, says "The category of dying and rising gods, once a major topic of scholarly investigation, must now be understood to have been largely a misnomer based on imaginative reconstructions and exceedingly late or highly ambiguous texts" ("Dying and Rising Gods" The Encyclopedia of Religion [Macmillian: 1987]). Why have modern scholars abandoned this notion? In part because there is no evidence of any pagan god who dies and then rises from the dead!
Take for instance, the myth of Osirus. He does indeed die - he is killed by his treacherous brother, Seth - but he never rises from the dead, triumphant over death never to die again. His wife, Isis, regathers most of his dismembered corpse, but it never "reconstitutes" or comes alive again. Instead, he goes to the underworld, where he becomes judge of all who seek to enter the afterlife. There is no true resurrection in the myth of Osirus.
The same is true of Attis, Adonis, Mithra, Tammuz and Balder; they all die, but the myths do not present them as returning to life again. So one could hardly call them "dying and rising gods"! There is no real precident for the Resurrection of Christ in pagan mythology.
We should also note that the fact that the death of these divinities is nothing unusual. We are so used to the Judeo-Christian-Islamic idea of an eternal God, Whom death cannot touch, that we sometimes forget that pagans did not believe that their gods were innately immortal. Their lives often had to be sustained, perhaps by eating a substance which gave them immortality (such as ambrosia), but they could still potentially be killed under particular circumstances.
So the even the deaths of these gods did not necessarily have some deeper meaning, involving some grand sacrifice for the world. They were simply part of the tragic epic of their lives; cruel twists of "Fate", to which pagans believed all are subject, both men and gods.
Contrast this with the death of Christ. First of all, He does not die as God, but as Man. He is immortal in His Deity, and therefore must assume a human nature in order to partake of our mortality (the pagan dying gods do not become man). Second, His death is a sacrifice for the salvation of mankind. None of the "dying gods" were ever said to have died for sins, or for anyone else, for that matter. Third, His Crucifixion was part of a greater Divine Plan, not merely a cruel fate.Critics of the "pagan christs" hypothesis point out many other differences as well. Jesus' death is an historical fact, while the "dying gods" are just myths with no historical basis. The Lord laid down His life willingly, while the "dying gods" were all slaughtered against their will. And the Crucifixion was a paradoxical triumph, not a defeat like the deaths of the pagan gods. The cult of Tammuz, for instance, was primarily a funeral rite for the god, mourning his fate with no sense of victory in his passing. Contrast that with the strong Christian emphasis on the Resurrection, and the rejoicing of the Paschal Season!
So the surface similarities between Jesus and certain "dying gods" actually mask much deeper differences. When one considers these profound differences, it becomes hard to see how Jesus' sacrificial death for sin could have been copied from paganism.
“The oriental myth of the dying and rising saviour-god (Tammuz, Bel-Marduk, Adonis, Sandan-Heracles of Tarsus, Attis, Osiris, the Cretan Zeus, Dionysus, and cf. the Mithras sacrifice and the double life of Kore) constitutes neither the native soil of the Gospel nor a true parallel to it. Egeirein and egeiresthai hardly occur at all in the relevant passages…. It is rather said that the god is delivered (Firm. Mat.Err. Prof. Rel., 22) or that he or the deliverance has come from Hades (Plut.Is. et Os., 19 [II, 358b]; Phot. Bibliotheca, 242 [MPG, 103, 1281a], or that he lives (Ps. Luc.Syr. Dea, 6). Indeed, sometimes the continued life is only partial (Arnobius, Adversus Nationes, V, 7 and 14 [A. Reiffenscheid in CSEL, IV]; Paus., VII, 17, 12), or perhaps even symbolical in the form of budding almonds or figs in the myths or wild jubilation and dramatic representation in the cults. Decomposition may take place (Diod. S., III, 59, 7). The resurrection of the god is not original in the Attis cult. Plut.Is. et Os., 11 (II, 355b); 58 (II, 374e) contests the historical character of the myths. Imaginary erotic pictures simply express the unfailing power of nature. The case seems to be rather different when we come to Dionysus. In him the Greeks perceive not so much the successiveness as the identity of life and death. We thus have an advanced identity mysticism of a speculative type. While the spiritual and ethical note is almost completely lacking in the eastern world, it is present here, but in a form very different from that of the NT, In neither case do we find the distinctive eschatological concept, e.g., of R. 6:10. For all the points of contact and mutual influence between the NT and the surrounding world, there is the decisive difference that in the NT NT the kernel and basis is spiritually and ethically significant history rather than nature myth or speculative myth. (Theological Dictionary of the New Testamnet)[egeiro, ‘arise’]
I could go on for hundreds of pages and each of the mythic figures Martin lists and thoroughly and in deatiled minutia discredit his ignorant thinking.
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Re: What about Paul? Re: What about Savior myths? -- mikwut Top of thread Archive
Posted by: mikwut ®
12/14/2002, 01:36:32
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Martins last sentence is pure and complete unadulterated abject nonsense. The only way to get to where he thinks he can is through incredibly general and wide sweeping parallels. Quickly concerning things such as the Logos - it would be similar to me (who am hardly such) being dubbed a syncretic surf dude if I ever used the word awesome. Martin gave away where he is getting this stuff here when he said “Damascus” - that’s Eisenman, and here is just a sampling of what has to historically be switched and moved and contorted for Eisenman’s academic conspiracy to be true:
The Dead Sea Scrolls should be dated much later, to the time of the New Testament - but there is an academic conspiracy afoot to cover up that fact.
As for the New Testament, it was written very late - and used the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the works of Josephus (dated c. 90 AD) as sources. It is a far less reliable source than the Pseudoclementine Recognitions, which was a source for the NT: In fact, the story of Paul being surrounded by a bright light from heaven is merely a copy of a story in the Recognitions of the tombs of two brothers that were miraculously whitened every year.
The Gospels are too anti-Semitic to have been written by Jews; they were all written by Gentiles. Anti-Semitism stands out in such teachings as, “The first shall be last and the last shall be first” and “A prophet is never accepted in his own land and in his own hometown.”
Early Pauline Christianity is guilty of a massive conspiracy to cover up the role of James and the Holy Family in the early church.
Many events in the NT are adulterated overwrites of actual events. The election of Matthias to replace Judas is an overwrite of the election of James to apostolic office. The stoning of Stephen is an overwrite of the stoning of James by Paul’s command. Events have even been lifted from the works of Josephus and overwritten, then placed in the NT.
Many persons listed in the NT simply did not exist: Stephen, Judas Iscariot, the apostle James, and Zebedee the father of James and John. Nazareth probably did not exist either. Timothy and Titus are the same person, as are Silas and Silvanus.
Anti-Jamesian polemic is the point behind Paul’s analysis of those with weak faith in the Book of Romans.
The early Christians, the Essenes, and the Sicarii are all pretty much the same movement.
The probable genius behind the conspiracy was Paul’s companion Epaphroditus, who is identical with the Epaphroditus who sponsored Josephus and the Erastus mentioned in the Corinthian correspondence.
Other than that, there are all the usual fallacies involved: Straw men, overreading of texts, outright errors, grasping at greasy straws, word games, and so on. Little else really needs saying.The conclusions speak for themselves. Robert Eisenman lives in a world of fantasy that Martin is swallowing.L.H. Schiffman professor at NYU and DSS expert says of Eisenman:
"What you essentially do is load on a whole lot of associative material that may or may not be parallel, and then deny all criteria of dating which specifies anything that we can possibly use -- one by one they're all written off -- then you take a fundamentally correct position (that all this stuff has got to be reevaluated and requestioned) and turn it into a bunch of jumbled information, which has nothing to do with the subject at hand.... Thus theory presents the notion that the entire set of documents is talking about a certain period, whereas virtually everybody believes that it dates to another period. So you must simply write off all evidence which doesn't fit your view."
In his 1994 book titled "Reclaiming the Dead Sea Scrolls", Schiffman goes on to say:
Second, the scrolls are not the documents of an early Christian sect. Contrary to claims by certain sensationalists, the scrolls never mention Jesus, John the Baptist, or James the Just, the "brother" of Jesus. Further, the scrolls in no way reflect Christian beliefs. The only way to make such an outrageous claim is to radically redefine Christianity to accord with the scrolls. In fact, the most recent carbon-14 testing has confirmed the dating that had already been established by paleography, which is the study of the shapes of Hebrew letters and of other ancient writing. Since all the material was composed before the rise of the early church, the Dead Sea Scrolls cannot refer to those events. [page xxi]
He [Eisenman] has advocated the view that the scrolls are closely linked to early Christianity, an approach that has gained few adherents. [page 25]
A similar view has recently been espoused by some who wish to claim that the scrolls refer directly to the early Christian movement. This view, as I previously maintained, is impossible to accept on chronological grounds. [page 120]
It must be stressed at the outset that the scrolls contain no references to Christianity. Christianity is a movement that began as a Jewish sect and then developed into a separate religious group. Because the sectarian documents [i.e., Dead Sea Scrolls] were authored before the careers of John the Baptist and Jesus, the scrolls make no mention nor do they even allude to these New Testament figures -- not withstanding specious claims to the contrary. [page 371]Commenting on the dating of the Dead Sea Scrolls accomplished by two independent Carbon-14 tests and paleographic techniques (all of which confirmed one another), Professor H. Stegemann said of Eisenman's hypothesis regarding the scrolls:
Therefore one may dismiss Dr. Eisenmann's ideas in this field. (quoted in "The People of the Dead Sea Scrolls", Garcia-Martinez and Barrera, 1993, p. 25)
DSS expert J.T. Barrera has added:
The thesis that Qumran manuscripts reflect Judaeo-Christian origins rests on incorrect dating of those manuscripts. (ibid, p. 25).
The certain fact is that the New Testament texts show many parallels and points of contact with the texts from Qumran. As the Essene writings are more ancient than the Christian writings it is logical to assume that the former could influence the latter. Undoubtedly, just as two parallel lines never actually meet, a Qumran text and a gospel text can run parallel without it meaning that the first has influenced the second directly. Study of comparative literature and comparative religion has often fallen into "parallelomania" (Sandmel), which confuses parallel with tangents and similarities of form or content with direct contacts or influences. (ibid, p. 203)
If only the points of contact between the New Testament texts and those from Qumran are noticed, a distorted view of them both results. It is important not to forget the points of disagreement, which we have not considered here but turn out to be more numerous and, in general, more significant. (ibid, p. 220)[Martin] It bears repeating that nowhere in the early epistles -- whether by Paul or anyone else -- is there any unambiguous reference to any historical Jesus or a historical ministry.
The only reason they are unambiguous is because of the mind bending credence you have given to crackpots and conspiracy lunatics who prey on a unsuspecting public by use of shock and manipulation of evidence.
[Martin] The Canonical and other Gospels can best be understood as representing the "Outer Mysteries" of Christianity as a Gnostic Astrological/Solar Mystery Religion wherein Joshua/Jesus represents the Jewish version of the Intermediary Son/Sun figure previously associated to varying degrees with Krishna, Dionysus, Osiris, Mithras, etc. These Outer Mysteries were ALWAYS given as parables / allegories that represented a myth-imbued Inner Mystery, and the stories of the Jesus/Christ of the New Testament is clearly no exception! I'll give an example to help elucidate what I mean...
The New Testament story regarding the marriage at Cana wherein Jesus/Christ is told to have miraculously turned water into wine is to those with clearer eyes a transparently obvious nod to Dionysus/Bacchus the Wine God at one level, and at a deeper level which subsumes the former is clearly an allegory to the Miracle by which the Sun (Son) converts Water (in the form of rainfall and irrigation) into Sacrificial Grapes at the time of Harvest as the Sun goes into decline. Even the marriage is powerfully symbolic, as Jesus/Christ is said to be the "Bridegroom" in the same way that Dionysus the Wine God was held to be the "Bridal One".
I repeat: If you strip away from the New Testament all the syncretization of mythologies and esoteric philosophies, nothing whatsoever remains. Certainly no historical Jesus is to be found!
Baloney, utter baloney. Robin Lane Fox points out a huge amount of differences between the early Christians thought, theology and practice it is striking, the most common example being Christian Charity it certainly doesn’t get stripped away and I would challenge Martin to show through sources how. I also point out the incredible inconsistency again. When it comes to science and to how we should form our beliefs peer review and the majority of scientists is sacrosanct for Martin, yet here with arguments from silence, misrepresentation and calling the very abstract concrete Martin parts ways with the consensus opinion of professional historians and social and religious anthropologists, and holds hands with crackpots who can’t let go of bygone and discredited thinking. Concerning the mystery religions, these initiations into the various cults were not 'required' for all membership (like baptism was for Christians at this time), but was an 'optional' rite available for those who wished it:“It should be noted that in most cases there exist forms of a ‘normal’ cult alongside the mysteries, that is, worship for the non-initiated, independent of possible candidacy for myesis or telete…In Rome, Mater Magna had her great festival in the spring, but the reported dates of taurobolia are unrelated to calendrical events. In any case, mysteries are seen to be a special form of worship offered in the larger context of religious practice. Thus the use of the term ‘mystery religions’ as a pervasive and exclusive name for a closed system, is inappropriate. Mystery initiations were an option activity within polytheistic religions, comparable to, say, a pilgrimage to Santiago di Compostela within the Christian system. Ancient Mystery Cults. Walter Burkert.
John Macquarrie. God Talk: an Examination of the Language and Logic of Theology. (Harper and Row, 1967), writes, "Myth is usually characterized by a remoteness in time and space...as having taken place long ago." The Gospels by contrast concern "an event that had a particular definite location in Palestine...under Pontius Pilate, only a generation or so before the New Testament account of these happenings" (p.177,80) . Sherwin-White, writes, "The agnostic type of form-criticism would be much more credible if the compilation of the Gospels were much later in time...than can be the case...Heroditus enables us to test the tempo of myth-making, [showing that] even two generations are too short a span to allow the mythical tendency to prevail over the hard historic core”
Eta Linnemann. writes, "The eyewitnesses [both sympathetic and hostile] did not disappear from the scene in a flash after two decades. Many are likely to have survived until the second half of the A.D. 70’s...Who at the time would have dared to alter the ‘first tradition’ beyond recognition?"
Michael Grant writes, "Modern critical methods fail to support the Christ-myth theory [that inspiration for Jesus’ death and resurrection was drawn from the Egyptian and Mesopotamian nature myths of Osiris, Mithras, etc. It has again and again been answered and annihilated by first-rank scholars" (p.200). J.Gresham Machen thoroughly refutes the theory in The Origin of Paul’s Religion. (Eerdmans, 1925), especially chs. VI and VII on mystery religions in the Hellenistic age. He notes for example, that most of those pagan sources asserted to have inspired Christianity are actually dated after Christ by one to three centuries. To name just one, the first mention at all of any Roman Taurobolium rite was the 2nd Century, and the full-blown rite in which blood from a slaughtered bull covered the candidate who was then "reborn forever," is dated the third century after Christ. The few sources which preceded the First-century were so superficial in their similarity to Christ as to fade into irrelevance. And they were theologically abhorrent to monotheistic Israel. Machen has been thoroughly verified by the modern scholars I posted above.
So look what the mythologizers have got to do, they have to push the dating of the N.T. to late, late dates that begin to stretch credulity to limits and even then suffer from not enough time. On top of that they have to push back the source material for their apparent borrowing sources to where we have factual data to actual support it. On top of that they have totally dismiss the New Testmament as even remotely reliable and totally forget the fact eyewitness into the first century seamlessly carry the implied historical understanding and impliedly write they way. On top of the that the modern understanding we have myth has dramatically changed the landscape where the atheists old parallels are anything but anymore.
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What a load of fatuous sophistry! Re: Re: What about Paul? -- mikwut Top of thread Archive
Posted by: Martin ®
12/18/2002, 10:22:43
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Mikwut, you're an appallingly dishonest man.
I hope you realize that you are doing great damage to your own case with all your lies and distortions and have thus lost your credibility.
- Martin(I will have more to say on this subject later)
Modified by Martin at Wed, Dec 18, 2002, 11:18:44
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Re: What about Savior myths? Re: What about Savior myths? -- mikwut Top of thread Archive
Posted by: Martin ®
12/17/2002, 17:03:34
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We need to get at least a broad, reasonable handle on how and why such a vast amount of pre-Christian, foreign mythology ended up in central elements of the Christian Myth. Answering that question in detail is the work of the new ahistoricist consensus of scholars and historians, and Burton Mack in his 2001 book The Christian Myth has issued the call for them to turn even more closely to those questions now that all the quests for a historical Jesus have been objectively observed to have failed miserably.
This is a complex subject that simply can't be summed up compellingly, particularly not in a space-limited forum like this. The case for how and why any particular myth appears in one form or another -- however concretely or abstractly, in full or in part -- in the Christian myth simply cannot be proven with the source texts available to us and must remain the work of Mack and his colleagues. But that these diverse, pre-Christian myths are now part and parcel of the Christian myth is simply undeniable, no matter how desperately mikwut and his orthodoxy-constrained parrots wish it were not the case.
The wisest intellectual approach to this subject must therefore be one of adopting the view best concordant with the principle of parsimony -- a parsimony which must account for all the relevant evidence. This is the way many other historical and scientific views are decided. I submit that the syncretic mythical, philosophical, ideological, social experimental theory of the origins of the Gospels and their Christology represents BY FAR the most adroit and parsimonious explanation.
What are the basic elements of the traditional view of Jesus and Christ that are also in common with several non-Christian mythologies?
- Thought to be predestined to birth during a special, if unstated, period of history.Now, mikwut and other desperate traditionalists hate to be faced with these lists (most of which are more extensive), because they know that their laughable counter-"arguments" are pitiful and hopeless in the face of such lists' powerful effects for parsimony. Mikwut in his flagrantly desperate orthodoxy-enslaved posts has suggested that if the myths which went into the manufacture of the Jesusian / Christian myth are not closely matched to the Christian Myth it means that these other myths have no real relevance and thus the Christian stories must be considered historical truths. And the sad truth is there are actually a great many people (who are mostly known as Christians) who swallow such specious nonsense!- Miraculous conception effected by spiritual entity.
- Virgin birth, usually celebrated on or around December 25.
- Birth usually heralded with stars or other astrological event.
- Special lineage (i.e., in Christ's case, from David's lineage).
- Threatened in infancy, generally by tyrant fearful of new arrival.
- Parental flight to foreign land (very often Egypt) to escape threat.
- Bestowed with title of "Savior", "Son of Man" and often "Son of God".
- Considered to be a God or God incarnate.
- Considered to be co-equal with God or Gods.
- Myths and fables featured often hidden astrological references.
- Performed many miracles, often involving fish and especially including healings, casting out of demons, restoring sight or hearing, and raising the dead.
- Participated in special communal meals, often commemorative.
- Suffered a visceral and humiliating death, usually held to have taken place around the Vernal equinox.
- Bodily restoration or resurrection, typically three days later.
- Ascent, typically bodily ascent, into higher sphere or heaven.
But while a historical story might have one or two aspects which merely coincidentally match one or two elements of the mythical outline, when we correctly observe that the Christian fable matches ALL of those common mythical elements, it becomes obvious that it is anti-parsimonious in the extreme to hold that there is any historical truth underlying the Jesus of the Epistles, the Gospels, and the Church. The historicist view is therefore correctly seen as astoundingly improbable and complicated and is thus directly opposed to the principle of parsimony.
If we're going to employ Occam's Razor, the only conclusion is that both Jesus and The Christ can only be mythical!
It is the fact that we were all raised on the Gospel fables being presented as historical accounts and were also raised to assume the New Testament Myth is basically historical that accounts for the great difficulty that even some atheists and other freethinkers have recognizing the purely mythical nature of the Christian story. Note that even if there were some Cynic and/or Stoic itinerant philosophers whose statements were later borrowed and embellished for the creation of Q and from there to the Gospels, that is absolutely NOT to say that there ever was any historical model for Jesus! The notion that a historical Jesus was the model for the Christian Myth simply isn't rational when one considers all the facts and the overpowering mythic parallels to other religious myths including astrological and/or sun gods and Mystery cult GodMen and/or Greco-Roman Gods and/or etc., etc., etc.
Here is a list of various Saviors of whom various aspects of their myths have parallels to the Jesus/Christ Myth (even though not all of them preceeded the invention of the Jesus Myth):
Adad of AssyriaThe claim that one of them, Jesus of "Nazareth" (a land which didn't even exist by that name) is actually historical is simply too daft and ignorant to credit!Adonis of Greece
Alcides of Thebes
Attis of Phrygia
Baal and Tuat, "the only Begotten of God," of Phoenicia
Bali of Afghanistan
Beddru of Japan
Buddha of India
Cadmus of Greece
Crite of Chaldea
Deva Tat, and Sammonocadam of Siam
Divine Teacher of Plato
Fohi and Tien of China
Gentaut and Quexalcote of Mexico
Hesus or Eros, and Bremrillah, of the Druids
Hil and Feta of the Mandaites
Holy One of Xaca
Indra of Tibet
Ischy of the island of Formosa
Ixion and Quirinus of Rome
Jao of Nepal
Krishna of India
Mikado of the Sintoos
Odin of the Scandinavians
Osiris and Horus of Egypt
Prometheus of Caucasus
Salivahana of Bermuda
Tammuz of Syria
Thor, son of Odin, of the Gauls
Universal Monarch of the Sibyls
Wittoba of the Bilingonese
Xamolxis of Thrace
Zoar of the Bonzes
Zoroaster and Mithra of Persia
Zulis, or Zhule of Egypt
As for Krishna parallels specifically, let me point out that I personally never made a big deal of it, even though it represents an intriguing parallel to the Jesus myth. I cited the Religious Tolerance web site to show that traditional Christianity is at least as closely associated with Eastern religious concepts as Mormonism, nothing more. However, since mikwut has taken it out of context and used it to advance his orthodox crackpottery of a historical Jesus, I would like to direct the reader to some knowledgable and informative references which directly contradict mikwut's foolish pseudo-arguments:
(From Religious Tolerance site -- by no means am I in agreement with all of the following, which is far too kind to Christian mythology!)
Linkages Between Two God-Men Saviors: Christ and Krishna
Specific Similarities Between The Lives of Jesus and Krishna
Was Jesus' life a copied from other saviors/god-men/heroes?
Linkage between Jesus and various Pagan saviors: Introduction
Parallels between Christianity and ancient Pagan religions
Life events shared by Yeshua (Jesus) and the "Mythic Hero Archetype"
Parallels between the story of Jesus and Osiris-Dionysus
THE VIRGIN BIRTH OF JESUS: Fact or fable?
(From elsewhere on the web):
Pagan Christs: Attis, Jesus, Krishna, Mithras, Osiris
The Origins of Christianity and the Quest for the Historical Jesus Christ
Suns of God: Krishna, Buddha and Christ Unveiled
Hare Jesus: Christianity's Hindu Heritage
Krishna and Jesus: Will The Real Savior Please Stand Up?
Shaken Creeds: Part II: The Virgin Birth Story
The Celestial Virgin of Sun Worship.....Becomes the Virgin Mary of Christianity
The Virgin Birth Of Jesus Christ As Recorded In The New Testament... Is It A Sun-Myth Retold?
The Krishna and Christian Jesus Parallels
Examining the Crucifixion Of Jesus and Parallels to Crucified Sun-G-Ds
The list goes on and on showing the truly astonishing degree of similarities between the Jesus Myth and the myths which gave rise (among several other unrelated elements) to its construction. If you remove the myths from the "biography" of Jesus, NOTHING REMAINS!
- Martin
Modified by Martin at Wed, Dec 18, 2002, 09:14:33
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Regarding Burkert et al & mikwut's bogus claims Re: What about Savior myths? -- mikwut Top of thread Archive
Posted by: Martin ®
12/17/2002, 18:33:55
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Here's a response from Earl Doherty to mikwut's obsolete, orthodoxy-slavish, and utterly wrong-headed attempts to minimize the fact that today's New Testament scholars know perfectly well that the mythical parallels predating the New Testament are utterly inseperable from the Christian Mythology. Please note that I have NEVER claimed that Christianity is derived per se from earlier myths, and be sure to also note EXACTLY what silly claim has been discredited and what has NOT been, which contradicts mikwuts bogus and obsolete pseudo-scholarship:
In the early part of this century, based on the ground-breaking work of respectable scholars like Richard Reitzenstein and Franz Cumont, sweeping claims were made about Christianity's derivation from the Greek mysteries by the "History of Religions School". At the center of these claims was the concept of "dying and rising gods," as in Wilhelm Bousset's scenario that ancient thinking had merged all the mystery deities, including Christ, almost into a single collective myth across the ancient world, about the suffering and dying god who is resurrected and thereby confers salvation. As time went on, such claims became discredited when it was seen more clearly that the myths and artistic representations of the various hellenistic cults actually contained nothing tangible about any resurrection of the god from the dead.However, pendulums have a habit of swinging too far in the opposite direction. Many scholars writing from the 60s to the 80s have claimed that there was virtually no common ground between Christianity and the mysteries. Some of them tried to knock down the mysteries to little more than social guilds and intercessionary exercises; people appealed to the cultic gods for help in coping with life's problems, somewhat as Christians do of the saints in heaven. For example, see Walter Burkert, Ancient Mystery Cults (1987), and Gunter Wagner, Pauline Baptism and the Pagan Mysteries (ET, 1967).
Wagner in particular was anxious to discredit the mysteries as having any possible influence on Christianity. He went so far as to say that not only were the so-called savior gods never thought of as resurrected, but that no concept existed within the cults that the initiate partook of the deity's nature, that he linked his destiny with that of the god, that baptismal rites in the mysteries were any more than ritual washings. He claimed to find no evidence that Attis and the other cultic deities were the ground for personal hopes of immortality or of quality of life after death. Wagner chose to interpret in one direction every point of ambiguity, every gap and uncertainty in the very sparse evidence we have about the cults. (Their injunction to secrecy seems to have been faithfully observed for a thousand years!) But Wagner thereby painted himself into a corner, for he was left with the problem (which he never addressed) of explaining what their appeal was. Why was Christianity locked in a virtual life and death struggle with the cults for 200 years, a struggle whose outcome was far from certain? The need of the age was for personal salvation, especially after death. It is intellectual dishonesty to try to cook the meager surviving evidence of the mysteries to suggest that they did not in their own way offer precisely that.
As for the question of dying and rising gods, from the 2nd century BCE and even earlier, the Jews developed a concept of the righteous dead rising to participate in God's Kingdom, which was to be established on earth. Physical resurrection was therefore required. Jews had always been very "this world" oriented and had a weak concept of a spiritual afterlife. The Greeks, on the other hand, were very different. Christianity's second century opponent, Celsus, said that the doctrine of resurrection of the flesh "is so repulsive that there is opposition to it even among Jews and Christians. . . the soul may have everlasting life, but corpses ought to be thrown away as worse than dung." Obviously, we should not expect those who held such an outlook to invent gods who are resurrected in flesh to bestow the same fate on humans. Proving that the Greek savior gods were not conceived of as "rising from their tombs" is to knock down a straw man.
The existence of significant conceptual differences should not be allowed to obscure the fact that both Christianity and the mysteries were an expression of the same needs and urges, that both proceeded from a common pool of religious impulses of the age, and that cross-cultural influences could help shape the particular expression each group formulated for itself.
As for the question of comparative dating, rites like those of Eleusis and the god Dionysos predate Christianity by many centuries. Mithra (Mithras in the Greek) was an ancient Persian god who seems to have been adopted by hellenistic circles in Asia Minor around 100 BCE. (See the fascinating The Origins of the Mithraic Mysteries, 1989, by David Ulansey, who has located the basis for the Greek cultic myth in an astronomical discovery of the time.) When was Attis added to the cult of the Great Mother Cybele? Dates vary. But cults do not form overnight, nor do the ideas underlying their rites and myths spring fully into being at one moment. The basic concepts and practices of the mysteries were ancient. They undergirded much of the religious expression of the era. Both Christianity and the cults were an outgrowth of them, even if Christianity had its own particular Jewish content as a prominent part of the mix. No one today is going to claim that Paul's Christianity is derived from the equivalent of the fully-formed cults we see in the second century CE.
Wayne Meeks represents a recent swing of the pendulum back toward a more median position. In The First Urban Christians (p.182, n.44) he says: "On the mysteries, I wonder if MacMullen has not been too skeptical. Apuleius Metamorphosis 11.6 presupposes some kind of personal immortality that will be enhanced, though not created, by the initiation. The initiate in the Elysian Fields, in "the subterranean vault," will still be Isis's worshipper and under her protection. So, too, MacMullen is too cavalier about the Mithraist promise (according to Celsus) of the soul's ascent through the seven planetary spheres. Bousset's description . . . erred in details and drew too schematic a picture, but this was nevertheless a powerful kind of belief apparently shared by many, not least by the Christian and non-Christian Gnostics. . . . Teachers of rhetoric recommend that speeches of consolation include reminders of the soul's return to the divine realm as a source of comfort for the bereaved."
Even more recently, Hyam Maccoby has reopened the case for Paul having much in common with ideas which were central to the mysteries. He explores the fact (in Paul and Hellenism) that Paul's interpretation of the eucharistic (thanksgiving) meal is unlike Jewish concepts (even blasphemous from a Jewish point of view) but very close to Greek sacramentalism. Paul's language resembles that of the Greek cults, even if there are important distinctions in meaning and application. Paul's Christ who dies a violent death (at the hands of the demon spirits of the firmament, if we are to judge by 1 Corinthians 2:8: see my Supplementary Article No. 3) is unrelated to any previous Jewish ideas of God's salvation, but fits in with the many Greek savior gods who "are the centers of rites in which their deaths are rehearsed for some salvific purpose" (p.65). I would highly recommend all the books of this British scholar.
And so on. It is undeniable that Paul was a hellenistic Jew who grew up in pagan surroundings. If in Tarsus, this city was the birthplace and focal point of the hellenistic Mithras cult, with its sacred meal so like the Pauline version of the eucharist. It would be foolish to claim that Paul enjoyed complete immunity from the religious concepts that permeated the atmosphere he breathed. This absorption does not have to have been conscious—or static. Paul's was an innovative and roving mind, and many ideas in early Christian theology are thought to proceed from him. Yet no one's ideas spring out of nothing, unrelated to precedents. Paul can be no exception.
Paul's Christianity compared to the mysteries may well have been a superior expression on several counts, for it contained an ethical dimension the Greek cults notably lacked, and his concept of dying and rising to Christ through baptism was more subtle and profound than any parallel in the mystery rites. But this does not disprove that some of the roots of his ideas lie in broader, humbler hellenistic precedents. On the other hand, if we do not impose the Gospels on Paul and his contemporaries, we find that the conceptual differences are not as great as some like to think.
The claim (constantly reiterated by scholars) that the cultic myths are just that, whereas Christianity is grounded in the record of an historical man, is something Paul and the other epistle writers never make clear for us. And is the concept behind 1 Peter all that different from the post-death activities of Osiris and other savior gods in the underworld? For if Christ was brought to life only "in the spirit", and subsequently went to the Jewish Shoel to raise to heaven the souls of the righteous dead (3:18-19), where is the dramatic point of contrast with the cult deities? If Paul maintains (1 Cor. 15:50) that "flesh and blood can never possess the kingdom of God and the perishable cannot possess immortality," can we say that his thought about a post-death "spiritual body" (modelled on Christ's own) is essentially different from the Platonic, or that he has not been absorbing hellenistic influences? Can we say that he envisions Christ's resurrection (now seen by modern liberal scholars as not involving a corporeal return to earth) much differently than did the Greeks of their gods? The great contrast arises only when Christ is historicized and made to walk out of his tomb with the wounds still fresh in his side. The very fact that early writers like Paul never draw attention to Jesus' historical humanity as a significant point of contrast with the competing deities of the other salvation cults—one of the most amazing silences of all!—should provide compelling evidence that for them no such contrast existed.
An excellent article which tries to maintain a middle ground is "Mystery Concepts in Primitive Christianity and In Its Environment" by Devon H. Wiens (1980). I know only of its publication in a German series of scholarly papers on the ancient Roman world. An older classic on the subject is A. D. Nock's Conversion (1933) which, though written by a Christian apologist, is full of solid data and comparisons concerning the mysteries. Gary Lease, in his article "Mithraism and Christianity" (also in that German series) declares that: "The insight has become widespread that Christianity shared deeply in the cultural and religious milieu of the Near East during the beginning centuries of our common era. Indeed, one may quite accurately say that Christianity is first and foremost an Oriental religion, and like so many of its counterparts during the Hellenistic and late antiquity periods, it drank often and deeply from the same spiritual and cultural wells which nourished contemporary movements in that age of upheaval.".
- Martin
Modified by Martin at Tue, Dec 17, 2002, 19:37:25
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Legitimate evidence IS completely lacking! Re: Evidence is lacking? -- mikwut Top of thread Archive
Posted by: Martin ®
12/27/2002, 15:56:52
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mikwut again merely name drops and intentionally befuddles and misdirects. As he has done throughout this thread, he drops names in lieu of providing an actual, credible argument. Yet that's very wise of him, since there's no valid, rational argument he can make to justify his position!He tosses off a few non-credible and/or discredited, hackneyed old lines of error, nonsense, or misdirection, but we can all see that he knows that all he's got going for him is the ability to drop the names of better known credulists of various stripes who, like mikwut himself, don't have any independent evidence of Jesus' existence either!
Here's an example of one such moldy oldie... Mikwut repeats Karyn's and John Meier's irrelevant misdirection ploy: "[W]hat we know about Alexander the Great could fit on only a few sheets of paper; yet no one doubts that Alexander existed."
First of all, even "a few sheets of paper" is infinitely more than we have of contemporary historical records of the Earthly existence of Jesus, which amounts to nothing at all!
Utterly unlike the alleged "Jesus", Alexander the Great's existence is demonstrated by very extensive archaeological evidence of his vast wake of destruction and construction of the very same cities the historical records of his conquests report. Major cities, buildings, and artifacts bore his name during his lifetime and for centuries later. Also unlike Jesus, from whom we have nothing in the way of his own writing, Alexander has left at least several stone tablets engraved with his own words (here's one: Letter of Alexander the Great to the Chians). We also have contemporary historical records of treaties with Alexander, etc.
We know from later historians that at least Hieronymus of Cardia and Demetrios of Phaleron wrote near-contemporary histories (within 10-20 years) of Alexander's death. The fact that these haven't survived is of less importance than the fact that they existed, were contemporary, and their existence is widely attested to.
And here's the kicker, folks: Although the respected historian Josephus wrote not one word about the New Testament's "Jesus", Josephus clearly mentions Alexander the Great and describes major events of his life. I quote now the first paragraph of Chapter 8 of Book XI of Josephus' Antiquities of the Jews
1. ABOUT this time it was that Philip, king of Macedon, was treacherously assaulted and slain at Egae by Pausanias, the son of Cerastes, who was derived from the family of Oreste, and his son Alexander succeeded him in the kingdom; who, passing over the Hellespont, overcame the generals of Darius's army in a battle fought at Granicum. So he marched over Lydia, and subdued Ionia, and overran Caria, and fell upon the places of Pamphylia, as has been related elsewhere.HOWEVER, if I were to embark on a program of researching the historicity of Alexander as carefully as I have the historicity of Jesus and found the independent historical evidence for Alexander to be as non-existent as that of Jesus, I would likewise immediately cease to believe that Alexander actually existed!mikwut then proceeds to more evidentially worthless name dropping. He cites Charlesworth, whose clear desperation to retain at least some portion of the discredited Testimonium Flavianum led him to cheat and deliberately mistranslate specific words to buttress his desperate but failed arguments.
Mikwut cites E.P. Sanders who, while very much a widely respected scholar, is nonetheless a credulist who buys into nearly all of the standard Gospel mytho-biography of mainstream Christianity and is also far too easily convinced of the legitimacy of a portion of the completely discredited Testimonium Flavianum. Nevertheless, he writes: [I]f we measure the general impact of prophetic figures by the degree of disturbance they caused, we shall conclude that Jesus was less important in the eyes of most of his contemporaries than were John the Baptist and the Egyptian..." Sanders also writes: "Roman sources that mention him [Jesus] are all dependent on Christian reports." Finally, he admits: "But knowledge of Jesus was limited to knowledge of Christianity; that is, had Jesus' adherents not started a movement that spread to Rome, Jesus would not have made it into Roman histories at all. The consequence is that we do not have what we would very much like, a comment in Tacitus or another Gentile writer that offers independent evidence about Jesus, his life and his death."
A. E. Harvey is well-known biblical exegete and a fairly traditionalist, credulist Christian apologist. With the exception that he admits there's a great deal of myth and confabulation in the Gospels and has doubts about the Gospel's reliability regarding the alleged Resurrection, his "testimony" that mikwut cites is evidentially worthless and is indistinguishable from the witnessing of any other credulist Christian's.
mikwut then foolishly quotes Christian apologist James Dunn's infamous, uninformed, and deeply flawed assertion circa 1985: "The alternative thesis is that within thirty years there had evolved such a coherent and consistent complex of traditions about a non-existent figure such as we have in the sources of the Gospels is just too implausible." Yet elsewhere in this thread, mikwut openly admits the inarguable fact that an extensive Christian (i.e., Messianic leader/teacher) movement had been brewing for perhaps two centuries before the common era! Furthermore, not only was there no such thing as a "coherent and consistent complex of traditions" within that thirty years, there is NO record alleging the existence of a historical Jesus with historical attributes in recent history until late in the first century at the earliest! The Church Fathers didn't even refer to any so-called "historical" traditions until well into the second century, and even those (such as the first ones, given by Ignatius) were PURELY CREEDAL RECITATIONS rather than reports of historical fact!
All in all, Dunn's more recent views and statements -- which have received forceful challenges and repudiations even from those in his own camp (along with Räisänen and others) -- are more supportive of the mythical thesis than he seems to realize or at least admit. He reluctantly admits that Paul's writings are not particularly convincing evidence of the existence of a historical Jesus for non-Christians and that Paul's "visions" could easily have been purely subjective, even though he personally aligns himself with traditional historicist opinion and is one of those crackpot credulists who laughably contends that Paul never referred to a historical Jesus or ministry or even quoted Jesus' words because -- get this -- it would have spoiled the "in joke" nature of the Christian community! At least he now reluctantly admits that Wells' clarified arguments have substantial weight and are very difficult to answer.
I find it hilarious that the obviously desperate mukwit relies on a proxy like the extraordinarily dubious Morton Smith to poke insults at GA Wells! Let's get this clear, folks: Morton Smith criticizes Wells in part because Smith clearly doesn't understand Wells and partly because he's angry that Wells doesn't buy into Smith's far-fetched horseshit about Jesus being an itinerant con-man magician! Wells' arguments are far, FAR more sound, credible, rational, compelling, and completely consistent with the extant evidence than Smith's ludicrous claims that the New Testament is the record of an insane and dishonest con-man, mass-hypnotizer, and performer of magic tricks! In short, to quote his own words back to him, Morton Smith "presents us with a piece of private mythology that I find incredible beyond anything in the Gospels."
It must be pointed out that mukwit's idiotic assertions throughout that sorry post of his are mostly taken from the bubble-headed Christian apologist J. P. Holding, who is nothing but an ordinary librarian!. See Wells' absolutely devastating trouncing of mikwut's librarian hero Holding's stupid views and claims here: A Reply to J. P. Holding's 'Shattering' of My Views on Jesus and an Examination of the Early Pagan and Jewish References to Jesus (2000)
- Martin
(Continued in Evidence IS lacking - Tacitus, Josephus, etc. -- to follow)
Modified by Martin at Sat, Dec 28, 2002, 17:58:23
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Krishna? Re: Mythical Jesus - A Mythical Idea! -- mikwut Top of thread Archive
Posted by: mikwut ®
12/14/2002, 01:45:38
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These parallels are now trivia, old and silly. I am reminded of the atheists little book, “The Book Your Church doesn’t want you to read” with the same 150 year old parallels, how ironic of a title because if that is the best the atheist and agnostic crowd have I welcome it wholeheartedly.
[Martin] Krishna and Buddha and several other Eastern mythical figures also have remarkable parallels to the Bible's Jesus the Christ, to the point where early Church Fathers were forced to argue (quite laughably) in their Christian apologetics that Satan had tried to steal Christ's thunder by means of a sort of retro-allegory!
Martin, READ THE FATHERS YOURSELF, read REAL scholarship. First, in order for Christianity to be true, it doesn’t have to be unique. This is utterly fallacious - if anything, the precise opposite is the case. If Christian doctrine were strange and deviant and had no similarities at all to that of other religious systems, it would be more likely to be a weird, aberrant construct, not less. To take one obvious example, a simple and economical explanation for the widespread human tendency to posit supernatural figures who, like Christ, mediate between man and God, is that humans correctly realise that we do need such a mediator. Hence, ironically, some of the scholars most eager to prove the existence of dying-rising gods in the ancient Near East and elsewhere were Christians, points of contact between Christianity and other religions are damaging to Christianity's truth claims only if actual borrowings can be proven - and as I have shown and can clearly be read from reputable scholars this has not been done at all, not if the parallel features have simply sprung from the same psychological source common to all humans - that is, from the innate, primary and fundamental religious instinct which Christians regard as a gift of God. The general and superficial parallels show Christianity to be true indirectly.
Now concerning Krishna, Krishna was born of the Virgin Devaki ("Divine One")
1. He is called the Shepherd God.
2. He is the second person of the Trinity.
3. He was persecuted by a tyrant who ordered the slaughter of thousands of infants.
4. He worked miracles and wonders.
5. In some traditions he died on a tree.
6. He ascended to heaven.
Looking a little more closely,1. Krishna was born of the Virgin Devaki ("Divine One") [We have already seen how these 'virgin birth' parallels are not close enough to constitute a 'compelling similarity', but this one is particularly inappropriate. The facts are simply otherwise--cf. Joseph Campbell, Occidental Mythology, p. 342:
"In India a like tale is told of the beloved savior Krishna, whose terrible uncle, Kansa, was, in that case, the tyrant-king. The savior's mother, Devaki, was of royal lineage, the tyrant's niece, and at the time when she was married the wicked monarch heard a voice, mysteriously, which let him know that her eighth child would be his slayer. He therefore confined both her and her husband, the saintly nobleman Vasudeva, in a closely guarded prison, where he murdered their first six infants as they came.According to the story, the mother had six normal children before the 7th and 8th 'special' kids--a rather clear indication that the mom was not a virgin when she conceived Krishna [remember, this is not an issue of 'special births', but of 'virgin' ones].
2. He is called the Shepherd God. [So he was a cow-herd...so what?...Simply a common religious title, not a 'compelling similarity'...and we noted above that even this was different when applied to Jesus.]
3. He is the second person of the Trinity. [This is a misunderstanding of the Hindu pantheon/s. The Hindu pantheon differs from the Christian trinity substantially (e.g., one's a pantheon and one isn't...). The biggest problem with the assertion, however, is that it is simply wrong. Although the Hindu pantheon has changed considerably over over time, Krsna has NEVER been the 'second person of a 3-in-1'.
It goes on and on down the list of similarities that just are not. These similarities just don't seem to illustrate 'numerous, complex, detailed' parallels--of the type needed to suggest borrowing. And the differences between Jesus Christ and the Krishna of the legends is considerable.
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Relevance of Pre-Christian Myth to Christ Myth Re: Krishna? -- mikwut Top of thread Archive
Posted by: Martin ®
12/17/2002, 16:32:40
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We need to get at least a broad, reasonable handle on how and why such a vast amount of pre-Christian, foreign mythology ended up in central elements of the Christian Myth. Answering that question in detail is the work of the new ahistoricist consensus of scholars and historians, and Burton Mack in his 2001 book The Christian Myth has issued the call for them to turn even more closely to those questions now that all the quests for a historical Jesus have been objectively observed to have failed miserably.
This is a complex subject that simply can't be summed up compellingly, particularly not in a space-limited forum like this. The case for how and why any particular myth appears in one form or another -- however concretely or abstractly, in full or in part -- in the Christian myth simply cannot be proven with the source texts available to us and must remain the work of Mack and his colleagues. But that these diverse, pre-Christian myths are now part and parcel of the Christian myth is simply undeniable, no matter how desperately mikwut and his orthodoxy-constrained parrots wish it were not the case.
The wisest intellectual approach to this subject must therefore be one of adopting the view best concordant with the principle of parsimony -- a parsimony which must account for all the relevant evidence. This is the way many other historical and scientific views are decided. I submit that the syncretic mythical, philosophical, ideological, social experimental theory of the origins of the Gospels and their Christology represents BY FAR the most adroit and parsimonious explanation.
What are the basic elements of the traditional view of Jesus and Christ that are also in common with several non-Christian mythologies?
- Thought to be predestined to birth during a special, if unstated, period of history.Now, mikwut and other desperate traditionalists hate to be faced with these lists (most of which are more extensive), because they know that their laughable counter-"arguments" are pitiful and hopeless in the face of such lists' powerful effects for parsimony. Mikwut in his flagrantly desperate orthodoxy-enslaved posts has suggested that if the myths which went into the manufacture of the Jesusian / Christian myth are not closely matched to the Christian Myth it means that these other myths have no real relevance and thus the Christian stories must be considered historical truths. And the sad truth is there are actually a great many people (who are mostly known as Christians) who swallow such specious nonsense!- Miraculous conception effected by spiritual entity.
- Virgin birth, usually celebrated on or around December 25.
- Birth usually heralded with stars or other astrological event.
- Special lineage (i.e., in Christ's case, from David's lineage).
- Threatened in infancy, generally by tyrant fearful of new arrival.
- Parental flight to foreign land (very often Egypt) to escape threat.
- Bestowed with title of "Savior", "Son of Man" and often "Son of God".
- Considered to be a God or God incarnate.
- Considered to be co-equal with God or Gods.
- Myths and fables featured often hidden astrological references.
- Performed many miracles, often involving fish and especially including healings, casting out of demons, restoring sight or hearing, and raising the dead.
- Participated in special communal meals, often commemorative.
- Suffered a visceral and humiliating death, usually held to have taken place around the Vernal equinox.
- Bodily restoration or resurrection, typically three days later.
- Ascent, typically bodily ascent, into higher sphere or heaven.
But while a historical story might have one or two aspects which merely coincidentally match one or two elements of the mythical outline, when we correctly observe that the Christian fable matches ALL of those common mythical elements, it becomes obvious that it is anti-parsimonious in the extreme to hold that there is any historical truth underlying the Jesus of the Epistles, the Gospels, and the Church. The historicist view is therefore correctly seen as astoundingly improbable and complicated and is thus directly opposed to the principle of parsimony.
If we're going to employ Occam's Razor, the only conclusion is that both Jesus and The Christ can only be mythical!
It is the fact that we were all raised on the Gospel fables being presented as historical accounts and were also raised to assume the New Testament Myth is basically historical that accounts for the great difficulty that even some atheists and other freethinkers have recognizing the purely mythical nature of the Christian story. Note that even if there were some Cynic and/or Stoic itinerant philosophers whose statements were later borrowed and embellished for the creation of Q and from there to the Gospels, that is absolutely NOT to say that there ever was any historical model for Jesus! The notion that a historical Jesus was the model for the Christian Myth simply isn't rational when one considers all the facts and the overpowering mythic parallels to other religious myths including astrological and/or sun gods and Mystery cult GodMen and/or Greco-Roman Gods and/or etc., etc., etc.
Here is a list of various Saviors of whom various aspects of their myths have parallels to the Jesus/Christ Myth (even though not all of them preceeded the invention of the Jesus Myth):
Adad of AssyriaThe claim that one of them, Jesus of "Nazareth" (a land which didn't even exist by that name) is actually historical is simply too daft and ignorant to credit!Adonis of Greece
Alcides of Thebes
Attis of Phrygia
Baal and Tuat, "the only Begotten of God," of Phoenicia
Bali of Afghanistan
Beddru of Japan
Buddha of India
Cadmus of Greece
Crite of Chaldea
Deva Tat, and Sammonocadam of Siam
Divine Teacher of Plato
Fohi and Tien of China
Gentaut and Quexalcote of Mexico
Hesus or Eros, and Bremrillah, of the Druids
Hil and Feta of the Mandaites
Holy One of Xaca
Indra of Tibet
Ischy of the island of Formosa
Ixion and Quirinus of Rome
Jao of Nepal
Krishna of India
Mikado of the Sintoos
Odin of the Scandinavians
Osiris and Horus of Egypt
Prometheus of Caucasus
Salivahana of Bermuda
Tammuz of Syria
Thor, son of Odin, of the Gauls
Universal Monarch of the Sibyls
Wittoba of the Bilingonese
Xamolxis of Thrace
Zoar of the Bonzes
Zoroaster and Mithra of Persia
Zulis, or Zhule of Egypt
As for Krishna parallels specifically, let me point out that I personally never made a big deal of it, even though it represents an intriguing parallel to the Jesus myth. I cited the Religious Tolerance web site to show that traditional Christianity is at least as closely associated with Eastern religious concepts as Mormonism, nothing more. However, since mikwut has taken it out of context and used it to advance his orthodox crackpottery of a historical Jesus, I would like to direct the reader to some knowledgable and informative references which directly contradict mikwut's foolish pseudo-arguments:
(From Religious Tolerance site -- by no means am I in agreement with all of the following, which is far too kind to Christian mythology!)
Linkages Between Two God-Men Saviors: Christ and Krishna
Specific Similarities Between The Lives of Jesus and Krishna
Was Jesus' life a copied from other saviors/god-men/heroes?
Linkage between Jesus and various Pagan saviors: Introduction
Parallels between Christianity and ancient Pagan religions
Life events shared by Yeshua (Jesus) and the "Mythic Hero Archetype"
Parallels between the story of Jesus and Osiris-Dionysus
THE VIRGIN BIRTH OF JESUS: Fact or fable?
(From elsewhere on the web):
Pagan Christs: Attis, Jesus, Krishna, Mithras, Osiris
The Origins of Christianity and the Quest for the Historical Jesus Christ
Suns of God: Krishna, Buddha and Christ Unveiled
Hare Jesus: Christianity's Hindu Heritage
Krishna and Jesus: Will The Real Savior Please Stand Up?
Shaken Creeds: Part II: The Virgin Birth Story
The Celestial Virgin of Sun Worship.....Becomes the Virgin Mary of Christianity
The Virgin Birth Of Jesus Christ As Recorded In The New Testament... Is It A Sun-Myth Retold?
The Krishna and Christian Jesus Parallels
Examining the Crucifixion Of Jesus and Parallels to Crucified Sun-G-Ds
The list goes on and on showing the truly astonishing degree of similarities between the Jesus Myth and the myths which gave rise (among several other unrelated elements) to its construction. If you remove the myths from the "biography" of Jesus, NOTHING REMAINS!
- Martin
Modified by Martin at Wed, Dec 18, 2002, 09:14:52
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Regarding Krishna's mom & Virgin Births Re: Krishna? -- mikwut Top of thread Archive
Posted by: Martin ®
12/18/2002, 09:08:48
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"In India a like tale is told of the beloved savior Krishna, whose terrible uncle, Kansa, was, in that case, the tyrant-king. The savior's mother, Devaki, was of royal lineage, the tyrant's niece, and at the time when she was married the wicked monarch heard a voice, mysteriously, which let him know that her eighth child would be his slayer. He therefore confined both her and her husband, the saintly nobleman Vasudeva, in a closely guarded prison, where he murdered their first six infants as they came.According to the story, the mother had six normal children before the 7th and 8th 'special' kids -- a rather clear indication that the mom was not a virgin when she conceived Krishna (remember, this is not an issue of 'special births', but of 'virgin' ones).
First, and of lesser importance, although mikwut is correct that in the standard version of the Krishna story which has clearly been Westernized (note the word Occidental in the title), Devaki had delivered previous children and thus was not, at least in our eyes, a virgin. However, in Hindu and Eastern tradition Devaki is always referred to as a Virgin. Furthermore, her Hindu sculptures -- from which the image of the Christian Madonna with Child might partially be taken -- are uniformly given the title of the Virgin Mother of Krishna.
While I wish to emphasize that I do NOT claim to know if or to what extent the example of Devaki and Krishna were borrowed into the Christian myth, the fact that Devaki was predominately held to be a Virgin is all that's necessary to have allowed it to be involved in some way with the manufacture of the Christian Virgin Birth.
The second and more important point I wish to make is that even in Christianity, the fact that Mary bore no other children is of vastly less import than the fact that Jesus was said to have been conceived miraculously without a human father. And the same is true of Devaki and of many other of the mythologies that the earliest Christians might well have borrowed in modified form for the invention of the Christ Myth.
The bottom line is that mikwut is grasping desperately at straws when he struggles to point out that the similarities between Krishna and Christ are not "close enough". What differences should be considered to be too "considerable" as to prohibit their being borrowed with modification for constructing the Christian Myth?
Nothing is too remote that it might not be suitably borrowed then modified and embellished to serve as building blocks for new myth.
- Martin
Modified by Martin at Wed, Dec 18, 2002, 09:44:12
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Re: Regarding Krishna's mom & Virgin Births Re: Regarding Krishna's mom & Virgin Births -- Martin Top of thread Archive
Posted by: mikwut ®
12/18/2002, 21:14:02
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"Nothing is too remote that it might not be suitably borrowed then modified and embellished to serve as building blocks for new myth."
Then NOTHING can dissuade you otherwise, not Mircia Eliade not anything. Your position cannot be falsified at all and it isn't even a metaphysical position, but a mere historical one. Another reason it is not taken seriously AT ALL by scholars who matter. The position I am offering sources from, (Oh and I know that incredibly orthodox and right wing Harvard), take examples of KNOWN and REAL borrowing outside of the Christian tradition and then examine the borrowing against your Christian example of borrowing and it isn't even in the ballpark. NO KNOWN example of what you are trying to pretend has ever be KNOWN to take place.
Let's just get that one more time folks, "NOTHING IS TOO REMOTE". Another Martin model towards truth discovery - NOTHING no matter how remote can be avoided in discrediting the Christian tradition. OH MY!
Regarding Krishna, I will add we are also presented with who is borrowing from whom if it even did take place becasue we don't have anything to go on before the 3rd century and what we do have is archeological artwork and not text per se. Martin has simply offered evidence that Krishna developed into a virgin not the Christian tradition.
mikwut
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Re: Regarding Krishna's mom & Virgin Births Re: Re: Regarding Krishna's mom & Virgin Births -- mikwut Top of thread Archive
Posted by: Martin ®
12/19/2002, 19:58:28
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The deceptive jackass mikwut brays and brays, but surely no intelligent person can be buying his line of evasionary BS and flagrant misdirection. He name drops desperately in the hope that some poor rube out there might be persuaded to ignore the facts and common sense and focus instead on his hypnotic sophistry... "Pay no attention to my lack of honest reasoning," he insists, over and over again. "Focus instead on my dropping of names like 'Harvard' and 'Mircia Eliade'", he drones on in his monotonous and deceptive voice (even though that's not her name).Let's be frank, fellow readers. If me and my friends created a new GodMan myth today and included mythical elements like Kal-El and Kryptonite and Obi Wan Kenobi and "The Force" (MTFBWY, Nigel!) and the Great Jones of Indiana and Noah's Ark and sacrificial Crucifixion and Babe the Blue Ox and Glenda the Good Witch and Ra the Sun God and blood atonement and rampaging robots and the Hogwarts School and pirates and a Golden Bible, another credulous believing mikwut in 2000 years would fluster and strut against their being mythical just as stupidly and vociferously and, above all, WRONGLY as this one is!
We all know (or should know) that there IS no real limit on what pre-extant mythic elements might have been adapted and encoded into the Christian Myth! The region and time wherein the Christian myths were created are known to have been exceptionally cosmopolitan; foreigners from great distances who brought their own myths and religious ideas and philosophies were a daily presence among the peoples who brought forth the Christian Myth. Nothing was too remote for possible inclusion into that myth!
- Martin
p.s.: The dating of the Bhagavad Gita which gives the mythical story of Krishna is almost universally held among secular, Christian, and Hindu scholars to have been written starting somewhere around 500 BCE and was completed within a few decades of approximately 200 BCE. What the disingenuous mikwut didn't tell you is that the only real uncertainty that remains involves fixing the date by which the various texts were unified into a single work.
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Re: Regarding Krishna's mom & Virgin Births Re: Re: Regarding Krishna's mom & Virgin Births -- Martin Top of thread Archive
Posted by: mikwut ®
12/22/2002, 05:22:10
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I love when you do this stuff. You call me a jackass and then immediately afterwards say, "Focus instead on my dropping of names like 'Harvard' and 'Mircia Eliade'", he drones on in his monotonous and deceptive voice (even though that's not her name)."
But it is HIS you meatball.
mikwut
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Re: Regarding Krishna's mom & Virgin Births Re: Re: Regarding Krishna's mom & Virgin Births -- mikwut Top of thread Archive
Posted by: nofaith ®
12/22/2002, 06:01:21
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-Dan
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Re: Regarding Krishna's mom & Virgin Births Re: Re: Regarding Krishna's mom & Virgin Births -- nofaith Top of thread Archive
Posted by: mikwut ®
12/22/2002, 12:06:16
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Thank you, I am aware I mispelled the name, something that doesn't or shouldn't detract from the point I made. Not even knowing who HE is does show something different then a mere mispelling. I find such amusement in pointing out mispelling or punctuation errors on an internet forum as if someone's argument is somehow bolstered and at the same time making a far more egregrious error of not even knowing what one is talking about.
mikwut
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Regarding Mircea Eliade Re: Re: Regarding Krishna's mom & Virgin Births -- mikwut Top of thread Archive
Posted by: Martin ®
12/23/2002, 16:28:13
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I publicly accede to the intolerably wicked and utterly unforgiveable crime of incorrectly reporting someone's gender, which surely must be considered by all humans everywhere to be an infinitely more objectionable sin than grossly mispelling that person's name while in the process of blatantly dropping names in lieu of credible argument.
Even so, anyone stupid enough to believe your blatantly desperate claim that my simple error demonstrates that I don't know what I'm talking about is far too stupid to reason above the sixth grade level anyway, and so their ignorance makes them victims of your credulous nonsense regardless of what I and the facts say.
But Mircea Eliade's views are far more in accord with the truth that Christianity is myth than with your hoplessly obsolete historicism! Over and over again, he emphasizes the clear fact that myth underlies the Christian religion.
I will be quoting at length from The Significance of Mircea Eliade for Christian Theology, by the Rev. Joseph G. Muthuraj, Ph.D.; Professor of New Testament and Dean of Doctoral Studies.
Eliade's academic specialty was in the field known as History of Religion. I'll let Rev. Muthuraj describe what that means in actual practice as it relates to the New Testament:
The main characteristic of the History of Religions School was 'to interpret primitive Christianity within the framework of the religions of the time'. It sought to explain Christianity as a product of the development of the spirit of classical antiquity. It was argued that the designation "History of Primitive Christian Religion" and not "New Testament Theology" is more suitable to refer to the study of the New Testament. Hence the task of New Testament scholarship was regarded as an attempt to depict primitive Christian religion. Its questions, therefore, were rightly concerned with the relationship between early Christianity and contemporary religious phenomena found in Judaism, Hellenism and what is being called 'Orient'.. . .Jewish and Hellenistic antecedents were uncovered by many studies. The significant contribution made by the History of Religions School was that it brought to light the role played by oriental religion and piety in the formation of NT religion.
i) Death of God Theology - Sky and Sky GodsThose ideas are manifestly mythological in origin and remained so even for Judaism and Christianity.Eliade wrote about 'sky and sky gods' when Christian theology was shaken at its very foundations by the 'death of God' theology. He spoke of 'God up there' when theologians such as J. A. T. Robinson were busy with erasing the mythical language of three-storied universe that underlies the early Christian thought and experience. Robinson argued in favor of 'the detaching of the Christian doctrine of God from any necessary dependence on a 'supernaturalistic' worldview'. ... J. J. Altizer, for example, maintained boldly by stating, 'Throughout its history Christian theology has been thwarted from reaching its intrinsic goal by its bondage to a transcendent, a sovereign, and an impassive God'. Eliade criticized the Death of God theology and argued that the theology of death of God was based on an understanding of God who was withdrawn from the earth and was forgotten by human beings (deus otiosus). For Eliade, God is indefinable and the moment we attempt to define God in clear-cut language we then lose the mystery of God. The second chapter in Patterns in Comparative Religion provides a good treatment on the subject of 'The Sky and Sky Gods'. There is almost a universal belief in celestial divine being, which created the universe and guarantees the fecundity of the earth and protector of life. Sky is associated with the wealth of mythological and religious significance. '"Height", "being on high", infinite space - all these are hierophanies of what is transcendent, what is supremely sacred'. The Supreme Beings associated with sky hierophanies are creators and they give life.
ii) Cosmic Christianity. . .The Letters to Ephesians and Colossians make reference to 'Cosmic Christ' (Eph. 1: 17-23; Col. 2: 5-11). There are theologians in India who spoke of 'cosmic Christ'. Eliade's idea of cosmic Christianity has some interesting theological features. He understood Christianity not in terms of the categories of the Western Europe. He observed that the myths and symbols of pre-Christian Europe survived in Christianity... The religious experience peculiar to the rural populations was nourished by what he called, "Cosmic Christianity". Cosmic Christianity, for Eliade, is a peasant-centered religion with its array of cosmic liturgies and religious folklores. It is not a paganization of Christianity and is not expressed by a scholastic theology. It is a popular theology that is built on the meaning and significance of seasonal festivals and religious folklore, which reflect the life of the common folk. Thus, cosmic symbols of folkloric themes such as Water, Tree, Vine, the plough and the axe, the ship, chariot etc which have been already assimilated by Judaism are passed on to the Church, which gave them sacramental meaning.
iii) Christology
Christology has received a new dimension in Eliades' popular theology, which has cosmic dimensions.... Eliade then goes on to claim that the images of Christ in the Gospels stand in no contradiction to images of Christ in religious folklore. ... In Christian folklore, Cross is conceived as Cosmic Tree, a universal symbol of hierophany. Tree constitutes religious life and is seen as i) an alter, ii) an image of the cosmos, iii) a cosmic theophany, iv) symbol of life, v) centre of the world and support of the universe, vi) mystical bond between tree and men and vii) the tree as symbol of resurrection of vegetation of spring and of the 'rebirth' of the year.
4) Eliade's Critique of TheologiansThank you once again, mikwut, for providing a source of strong confirmation of the fact that the Christian myth owes a great deal to the Oriental and other myths that went into its construction!... Eliade interprets Christian experience on the basis of cross-cultural parallels irrespective of their historical contexts, which divide humanity on the basis of language, geography and religion. ...
Eliade criticizes theologians for two reasons. He comments that theologians are 'suspicious of historico-religious hermeneutics that might encourage syncretism or religious dillettantism or worse yet, raise doubts about the uniqueness of the Judeo-Christian revelation'. ... Eliade hesitates to assign a privileged position to the Judeo-Christian tradition as he argues that there are images and symbols in Christianity, which are common properties of the entire religious history of humanity.
... Thirdly, Eliade observes that theological study seeks to study selected data from monotheistic religions rather than from the so-called primitive materials and, moreover, secondary importance is accorded to religions of the Mediterranean world. This is very much the case with the section of NT studies, which deals with the description of early Christianity. An accurate knowledge of the broader and heterogeneous Mediterranean cultures is fundamental to that description. NT scholarship ignores the Afro-Asiatic landscape of the Eastern Mediterranean in favor of western Mediterranean world, which is regarded as the sea-bed of European civilization. Alice Bach in her article argues that a biblical scholar assumes a divinity, which is congenial to and arises out of the myths of Greece and Rome, the Mediterranean roots of European culture. The discarded aspects of Rome and Greece, Egypt and Ethiopia had oriental elements derived from the religious and cultural traditions of Indo-Iran landscape. As a result we have an account of early Christianity which is Occidental in nature and is opposed to the other, the Orient. This created the Christian/pagan distinction in the reading of NT.
One of the contributions of Eliade, which will have great significance for study of NT history is that Eliade sees cultural contacts and reciprocal influences between Indo-Iranian, Mesopotamian, Mediterranean worlds. Once this cultural bond is recognized then NT world need not be narrowly defined. Quite rightly, Eliade considers in his second volume of A History of Religious Ideas, Vedas, Upanishads, Yoga, Buddhism, Jainism, Mahabharata, Bhagavad Gita, Greco-Oriental Mysteries, Iranian religious synthesis as forerunners of Christianity. The fact that they are prolegomena to NT religion should be applied as one of the most important criteria for historical interpretation in NT studies. The Eastern civilization can be proud of the contribution it has made to the make-up of the world of thought that saw the birth of NT Christianity.
- Martin
Modified by Martin at Mon, Dec 23, 2002, 16:35:46
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Irony - Mormonism and the mythicists. Re: Mythical Jesus - A Mythical Idea! -- mikwut Top of thread Archive
Posted by: mikwut ®
12/14/2002, 01:48:32
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“A certain discrepancy between expectations and what transpires is normal, even predictable. Acute incongruity between anticipation and what actually happens is rarer, less routine. Real irony, however, is unusual, something sufficiently out of the ordinary to be regarded as exceptional. Considered from one standpoint, the journals of William E. McLellin that had been reposing in a safe of the LDS Church Historian or of the First Presidency since 1908 meet the irony test; their content seems genuinely ironic in view of the circumstances surrounding their discovery.
The papers of McLellin, an Illinois schoolteacher who converted to Mormonism in 1831, became an apostle in 1835, but afterwards left the Church and was branded apostate, had long been presumed lost until the nefarious document dealer Mark Hofmann reported in the mid-1980s that he had found them.....Many ...expected-and some feared-that any contemporaneous documents in a collection of McLellin’s papers would be filled with information that would add to a perception of early Mormonism as a hotbed of occultism and hermetic hocus-pocus. Instead, what these narratives from the 1830s depict is a struggling missionary band preaching not only a millennialist message that, to be sure, reflected the importance of the coming forth of the Book of Mormon as a signal that the end was near, but also a message whose true anchor was nonetheless the Christian Scriptures.”The rootedness of Mormonism is in Christian motifs, themes and thought - the Bible being the most prominent - not folk magic. This is the earliest source available for the burgeoning religion.
Just my two cents on the Christ myth and attempt of fitting magic and folklore into the explanation of early Mormonism - it is embarassing for skeptics to push, they have to repudiate their otherwise respectful honor towards scholarship and peer review and primary sources from experts in the field.
Regards my friends,
mikwut
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The Occult and Joseph Smith (with note links) Re: Irony - Mormonism and the mythicists. -- mikwut Top of thread Archive
Posted by: Martin ®
12/16/2002, 16:14:28
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A COMPANY OF MONEY-DIGGERS -- Excerpted from Chapter 2, Part 2.
[Although the footnote numbers weren't scanned in for this post, the associated notes documenting the sources run from note 26 through 49 for Chapter 2, which can be viewed at Chapter 2 Footnotes]
Relatively few Mormons know that at one time Joseph Smith's reputation as an occultist stretched from New York to Northern Pennsylvania. Moreover, the use of occult rituals among his early followers was the norm, rather than the exception (see pp. 87-90). Much of their attachment to occultism centered around the now archaic practice of treasure hunting via divination -- i.e., money-digging. The pursuit held the fascination of countless individuals throughout rural America in the early nineteenth century.These "money-diggers," as they were called, often spent most of their days and nights trying to "dig up treasure that supposedly had been buried throughout the land by pirates, Spaniards, or ancient inhabitants of the country." The more desperate souls actually formed money-digging companies of like-minded believers dedicated to pursuing a futile search for instant wealth. Their chosen means of locating this elusive treasure was occult divination by magical ceremonies and enchanted tools including "peep-stones" (or seer stones) and divining rods.
Oftentimes money-diggers would hire themselves out to persons who believed that they, too, might profit through occultism. Such activity, however, was illegal because money-diggers habitually defrauded clients out of hard-earned cash by not delivering on their promises to find large caches of buried treasure. Nevertheless, money-diggers rarely found themselves without a roster of gullible customers whose dreams of abundant assets greatly overshadowed any modicum of down-to-earth business sense they may have possessed -- and so the profession thrived.
Joseph Smith, Jr., probably gravitated toward money-digging due to his mother and father's predilection for occult ritual, white magic, superstitions, paranormal phenomena, divination, and treasure hunting. An innate interest in such issues seemed to have been very active not only in them, but also in various members of their family lines going back as far the seventeenth century. Neighbor Fayette Lapham learned from Joseph, Sr. that he was "a firm believer in witchcraft and other supernatural things; and had brought up his family in the same belief." Lapham further recalled: "[Smith] also believed that there was a vast amount of money buried somewhere in the country; that it would some day be found; that he himself had spent both time and money searching for it, with divining rods. A similar propensity manifested itself early in the Mack line as well, with family members "into the spiritual realms of visions, healings, and a quest for a new dispensation."
Such inclinations ultimately brought the Smiths in contact with a widespread money-digging network that existed in the Palmyra-Manchester area during the early-mid 1800s. Martin Harris, who financed the first edition of the Book of Mormon, explained: "There was a company there in that neighborhood, who were digging for money supposed to have been hidden by the ancients. Of this company were old Mr. Stowel -- I think his name was Josiah -- also old Mr. Beman, also Samuel Lawrence, George Proper, Joseph Smith, Jr., and his father, and his brother Hiram [Hyrum] Smith. They dug for money in Palmyra, Manchester, also in Pennsylvania, and other places."
According to local rumors, these men encountered "a great many strange sights" including disappearing strongboxes, mysterious horsemen, and nine-foot-tall strangers who beckoned them from afar. The Smiths, who were seen as leaders of the company, seemed particularly interested in telling such tales. Joshua Stafford, for instance, said that shortly after he became acquainted with Joseph's family around 1819/20 "they commenced digging for hidden treasures ... and told marvelous stories about ghosts, hob-goblins, caverns, and various other mysterious matters."
Most of the residents of Palmyra and Manchester, in fact, knew the Smiths as a close-knit clan of occultists who espoused popular superstitions embraced by nineteenth century practitioners of folk magic. Consider the text from a particularly relevant 1831 Palmyra Reflector [newspaper] article:
"We are not able to determine whether the elder Smith was ever concerned in money digging transactions previous to his emigration from Vermont, or not, but it is a well authenticated fact that soon after his arrival here he evinced a firm belief in the existence of hidden treasures, and that this section of country abounded in them -- He also revived, or in other words propagated the vulgar, yet popular belief that these treasures were held in charge by some evil spirit, which was supposed to be either the DEVIL himself, or some one of his most trusty favorites."
There is no doubt that Joseph, Jr., was deeply entrenched in occultism along with the rest of his family. William Stafford, a neighbor and fellow money-digger, stated that Joseph, Jr., used a seer stone not only to "see all things within and under the earth," but also to discover "the spirits in whose charge these treasures were, clothed in ancient dress." According to Jesse Townsend, Joseph gazed into his stone to "see chests of money buried in the earth. He was also a fortune-teller, and he claimed to know where stolen goods went." Joseph Capron had similar recollections:
"The family of Smiths held Joseph Jr. in high estimation on account of some supernatural power, which he was supposed to possess. This power he pretended to have received through the medium of a stone of peculiar quality. THE STONE WAS PLACED IN A HAT [which is PRECISELY how Joseph Smith was seen by witnesses to have allegedly magically "translated" the Book of Mormon], in such a manner as to exclude all light, except that which emanated from the stone itself. This light of the stone, he pretended, enabled him to see anything he wished. Accordingly he discovered ghosts, infernal spirits, mountains of gold and silver, and many other invaluable treasures deposited in the earth. He would often tell his neighbors of his wonderful discoveries, and urge them to embark in the money digging business. Luxury and wealth were to be given to all who would adhere to his council."
One of the earliest documents referring to Smith's money-digging reputation is an 1830 letter from Rev. John Sherer to the American Home Missionary Society. In this communication, Sherer describes Smith as a person who pretends to look "through a glass, to see money underground." Rev. Sherer also labeled Smith a "juggler," a term that used to denote someone who MANIPULATED PEOPLE FOR FRAUDULENT PURPOSES - I.E., A CON-MAN.
Additional testimony shows that Joseph, Jr. and his family often engaged in complex rituals based on occult lore generally not known except by avid practitioners of folk magic. For instance, nineteenth century occultists believed there were periods throughout each lunar cycle that corresponded to times when supernatural powers were higher than usual. This is exactly what Joseph believed, according to William Stafford, who noted in his affidavit published by E.D. Howe that when it came to money-digging, Joseph believed there were certain times when the treasures could be obtained more easily than at other times: "The facility of approaching them, depended in a great measure on the state of the moon. New moon and good Friday, I believe, were regarded as the most favorable times for obtaining these treasures."
On some occasions, Smith made ANIMAL SACRIFICES to appease whatever spirits might be guarding the buried treasure. Emily M. Austin recounted one time when Joseph told his money-digging company "there was a charm on the pots of money, and if some animal was killed and the blood sprinkled around the place, then they could get it." Austin remembered: "So they KILLED A DOG and tried this method of obtaining the precious metal.... Alas! how vivid was the expectation when the blood of poor Tray [i.e., the dog] was used to take off the charm, and after all to find their mistake ... and now they were obliged to give up in despair."
Hiel Lewis, a cousin of Joseph's wife, Emma, reported that the SACRIFICE of white dogs, black cats, and other animals "was an indispensable part or appendage of the art which Smith, the embryo prophet, was then practicing." Sometimes, however, Joseph and his companions relied solely on magical rituals and occult ceremonies. Consider the following incidents, described by two different acquaintances of Joseph, Jr.:
Episode # 1:
"Joseph, Sen. first made a circle, twelve or fourteen feet in diameter. This circle, said he, contains the treasure. He then stuck in the ground a row of witch hazel sticks, around the said circle, for the purpose of keeping off the evil spirits. Within this circle he made another, of about eight or ten feet in diameter. He walked around three times on the periphery of this last circle, muttering to himself something which I could not understand. He next stuck a steel rod in the centre of the circles, and then enjoined profound silence upon us, lest we should arouse the evil spirit who had the charge of these treasures. After we had dug a trench about five feet in depth around the rod.... [Joseph, Sr.] went to the house to inquire of young Joseph the cause of our disappointment. He soon returned and said, that Joseph had remained all this time in the house, looking in his stone and watching the motions of the evil spirit that he saw the spirit come up to the ring and as soon as it beheld the cone which we had formed around the rod, it caused the money to sink."
Episode # 2:"The sapient Joseph discovered, northwest of my house a chest of gold watches; but as they were in the possession of the evil spirit, it required skill and stratagem to obtain them, Accordingly, orders were given to stick a parcel of large stakes in the ground, several rods around, in a circular form.... over the spot where the treasures were deposited... Samuel F. Lawrence, with a drawn sword in his hand, marched around to guard any assault which his Satanic majesty might be disposed to make. Meantime, the rest of the company were busily employed in digging for the watches, They worked as usual till quite exhausted, But, in spite of their defender, Lawrence, and their bulwark of stakes, the devil came off victorious, and carried away the watches."
Both of these episodes ended unsuccessfully after the treasure was either stolen away or moved out of reach by demonic forces. Such outcomes were typical in tales circulated by nineteenth-century money-diggers. In "The Refiner's Fire: The Making of Mormon Cosmology, 1644-1844", history professor John L. Brooke of Tufts University observes: "One of the central themes in the treasure-hunting sagas was the volatility of precious metal: chests of money `bloom' to the surface of the earth only to fall away when the diggers utter a sound or violate a ritual practice."Joshua Stafford remembered Smith actually showing him "a piece of wood which he said he took from a box of money" that had mysteriously moved back into the hill. Many years later in Utah, two of Smith's closest associates -- Martin Harris and Orrin Porter Rockwell -- actually gave recollections of having been present when this corner of a wooden treasure box was broken off before it "slipped back into the hill" under the influence of some unseen power.
BOUND IN BAINBRIDGE -- Excerpted from Chapter 3, Parts 2-4a.[Although the footnote numbers weren't scanned in for this post, the associated notes for what follows, documenting the sources, run from note 10 through 52 for Chapter 03, which can be viewed at Chapter 3 Footnotes]
The transcript of Smith's appearance in court was first published in 1873 in Fraser's Magazine (an English periodical). During this preliminary hearing (then called an "examination"), Joseph admitted that he possessed "a certain stone" that he occasionally used to determine where treasures were hidden in the earth. The court record continued: "[H]e professed to tell in this manner where gold mines were a distance underground, and had looked for Mr. Stowell several times, and had informed him where he could find these treasures." Stowell attempted to defend Joseph, but ended up doing more harm than good by testifying that he positively knew Smith could "tell, and did possess the art of seeing those valuable treasures through the medium of said stone." He further stated that he had the most implicit faith in Joseph's skills. After others testified that they, too, had witnessed Smith's illegal activities, the court pronounced him guilty.Joseph escaped jail time, however, when the court subtly suggested he leave town and never return. This common show of mercy, known at that time as "Leg Bail," may have been granted because Smith was only twenty years old. In an 1831 letter to the Evangelical Magazine and Gospel Advocate, Bainbridge resident A.W. Benton recounted what he witnessed at Smith's trial: "[C]onsidering his youth, (he then being a minor,) and thinking he might reform his conduct, he was designedly allowed to escape. This was four or five years ago. From this time he absented himself from this place, returning only privately, and holding clandestine intercourse with his credulous dupes, for two or three years." Joel K. Noble, a justice of the peace during that era, corroborated Benton's account, stating: "Jo. was condemned. [The] Whisper came to Jo. 'off, off' -- [He] took Leg Bail... Jo was not seen in our town for 2 years or more (except in Dark Corners)."
For many years Mormons steadfastly viewed all such statements, including the court transcript published in 1873, as nothing but anti-Mormon propaganda created to smear the good name of their prophet. In reference to the Bainbridge court record, for example, LDS author Francis Kirkham adamantly declared "no such record was ever made, and therefore, is not in existence." The LDS church-owned "Deseret News" called it a "fabrication of unknown authorship and never in the court records at all." Mormon apostle John Widtsoe stated: "This alleged court record ... seems to be a literary attempt of an enemy to ridicule Joseph Smith.... There is no existing proof that such a trial was ever held." The reason for such ardent denials was articulated well by Dr. Hugh Nibley, one of Mormonism's staunchest defenders. In 1967, he wrote: "If this court record is authentic, it is the most damning evidence in existence against Joseph Smith."
Then, in 1971, concrete evidence for the transcript's validity was unearthed by Wesley P. Walters and Fred Poffarl, two religion researchers who had been investigating Mormonism for many years. While searching through court records stored in the basement of an old county jail in New York, they discovered two cardboard boxes shoved against a wall in a darkened corner. They contained bundles of water damaged court bills dating back to the early 1800s. The 1826 bundle included several bills showing court costs of a Justice Albert Neely. One of his cases referred to none other than "Joseph Smith the Glass Looker." Neely's charges, $2.68, exactly matched the figure given for court costs in Fraser's Magazine. The date also was the same-March 20, 1826 (see photo, p. 45).
For many years Mormons tried in vain to cast aspersions on the legitimacy of the Neely document. But finally, in 1992, LDS church historian Leonard J. Arrington conceded that the bill was indeed drawn up by Neely and that it referred to Smith "as a `glass looker' (one who, by peering through a glass stone, could see things not discernible by the natural eye)."
Interestingly, before Neely's bill had surfaced, Francis Kirkham made a very telling comment based on his complete confidence that no evidence would ever be found to substantiate the 1826 trial: "If any evidence had been in existence that Joseph Smith had used a seer stone for fraud and deception, and especially had he made this confession in a court of law as early as 1826, or four years before the Book of Mormon was printed, and this confession was in a court record, it would have been impossible for him to have [legitimately] organized the restored Church."
GOING FOR THE GOLD
After his 1826 brush with the law, Smith temporarily seemed more interested in romance than in money-digging. Even before his arrest, while continuing to hunt treasure for Stowell in New York, Smith often returned to Pennsylvania to see Emma. But when he asked for permission to marry her, it was refused. Her father remembers: "I gave him my reasons for so doing; some of which were, that he was a stranger, and followed a business that I could not approve: he then left the place." Joe, however, would not take no for an answer, and on January 18, 1827, while Isaac was away from home, he took Emma to New York and married her. Smith apparently began pondering his financial situation around this same time, realizing that money-digging alone was bringing in only about $14 a month, which was not nearly enough to support a family.
So, at some point in 1826/27, Smith began telling others, most notably his money-digging friends, about the existence of a golden book he would soon be retrieving from a secret place that had been revealed to him through his seer stone. Smith originally attached no religious significance to the mysterious volume, but instead, touted it as a book that would, according to neighbor Parley Chase (b. 1806), "tell him how to get money that was buried in the ground." In other words, it would compliment to his money-digging activities.
Abner Cole, a former justice of the peace who became editor of the Palmyra Reflector, recalled a similar explanation that came directly from young Joseph's father. His account provides invaluable information that suggests how the whole series of stories involving visions probably began:
"[T]he elder Smith declared that his son Jo had seen the spirit, (which he then described as a little old man with a long beard,) and was informed that he (Jo) under certain circumstances, eventually should obtain great treasures, and that in due time he (the spirit) would furnish him (Jo) with a book, which would give an account of the Ancient inhabitants (antideluvians,) of this country, and where they had deposited their substance, consisting of costly furniture, &c.... which had ever since that time remained secure in his (the spirit's) charge, in large and spacious chambers, in sundry places in this vicinity."
Eventually, however, Joseph decided that instead of keeping the book as a means of finding more treasure, it would be far more profitable to sell the volume as a speculation about America's ancient inhabitants and their origins. Neighbor Joseph Capron remembered an especially enlightening conversation he had with Joseph, Sr., who never even intimated that the volume would be religious:
[Joseph, Jr.] pretended to find the Gold Plates. This scheme, he believed, would relieve the family from all pecuniary embarrassment. His father told me, that when the book was published, they would be enabled, from the profits of the work, to carry into successful operation of the money digging business. He gave me no intimation, at that time that the book was to be of a religious character, or that it had any thing to do with revelation. He declared it to be a speculation, and said he, "when it is completed, my family will be placed on a level above the generality of mankind."
But Joseph kept changing his mind again and again, not only about the hidden book's contents, but also about how he discovered its existence, and how he retrieved it. He could not keep his story straight, nor could his siblings, or parents. Parley Chase recalled that when it came to explaining exactly how the plates were found, the Smiths "scarcely ever told two stories alike." In hindsight, some of these accounts sound like a cross between Washington Irving's "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" (1819-20) and assorted pirate tales featuring the likes of Captain Kidd (1645-1701), whom Joseph, interestingly enough, claimed to have seen "sailing on the Susquehanna River" one day while gazing into his peepstone. (He also said he saw where Kidd had buried "two pots of gold and silver.")
Long before area residents heard any of the "first" or "second" vision accounts thus far discussed, a number of radically different explanations about the golden plates had been circulated by the Smiths. On one occasion, Joseph, Jr. told his wife's cousin, Hiel Lewis, that he learned about the golden plates IN A DREAM, and that on his first attempt to get them in 1823, he was "knocked down" several times by a mysterious power. Joseph then claimed to have seen the ghost of a man "standing over the spot, who, to him appeared like a Spaniard, having a long beard coming down over his breast to about here, (Smith putting his hand to the pit of his stomach) WITH HIS (the ghost's) THROAT CUT FROM EAR TO EAR, AND THE BLOOD STREAMING DOWN, who told him that he could not get it [the plates] alone; that another person whom he, Smith, would know at first sight, must come with him, and then he could get it" (emphases in original).
Fayette Lapham heard the same scenario from Joseph, Sr. -- i.e., that the golden plates had been revealed to young Joseph VIA A DREAM. And that during this dream "a very large and tall man appeared to him, dressed in an ancient suit of clothes, and the clothes were bloody." The gruesome apparition told Joseph "there was a valuable treasure, buried many years since, and not far from that place ... [and] he would direct him to the place where it was deposited, in such a manner that he could obtain it."
Lapham was then told the rest of the story just as it had been related to Emma's cousin, including the part about Joseph, Jr. being struck down and seeing the Spaniard appear at the location. According to Joseph, Sr., the macabre ghost had been "sworn to take charge of and protect that property, until the time should arrive for it to be exhibited to the world of mankind; and, in order to prevent his making a improper disclosure, he was murdered or slain on the spot, and the treasure had been under his charge ever since. He said to him [Joseph] that ... if he would come again one year from that time, he could have them."
The Smiths eventually changed Joseph's "dream" of a ghost to a "vision" of a spirit (but not yet an angel). This version was told to Willard Chase. He recalled that in June of 1827 Joseph Smith, Sr. related an astonishing story that allegedly had been unfolding since 1823 (the same year now accepted by Mormons as the time of Joseph's second vision). According to the elder Smith, a "spirit" had appeared in a vision and communicated to his son that "in a certain place there was a record on plates of gold, and that he was the person that must obtain them." The spirit then instructed young Joseph to go to this location on September 22, 1823, but to do so "dressed in black clothes, and riding a black horse with a switch tail. Joseph was then supposed to demand the book, using a special secret word, and after obtaining plates, "go directly away, and neither lay it down nor look behind him."
Joseph, Sr. informed Chase that his son did in fact dress himself in a suit of black clothes and borrowed a black horse. He journeyed to the hill and briefly retrieved the plates (in 1823) until they supernaturally flew back to where they had been. Apparently, Joseph had placed them down to adjust the positioning of supplies on his horse, which disobeyed the spirit's command to "go directly away." Consequently, the plates slipped back into the hill. One fascinating addition to this particular story involved an as yet unheard of toad-like creature that appeared when Joseph tried to re-obtain the plates after they had deposited themselves back into the hill. This entity "assumed the appearance of a man" and struck Joseph on the side of his head, telling Joseph that it was not yet time to retrieve the plates and that he would have to return in one year.
A subsequent version of Smith's ever-changing tale, one sounding a bit more Christian, was related to Martin Harris, who in turn told it to the Rochester Gem, which published a synopsis of it:
"In the autumn of 1827 a man named Joseph Smith of Manchester, in Ontario County, said that he had been visited by the spirit of the Almighty in a dream, and informed that in a certain hill in that town, was deposited a Golden Bible, containing an ancient record of a divine origin. He states that after a third visit from the same spirit in a dream, he proceeded to the spot, removed earth, and there found the bible, together with a huge pair of spectacles."
Over the years these yarns gradually were revised and expanded, eventually becoming today's official account of the 1823 "second" vision featuring the angel Moroni. One element of the earlier stories, however, did not easily give way. Until well into the late 1800s it was widely understood that Smith found the golden plates not by a dream, or a ghost, or a vision -- but by looking into his peep-stone and seeing where they had been deposited. Orasmus Turner recalled one day when Joseph was away from home, and his family inadvertently revealed how he actually had found the plates, if indeed, there ever were any:
"[I]n his absence, the rest of the family made a new version of it to one of their neighbors. They spewed him such a pebble as may any day be picked up on the shore of Lake Ontario .... They said it was by looking at this stone, in a hat, the light excluded, that Joseph discovered the plates.... It was the same stone the Smith's had used in money digging, and in some pretended discoveries of stolen property."
This may have been the most prevalent Mormon understanding of the events leading to the retrieval of Smith's golden plates. Even Brigham Young, Smith's successor to the LDS presidency, knew that Smith used his peep-stone to find the golden plates. In 1856, Mormon pioneer Hosea Stout recorded in his diary that Young actually "exhibited the Seer's stone with which the Prophet Joseph discovered the plates of the Book of Mormon." Martin Harris, one of Smith's closest allies and a crucial figure in the creation of the Book of Mormon, also testified to the peep-stone's use:
"Joseph had a stone which was dug from the well of Mason Chase.... It was by means of this stone that he first discovered these plates.... [Joseph) had before described the manner of his finding the plates. He found them by looking in the stone.... The family bad likewise told me the same thing."
No one will probably ever know exactly how these earliest stories developed and merged. But one thing is certain -- all of the religious aspects of Smith's adventures came much later. Orasmus Turner wrote: "The primitive designs of Mrs. Smith, her husband, Jo, and Cowdery, was money-making; blended with which perhaps, was a desire for notoriety, to be obtained by cheat and fraud. The idea of being the founders of a new sect, was an after thought, in which they were aided by others." In agreement with Turner, Joseph Smith's cousin-in-law, Hiel Lewis, summarized:
"In all this narrative, there was not one word about 'visions of God,' or of angels or heavenly revelations. All his information was by that dream, and that bleeding ghost. The heavenly visions and messages of angels, etc., contained in Mormon books were after-thoughts, revised to order."
Many of Joseph's doctrines would end up fitting into this category of "afterthoughts" -- e.g., his revelations concerning God's nature, inhabitants on the moon, Caucasians advancing to godhood, and the notion that Blacks, Indians, and other people of color are cursed spirits (see Chapter Sixteen). Smith's most significant "afterthought," however, would be his role as a latter-day prophet commissioned to lead humanity into the glorious millennial kingdom of God. But first he would have to decipher the mysterious writing on the Book of Mormon plates, and offer his translation to the world.
THE ART OF TRANSLATING
After supposedly retrieving the plates, Smith took extreme measures to avoid at all costs anyone who might want to see them. The angel, according to Joseph, had warned him that he would lose possession of the plates if he let anyone else see them. This certainly convinced his family. But still troublesome to Joseph were the men associated with his money-digging company. They felt that "they had as much right to the plates as Joseph [did]" and that he had "been [a] traitor and had appropriated to himself that which belonged to them."
Smith responded by hiding the plates; first, in the hollow of a tree, then under the hearth of his house, then under an old cooper's shop. As a result, few people, except for Joseph's family and the money-diggers, even believed the golden book truly existed. After all, no one had actually seen the plates, nor would anyone ever see them. (After the plates were "translated," they were returned to the angel by Smith, who claimed to have deposited them in a huge cave filled with treasure.)
But unbelievers were the least of Joseph's problems. A far more pressing issue was his lack of funds to carry out the God-given task of translating, then publishing, the Book of Mormon. A solution to this problem came in the form of Martin Harris, a prosperous farmer with considerable land. He also happened to be a religious fanatic prone to visions and other supernatural phenomena. Angelic visitations, ghostly encounters, and meetings with Jesus Christ were commonplace in Harris' life.
On one occasion, Harris told Stephen S. Harding that he "saw the devil, in all his hideousness, on the road just before dark, near his farm, a little north of Palmyra." This terrifying encounter began when his horses suddenly stopped: "[Harris] then commenced smelling brimstone, and knew the Devil was in the road, and saw him plainly as he walked up the hill and disappeared.... [Satan looked like] 'a greyhound as big as a horse, without any tail, walking upright on his hind legs.'" He told another gentleman in Palmyra that "while the Book of Mormon translation was going on, that on the way [to Pennsylvania] he met the Lord Jesus Christ, who walked along by the side of him in the shape of a deer for two or three miles, talking with him as familiarly as one man talks with another."
Again, footnotes and citations for the above can be viewed at Chapter 2 Footnotes and Chapter 3 Footnotes
- Martin
(modified to add links to footnotes)(Also corrected the spelling of the author's name: It's Abanes, not Albanes. I get it right most of the time, but I screwed up and then cut&pasted my mistake. I apologize for my error.)
Modified by Martin at Sat, Dec 21, 2002, 15:38:52
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Re: The Occult and Joseph Smith Re: The Occult and Joseph Smith (with note links) -- Martin Top of thread Archive
Posted by: mikwut ®
12/18/2002, 20:15:54
Author Profile Mail author
O.K. let me get this straight. You have been posting on a "Mormon" forum for several years now. At your disposal is not simpleton disenchanted monkeys that left the church but rather sophisticated and erudite former members such as rpcman, Cal, Craig C., Gunnar, and Fer-de-lance. I give you a PRIMARY historical document that doesn't offer ANYTHING to an occultist hypothesis of Mormon origins which dates to 1831 and a quote from the NON-Mormon and respected from within and without Jan Shipps concerning the occult and Mormon origins and you respond by quoting from that bananna Richard Arbanes!?
This is not to say that there isn't good scholarship at your disposal to attack my Mormon position from, might I reccommend the most recent editing by Brent Metcalfe and Dan Vogel - The Mormon Apocrypha or the recent Insider's View of Mormon Origins which is a neutral position explaining the controversies concerning Mormon origins by Grant Palmer. Then you at least could be taken seriously by Mormons when your trying so desperately to convince them of their own wrong headedness. Why would you lead with that meatball Arbanes? Maybe some of his ridiculous reasons for you needing to abandon your critical position and join the envangelical right would be worthy of your attention as well, or maybe you missed the last Bible Answer Man in which your buddy was a guest lackey.
Oh, one more thing don't get me wrong here either Martin, this isn't the same kind of critical position I took towards Wells, I am not making fun of Mr. Arbane's quality American High School Education of which he is a graduate in his youth as effecting his ability at scholarship in the least.
Arbanes?! That's rich Martin, that's rich.
laughingly,
mikwut
P.S. Yes, Joseph participated in the common practice of "money digging". La DEE Frickin DAH!
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Re: The Occult and Joseph Smith Re: Re: The Occult and Joseph Smith -- mikwut Top of thread Archive
Posted by: Martin ®
12/19/2002, 17:50:43
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Don't be fooled, folks! Abanes absolutely did NOT invent anything in that catalog of Joseph Smith Jr's and his family's frequent indulgence in many rather extreme and extremely rare occult practices. What Albanes has gathered together and reported is historically accurate as it is written and has been often reported elsewhere. No credible, objective rebuttals have ever been provided.
Even Brigham Young made it plain repeatedly that Smith used his patently occult and superstitious practices to "find" and "translate" the alleged gold bible!
As for mikwut's P.S., whether or not others engaged in Joe Smith Jr's occult and superstitious practices strikes me as entirely irrelevant. The others did not claim to be a true Prophet! I don't know about the rest of you, but speaking for myself, I'd hold anyone who claimed to be God's Prophet and representative on Earth to a far higher standard!
In any case, contrary to one or two recent posts that suggested that the claims of Quinn in this regard are credible, I've seen no evidence for the claim that occult practices of the nature and extent that the Smith family engaged in, including money digging for profit, was a "common practice" of that or any other day. I'm not surprised that mikwut is so fond of lies, since on those all-too-rare events that a sense of self-honesty gets through to his conscience, he's doubtless glad he had his Mormon apologetic stockpile of lies and half-truths always at the ready. He'd have no trouble at all living for a year or score on his cache of deceit.
- Martin
Modified by Martin at Thu, Dec 19, 2002, 17:58:29
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Scholarly ReferencesNow Available (mod) Re: The Occult and Joseph Smith (with note links) -- Martin Top of thread Archive
Posted by: Martin ®
12/19/2002, 18:50:24
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Thanks to Dan's help, I now have made these scholarly footnotes available for your inspection and reference. You will find that Abanes has met very high standards of scholarship indeed, certainly at least for the material I have quoted.
Tables showing D&C Alterations
- Martin
Modified to add links to reference pages
Modified by Martin at Fri, Dec 20, 2002, 11:22:23
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Re: Scholarly References Available Re: Scholarly ReferencesNow Available (mod) -- Martin Top of thread Archive
Posted by: nofaith ®
12/20/2002, 05:10:14
Author Profile Mail author
-Dan
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Lib. Jrnl. Review of Abanes' One Nation Under Gods Re: The Occult and Joseph Smith (with note links) -- Martin Top of thread Archive
Posted by: Martin ®
12/21/2002, 10:59:17
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On a personal note, I most emphatically do not side or empathize with Abanes' conservative Christian views and I absolutely do not deny the fact that he has an agenda. But it is clear as you read One Nation Under Gods that while it is undeniable that he personally wished to portray the LDS Church's history in an unflattering light, he was also dedicated to scholarly accuracy, intellectual honesty, and getting his facts straight. The truth is that the LDS Church's history -- told honestly (as Abanes does) -- does far more damage to the facade of that church than any lies or distortions could achieve. There's absolutely no need to falsify or distort the Church's history in order to achieve Abanes' agenda, so except for his fairly uncommon editorializing, Abanes simply let's the truth speak for itself.
- Martin
Modified by Martin at Sat, Dec 21, 2002, 12:19:39
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Re: Lib. Jrnl. Review of Abanes' One Nation Under Re: Lib. Jrnl. Review of Abanes' One Nation Under Gods -- Martin Top of thread Archive
Posted by: Craig C. ®
12/21/2002, 13:02:56
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If the excerpts that you have provided from Abane's book are indicative of the book in its entirety, then I would conclude that he has produced another distorted view of Mormonism. I draw this conclusion because he has (seemingly) omitted or ignored facts that fail to support his views. One example would be his apparent failure to cite the stirring words of apostle Hugh B. Brown on the importance of freedom of thought and expression.
Rpcman provides a more accurate picture of Mormonism on this web site because he has not focused the site exclusively on negative aspects.
Some of Abane's statements might only register as half-truths to those who have experienced Mormonism first hand. Perhaps Cal or Gunnar or Alf or rpcman or Fer-de-lance or Kevin might wish to comment on that.
Respectfully,
Craig
Modified by Craig C. at Sat, Dec 21, 2002, 13:08:10
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I respect your views, but can't agree Re: Re: Lib. Jrnl. Review of Abanes' One Nation Under -- Craig C. Top of thread Archive
Posted by: Martin ®
12/21/2002, 14:10:01
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I have read much of the soft-pedaled, overly forgiving views that rpcman has quite understandably given on his site as well as very similar views provided elsewhere on ex-Mormon sites, but I simply do not accept that those views are sufficiently plain-spoken when dealing with the dark side of Mormon history. I don't buy into the frequent soft-pedaling or downplaying of the hard truth about Christianity and I don't buy into the frequent soft-pedaling or downplaying of the hard truth about Mormon history. With all due respect to rpcman and his very laudable sites, I simply cannot accept that such downplaying and soft-pedaling of the embarrassing truth truly represents accuracy. It is my genuine belief that rpcman and others -- including such scholarly and highly respected historians and writers such as Quinn -- deliberately downplay the uglier aspects of the whole truth and take pains to over-emphasize the all-too-rare wisdom of the hierarchy's leadership in order to try to reach current LDS believers with their message.
I have read the words of Brown you refer to and find them, in my opinion, to be little more than window-dressing. Their insincerity is, I feel, made evident by Brown's manifestly deceptive apologetics, such as asserting that, and I quote: "None of the early revelations of the Church have been revised."
There is no question at all that Mormonism has some positive aspects and bright spots, just as Soviet Communism, Roman Catholicism, the Eugenics movement, and even Trent Lott all did. But to give them an equal footing with the horrendous aspects of the LDS Church is simply not to be candid about the facts.
I very strongly feel that there was a truly pressing need for Abanes' unflattering but meticulously researched book to counter-balance the official LDS false history and the overly kind treatment by ex-Mormons seeking to avoid the label of "anti-Mormon".
Respectfully and Sincerely,
- Martin
Modified by Martin at Sat, Dec 21, 2002, 14:54:18
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Re: I respect your views, but can't agree Re: I respect your views, but can't agree -- Martin Top of thread Archive
Posted by: Craig C. ®
12/22/2002, 13:07:16
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I suspect that this is an area where we will have to agree to disagree.
You say that there is a “pressing need for Abanes' unflattering but meticulously researched book to counter-balance the official LDS false history”. I am not at all sure why you would make this claim as there are already plenty of highly negative one-sided portrayals of Mormonism available, and they have been available for many years.
One of my first exposures to anti-Mormon literature was the Tanner’s Book: Mormonism: Shadow or Reality
This is a full-fledged frontal attack on Mormonism. When I read parts of it as a youth, I quickly understood its aims and recognized that it omitted facts that did not support those aims. I could also see the hypocrisy of the authors in attacking Mormonism while failing to apply the same standards to their own faith (also true of Abanes). This led me to conclude (incorrectly) that the Tanner’s work could be readily dismissed, despite their extensive research and footnotes . Had the Tanners written more honestly – and by this I mean with more attention to providing a complete and total presentation of evidence - both positive and negative - I would have been much more willing to give them a fair hearing and accept the negative.
Regarding Hugh B. Brown, I do not believe he was insincere or spouting “window dressing” when he encouraged of freedom of thought withint he Church.
When he (apparently) said "None of the early revelations of the Church have been revised", it seems possible to me that he spoke sincerely, based on the information available to him at the time.
Here are some Hugh B. Brown quotes I find laudable:
Excerpts from “An Abundant Life”
“At a time when radicals of right or left would inflame race against race, avoid those who preach the evil doctrines of racism.” (Hugh B. Brown: His Life and Thought, pp.259-60)
On the negative side (in my view), he did weigh in against birth control.
You conclude your post with this conclusion about recognizing the positive aspects of the LDS Church… “But to give them an equal footing with the horrendous aspects of the LDS Church is simply not to be candid about the facts.”
Actually, I truly believe that the only truly honest and candid thing to do is to give all facts a fair hearing – to let the chips fall as they may. It is a distortion to dwell exclusively on the negative (or on the positive for that matter).
Regards,
Craig
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Re: advice? Re: Re: I respect your views, but can't agree -- Craig C. Top of thread Archive
Posted by: rdl ®
12/23/2002, 04:23:31
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Is there a book about the history of the LDS faith that you would recommend? One that you feel does give all the facts a fair hearing? I would very much like to find and read one. (not said sarcastically, I'm very serious and would trust your judgement)
Thanks,
rdl
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Re: advice? Re: Re: advice? -- rdl Top of thread Archive
Posted by: Craig C. ®
12/23/2002, 07:52:55
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Your question is a very good one, but, to my chagrin, I can't even think of a book that provides the whole history of Mormonism in a balanced way. Nearly all the books I can think of are highly polarized one way or the other.
There are some books that do a good job with Joseph Smith.
A classic on him is:
> No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith: the Mormon Prophet by Fawn McKay Browdie
From reviews on the Internet, both of the following also sound like good scholarhip (but I have not read either):
> Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Mormonism by Richard Lyman Bushman
> Joseph Smith and the Origins of the Book of Mormon (2nd Edition)
By David Persuitte
Sorry I can't be of more help.Craig
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thank you Re: Re: advice? -- Craig C. Top of thread Archive
Posted by: rdl ®
12/23/2002, 11:22:28
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I've made a note of your other suggestions and will add them to my reading list. Thank yourdl
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Re: thank you Re: thank you -- rdl Top of thread Archive
Posted by: nofaith ®
12/23/2002, 12:07:00
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-Dan
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Pick me! Pick me! Re: thank you -- rdl Top of thread Archive
Posted by: Jersey Girl! ®
12/23/2002, 13:22:12
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I've read several books on Mormonism and I agree with Craig that most come from a position of bias. One that I found interesting was not necessarily a historical account but (hope I get the title right) "Mama, Mormonism and Me" By Granny Geer was so good. It brings out the close warmth of Mormon families while providing a somewhat critical look at the faith. I enjoyed it very much!
Vicki
The God Makers
The Mormon Puzzle....very biased!
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Re: I respect your views, but can't agree Re: Re: I respect your views, but can't agree -- Craig C. Top of thread Archive
Posted by: Martin ®
12/23/2002, 14:10:28
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Again, please understand that I respect your views and find them reasonable and sincere. However, I also believe that honest people can genuinely disagree on this question. And I agree with your assessment that this is probably an area in which we'll have to agree to disagree.
I haven't read all that much (only 4 books and perhaps 60 articles) regarding Mormon origins and history and theology, but I've read enough (excluding Abanes for the moment) to form what I consider to be a reasonably informed opinion that the writers of that material -- be they current Mormons, ex-Mormons, Christian "anti-Mormons", or secular writers -- usually go to some lengths to downplay the dark side of Mormon history and over-emphasize the better side. It remains my opinion that the non-Mormons do this deliberately in hopes of avoiding having the sales-demolishing epithet "anti-Mormon" attached to their books and to win an audience that includes as many current Mormons as they feel possible to reach.
Even Stan Larson's otherwise excellent book, Quest for the Gold Plates, pretty much praised the LDS Church both in his own and in Ferguson's words, even after making it perfectly clear that Joseph Smith, Jr. and the Book of Mormon were frauds! It was so positive and affirmative in its portrayal of the LDS Church that its not out of the range of possibility that it might have proselytizing benefits to the Church for more sophisticated members.
But to me, the massive scale of the frauds of Joseph Smith, Jr. and various subsequent "Prophets" is the determining, prevailing truth of LDS history. You can paint a happy smile on that fraud and various LDS leaders can occasionally say wise things, but the massive fraudulence remains and, in my personal opinion, that's the cardinal truth that must become more widely known. Please remember that I left the Roman Catholic Church because of its long history of intolerable fraudulence and much worse villainy as well, so please note that I'm being as impartial as human psychology allows.
As for Abanes and One Nation Under Gods, I have never seen any other book that includes and covers so much of the darker side -- and from everything I've evaluated personally, accurately so -- of Mormon history. But even Abanes does not paint an exclusively dark picture. Among other things, he not only cites FARMS, he lists them as a "Recommended Resource" (along with rpcman's lds-mormon.com, by the way).
Furthermore, I don't accept that a book -- even a historical analysis -- must be "balanced" unless the author explicitly claims it to be (which Abanes does not), especially if that means the author would be forced to provide space to an outlook or position that he does not share or doesn't believe accurately reflects the predominant stance of institution he's examining. Should the author of a history of the Indian Thugs be required to devote space in her book to presenting the positive side of their religion on pain of having it be called "unbalanced" or "anti-Thug"?
Abanes subtitled his book A history of the LDS Church, not The history. A small point perhaps, but worth noticing.
As for Hugh B. Brown's comments regarding freedom of thought, I still doubt they were considered by Brown to refer to seriously dissenting from Mormon doctrine or official Church history, but even in what I feel to be the unlikely case they were, I'd like to quote rpcman's introduction that suggests what an anomaly Brown's comments were:
Unfortunately for Mormonism, you don't hear talks like the following anymore. The speaker was Hugh B. Brown of the quorum of the twelve apostles. He said these things about 40 years ago. If anyone can find similar thought expressed in public by church leaders in the last 40 years, please send them to me. As near as I can tell though, if Brown was around today, he'd think that the church had entered the dark ages.I, personally, would be surprised if anyone could find very similar thoughts expressed before Brown, either!Furthermore, Brown's speech includes clear weasel words:
You will of course respect the opinions of others but be unafraid to dissent - if you are informed.To anyone capable of reading between the lines, those words make the rest of Brown's speech ring rather more hollow, since any dissent from Church dogma could thus easily be squelched by asserting that the dissenters weren't properly informed. (The reader may also wish to read rpcman's essay: Are Mormons allowed to think for themselves?)And as for Brown's fairly damning words that I cited previously and that you weren't sure were legitimate or accurate, please see this letter of Brown's and then see the graphics: Alterations to D&C (and The 1833 Book of Commandments).
Respectful regards,- Martin
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Re: I respect your views, but can't agree Re: Re: I respect your views, but can't agree -- Martin Top of thread Archive
Posted by: nofaith ®
12/23/2002, 14:49:28
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Brown's encouragment to dissent must be taken in the context of his being an apostle. Obviously, a view that the church was not true, etc., would have been unacceptable to him, so he clearly felt that being "informed" would not lead to total apostasy.
"Don't be afraid to disagree, if you know what you are talking about"--coming from someone whose listeners would consider to be an expert on the topic of Mormonism--is a meaningless encouragment, since any disagreement with Brown or the other apostles would clearly imply a lack of information. Only the most minor points could be debated safely.
Brown almost certainly meant that members should not listen to someone teaching an incorrect doctrine, etc., and sit idly by--rather, they should correct misperceptions, but only if they knew their stuff. I doubt this train of thought would have extended to challenging core doctrines of Mormonism. The sources of the "information" that is required to dissent would include the apostles, so questioning or disagreeing with them was probably not included. Disagreement with Church teachings is impossible, since those teachings are the source of the "inform[ation]."
"If you are informed" sets an ambiguous requirement for dissenting--one that is assessed at the time of dissent. Any claim too wild, any teaching too blasphemous, and you have failed to meet the requirement. It becomes, "If you know the teachings of the Church, don't be afraid to disagree when someone contradicts them." It could easily be thought that Brown was just encouraging members to stick up for the Church's doctrine.
-Dan
Modified by nofaith at Mon, Dec 23, 2002, 14:51:13
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Re: The Occult and Joseph Smith (with note links) Re: The Occult and Joseph Smith (with note links) -- Martin Top of thread Archive
Posted by: nofaith ®
12/21/2002, 12:32:05
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This is an interesting post, which I'm still reading. However, the picture links don't seem to work, for some reason. Perhaps direct links would work, but I'm not sure.
http://geocities.yahoo.com/ also offers web site hosting, and thus files as well (but they unfortunately don't allow ftp). If you already have a yahoo address, it's pretty easy to sign up. This might be a better place to put files like this.
-Dan
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Aarrgh! Re: Re: The Occult and Joseph Smith (with note links) -- nofaith Top of thread Archive
Posted by: Martin ®
12/21/2002, 14:19:45
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Everything was working perfectly there yesterday! Just now when I checked I found the following:
Server RelocationI'm going to give them a few days to sort out their mess before I go to the time and trouble to upload them again somewhere else. The links I provided are as direct as they will allow. Let's hope they can solve their problems...Because of recent problems with our primary server and the support we're receiving at that location, we're relocating our main services to a new platform.
- Martin
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UNHISTORICAL HISTORY Re: Irony - Mormonism and the mythicists. -- mikwut Top of thread Archive
Posted by: Martin ®
12/20/2002, 11:29:56
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UNHISTORICAL HISTORY -- Excerpted from Chapter 18, Part 2
According to former LDS church historian Leonard J. Arrington, "[F]rom its inception the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has sought to leave an accurate and complete record of its history." [16] But what is routinely presented by the church as official "history" has much more in common with well-crafted myths designed to tell uplifting stories about a specific LDS hero or set of heroes. It produces "faith" in church members, but bears little resemblance to historical fact. In 1999, long-time Mormon, Francis Nelson Henderson, a founding member of Comtel (a satellite communications company), publicly announced that he had left Mormonism because his trust in the church had been violated by LDS leaders' disreputable take on what constitutes good history:
[C]hurch policy is that the only Mormon history told should be a so called "faith promoting" history which conceals controversies and difficulties of the Mormon past and present.... [A] policy of changing, retelling, or withholding information, is willful manipulation of my ongoing right to an informed choice. [17]Henderson's observation highlights an ongoing problem within Mormonism. LDS leaders, especially General Authorities and historians, are "not only anxious to forget the past, but actively suppress the activities of would-be researchers in Mormon archives." [18] Few issues trouble Latter-day officials as much as the constant threat of accurate Mormon history being revealed to the general public, potential converts, and/or church members. In his article "Truth and Mistruth in Mormon History," author B. Carmon Hardy additionally observed: "Apart from purposeful misrepresentation, there is also the practice, both past and present, of suppressing historical materials or, if not suppressing them, of discouraging their discovery." [19]Journalist Richard Ostling agrees, having discovered that in official LDS publications sensitive issues "frequently are downplayed, avoided, or denied." [20] Such scholarly sins of omission are accentuated by blatant historical revisionism wherein LDS leaders re-write historical documents, deny that other documents exist, create fictitious historical data, add words to update old revelations so that they conform to current events/knowledge, and delete various sections of divine pronouncements said to have been transcribed perfectly when originally delivered. As a result, truth to Mormons "is not absolute or fixed; it is changeable, flexible, and additive." [21]
Numerous examples of looking at history in a "changeable" truth way is perhaps most pronounced in Mormonism's official History of the Church, supposedly written by Joseph Smith. In reality, the majority (approximately, 60 percent, or more than 2,000 pages) of this multi-volume set of books was composed by LDS officials and historians after Smith's death in an effort to build the faith of church members. Moreover, certain segments of the text that Smith actually did write were deleted in order to cover up embarrassing or contradictory statements. [22]
The behind-the-scenes authors also copied portions of various diaries, journals, and even newspaper articles, then changed them to read as if Joseph Smith himself had written the material (Tables 18.1, 18.2, 18.3) [See the Tables here]. Although such changes were drastic, no notations were added to the published text that would have alerted readers to the many liberties that had been taken with the original manuscripts. This was a flagrant breach of standard protocol for persons producing historical works.
As a result, Mormons perusing the official History of the Church are under the mistaken impression that what they are reading is accurate, original material. Yet this is not the case. For example, two Joseph Smith prophecies contained in the church's so-called history were not even uttered by Smith, but instead, were created after his death in an effort to glorify his accomplishments and confirm his prophetic abilities.
One of the forged predictions is about "a mighty people" (i.e., the Mormons) that would dwell "in the midst of the Rocky Mountains," while the other is a prediction about the political career of Senator Steven A. Douglas (1813-1861, D-Illinois). [23] Although both are impressive, neither one came from Smith. Yet most Mormons today enthusiastically point to them as proof of their prophet's divine powers and his appointment as God's representative on earth.
When carefully compared to the original handwritten documents from which the modern History of the Church was prepared, it seems that more than 62,000 words were either added or deleted, often leading to substantive changes in the meaning of the passages. [26] LDS author Samuel W. Taylor has found that vital facts have not only been omitted from the texts, but sometimes re-written to give a false impression of what took place. [27] Volume six of the History, for instance, contains the minutes from Smith's October 1843 church conference regarding Sidney Rigdon (vol. 6, pp. 47-48). But when compared to the minutes originally printed in the Times and Seasons (vol. 4, p. 330), the revised/modern version reveals an account exactly opposite of what actually happened.
Another tactic utilized by Mormon leaders has been to revise Smith's revelations so as to make the church's history more palatable. Some of the most drastic alterations to authoritative writings-e.g., paragraphs added/deleted, words added/deleted, wording changes to alter a meaning, phrases added/deleted-can be found by comparing sections of Smith's 1833 Book of Commandments with the text of the 1835 republication of these same revelations as the Doctrine and Covenants (Figure 18.1, 18.2, 18.3). Hundreds of changes were made to these revelations. In response to the discrepancies, famous Mormon scholar Hugh Nibley blithely stated: "Revelations have been revised whenever necessary. That is the nice thing about revelation-it is strictly open-ended." [28]
Not all Mormon officials have been so upfront. Apostle Hugh B. Brown, for instance, in a 1966 letter wrote: "None of the early revelations of the Church have been revised." [29] Consider a few of the other declarations made by high-ranking Mormon leaders over the years about Smith's revelations:
Apostle John A. Widtsoe (1951): "There has been no tampering with God's Word.... [T]he whole body of Church laws forms a harmonious unit, which does not anywhere contradict itself nor has it been found necessary to alter any part of it." [30]
LDS President Joseph Fielding Smith (1954): "Inspiration is discovered in the fact that each part, as it was revealed, dovetailed perfectly with what had come before. There was no need for eliminating, changing, or adjusting any part to make it fit." [31]
John J. Stewart (1966): "Joseph would dictate them to a clerk at as fast and steady a pace as the clerk was able to write, maintaining an even flow of delivery, and never altering the words spoken." [32]
This concerted attempt to cover-up significant alterations made to Smith's original revelations actually prompted some LDS officials in the early 1960s to suppress a copy of the Book of Commandments locked in their church archives. At one point Mormon leaders even contacted BYU, telling the school to not allow microfilmed pages of the rare book to be distributed to the public. [33] Eventually, however, a full copy of the revelations in the Book of Commandments was published.
Footnote numbers are found within square brackets. Those notes for scholarly references and citations for the above can be found at:
Tables showing D&C Alterations
- Martin(Corrected the spelling of the author's name: It's Abanes, not Albanes. I get it right most of the time, but I screwed up and then cut&pasted my mistake. I apologize for my error.)
Modified by Martin at Sat, Dec 21, 2002, 10:37:32
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THINKING IS A SIN Re: Irony - Mormonism and the mythicists. -- mikwut Top of thread Archive
Posted by: Martin ®
12/20/2002, 11:30:57
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THINKING IS A SIN -- Excerpted from Chapter 18, Part 3
Most of the academic dishonesty foisted upon church members by LDS scholars and leaders relates to the Mormon notion that all works of history must be "faith-promoting." In other words, books read by Mormons are intentionally designed to build up their faith, not challenge it in any way, especially on an intellectual basis. Since its earliest days, Mormonism has been an emotion-based religion opposed to intellectual, rational thought. Potential converts were told in the 1800s, just as they are instructed now, to "feel" the validity of Mormonism independent of reasoning.
This "feeling," often described as a "burning in the bosom," allegedly is the "witness of the Spirit" (i.e., God) that Mormonism is true. Although the "feeling" is completely subjective, its power over Mormons cannot be overstated. Even when faced with irrefutable facts that undermine the LDS church, a Saint will cling to their "witness" and often resort to simply repeating their personal testimony, as a kind of mantra that helps them sustain a state of unthinking, faith-bolstering denial. They will say something like: "I bear you my testimony that Joseph Smith was a prophet of God, that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is the only true church, and that the Book of Mormon is true."
Such a response also shows obedience to LDS leaders, who have counseled their followers to not only shun anything that might shake their faith, but also to simply not think and obey church authorities. The church-published Improvement Era in 1945 warned:
[Satan] wins a great victory when he can get members of the church to speak against their leaders and to do their own thinking. When our leaders speak, the thinking has been done. When they propose a planit is God's plan. When they point the way, there is no other which is safe. When they give direction, it should mark the end of controversy. God works in no other way. [34]What about being led astray by an erring prophet? Circular reasoning helps alleviate any such concerns. Basically, the Mormon is taught: Since the church's prophet is directed by God, then he cannot lead the church astray. He cannot lead us astray because he is the church's prophet, who is directed by God. As Brigham Young said:The Lord Almighty leads this Church, and he will never suffer you to be led astray if you are found doing your duty. You may go home and sleep as sweetly as a babe in its mother's arms, as to any danger of your leaders leading you astray, for if they should try to do so the Lord would quickly sweep them from the earth [35]
Little has changed since Young made these remarks. Apostle Bruce R. McConkie, for instance, at an October 7, 1984, church conference, announced:No true Latter-day Saint will ever take a stand that is in opposition to what the Lord has revealed to those who direct the affairs of his earthly kingdom. No Latter-day Saint who is true and faithful in all things will ever pursue a course, or espouse a cause, or publish an article or book that weakens or destroys faith. [36]Amazingly, Mormons also have been taught that even if they are told to do something they know is wrong, they should still obey the instruction from their superiors. In 1960, Marion G. Romney of the LDS First Presidency quoted Mormon prophet-president Heber J. Grant, saying:Always keep your eye on the President of the church, and if he ever tells you to do anything, even if it is wrong, and you do it, the Lord will bless you for it but you don't need to worry. The Lord will never let his mouthpiece lead the people astray. [37]Mormon apostle Boyd K. Packer echoed these teachings in 1992 saying: "Follow your leaders who have been duly ordained and have been publicly sustained, and you will not be led astray." [38] Some of the most disturbing instructions about blind obedience came from LDS president Ezra Taft Benson in his "Fourteen Fundamentals in Following the Prophet" speech. His fundamentals for living a righteous Mormon life left little room for independent thought (see this endnote for transcript). [39]For those few who have ventured to take that forbidden step, the ultimate punishment awaiting them is excommunication. At one point in the mid- to late 1990s this drastic course of church discipline was used unsparingly against a cadre of Mormon scholars trying to break free of the intellectual confines into which they had been placed by LDS authorities. [40] Even more significant, many of them had dared to reveal various aspects of Mormon history that church leaders did not want released to the general public. It resulted in nothing less than a Latter-day Saint witch hunt.
Footnote numbers are found within square brackets. Those notes for scholarly references and citations for the above can be found at:
- Martin(Corrected the spelling of the author's name: It's Abanes, not Albanes. I get it right most of the time, but I screwed up here. I apologize for my error.)
Modified by Martin at Sat, Dec 21, 2002, 10:36:37
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Re: THINKING IS A SIN - OH THE IRONY! Re: THINKING IS A SIN -- Martin Top of thread Archive
Posted by: mikwut ®
12/20/2002, 21:54:45
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I begin with the irony of naming your post "thinking is a sin" in an obviously satirical frame of reference and yet you don't offer the slightest bit of thinking yourself, you simply copy from the meatball Richard Arbanes. You then place on me the ONLY burden to have to THINK through the convuluted mess of goop Mormons are constantly barraged with - THEY HAVE TO THINK TO KEEP THEIR FAITH, your post and this forum and the type of NON-thinking that is mimicked and parroted over and over and over PROVES THAT BEYOND DOUBT.
"Most of the academic dishonesty foisted upon church members by LDS scholars and leaders relates to the Mormon notion that all works of history must be "faith-promoting."
This is nonsense. The church itself writes and publishes from a BELIEVING frame of reference - MY GOD how dumb, what is it you expect from the church (ANY) church - Joseph McCabe? OF COURSE they publish "faith-promoting" writings and publications and history - THEY ARE IN THE FAITH.
"designed to build up their faith"
Yes. A noble thing to those of us that have it.
"not challenge it in any way"
False and unsubstantiated opinion, my faith has grown and been challenged enormously by many Deseret Book, Bookcraft and BYU publications, FARMS as well. I have also laughed out loud at many from all of the same. "in any way" should give this one away. My own scriptures exhort me to seeking understanding through "study" AND by "faith" the church understands itself as having the duty for part II (faith) and then exhorts me through scripture to "seek out of the best books" to do the part I (study or secular learning). My father and mother have doctorates, I have 5 other siblings with post-graduate degrees or working towards (my youngest brother is freshman in college)
and it was always encouraged in us. Most of my Mormon friends and acquaintances this is the same."especially on an intellectual basis"
I have no idea why "faith promoting" cannot be harmonious with "intellectual" for I find it very unthinking and unintellectual to wave ones hand at the reality of faith and movements of the spirit - so you don't, big deal we disagree.
"Potential converts were told in the 1800s, just as they are instructed now, to "feel" the validity of Mormonism...."
Yes and no. This is partially correct when it is placed in the proper context. Mormons believe in God, they believe in the spirit of God everyone knows that much. The movement, sense, intuition, apprehension and perception of the epistemological significance that the spirit self-evidently demonstrates to each and everyone of us is often articulated by Mormons with the word "feel", all Mormons and I believe converts clearly understand the context of the word "feel" when it is placed in these phrases and I find it difficult to believe smart and clever skeptics do not.
"independent of reasoning."
This is hyperbole plain and simple. I don't know HOW to seperate my "reasonable" spiritual apprehensions "independent of reasoning".
"This "feeling," often described as a "burning in the bosom," allegedly is the "witness of the Spirit" (i.e., God) that Mormonism is true."
Yes it is the witness of the spirit and is self-evident and self-authenticating basic and primary experience. It comes in many gradients of experience just as our reasoning processes do and is subjected to gross misinterpretation when simplified in this crude manner.
"Although the "feeling" is completely subjective, its power over Mormons cannot be overstated"
It is a powerful experience and we have discussed the subjective/objective dichotomy at great length already.
"Even when faced with irrefutable facts that undermine the LDS church, a Saint will cling to their "witness" and often resort to simply repeating their personal testimony, as a kind of mantra that helps them sustain a state of unthinking, faith-bolstering denial."
I won't deny this practice takes place for many a immature believer, no different than all religions and even cultural customs and practices, why doesn't your strawberry high school grad mention the existence of the opposite within Mormonism as well or does that become too complex for him. If a person raised an atheist were to convert to theism in any variety because of "irrefutable facts" to the contrary of his nonbelief I am sure this paragraph could be reversed. We all have our Mantra's Martin - BOB knows you do. Should I be disturbed if I push you into a corner intellectually and you are left with only being able to say "I trust my reasoning processes and self-evidenct intuitions and know that they are true"? I should hope not if you are rational thinking person.
"Such a response also shows obedience to LDS leaders, who have counseled their followers to not only shun anything that might shake their faith, but also to simply not think and obey church authorities. The church-published Improvement Era in 1945 warned:
[Satan] wins a great victory when he can get members of the church to speak against their leaders and to do their own thinking. When our leaders speak, the thinking has been done. When they propose a planit is God's plan. When they point the way, there is no other which is safe. When they give direction, it should mark the end of controversy. God works in no other way. [34]"
You see Martin, this is where following meatballs UNTHINKINGLY gets you in trouble. The statement soon after being made was recanted as going overboard. The average Mormon today knows nothing of this old statement unless it comes up in anti-mormon polemic such as this and they are forced to look it up and discover the proper context. The same is true for your other simply lifted quotes. They are given at different times and places - for example Boyd K. Packer makes most of his most rigid statements to Church Educators who know the rigid rules they accept and openly understand to be under. Mormons understand that BEFORE they CAN OBEY they MUST THINK and THINK hard concerning the CHOICE the obedience demands, they also understand that they are not obeying MEN but the self-authenticating witness to the spirit that guides them. I have said many times if I am presented with IRREFUTABLE evidence concerning my Mormonism I would in fact leave it. Such simply is not the case though. The most recent DNA understandings put me into "O.K. let's go check this out" mode to find out and they do not REFUTE the faith I believe in any more than your shallow attacks.
"For those few who have ventured to take that forbidden step, the ultimate punishment awaiting them is excommunication."
A common ploy by skeptics. "Punishment" might coincide with your pejoritve and belittling understanding of others faith but it does not coincide with my understanding of MY OWN faith nor do I believe others. I was in fact excommunicated myself about 12 years ago and find nothing of this "punishing" type of nonsense your bannana writes about unthinkingly and unknowingly.
Quickly, concerning the changes in history and revelations. Joseph Smith and the early leaders never placed themselves under the strict institutional code of scholarly writing. Plagarism even outside of Mormonism was common as well. As far as the exommunications for the Mormon scholars go I will say this. There is an extreme apostate writing that whoever is excommunicated for writing it is mere formality - the scholars such as Quinn and the other infamous ones were BYU employees and under commitments they made to the institution that is dedicated to intellectual growth and spiritual growth. They are good scholars they could go to secular universities and publish what they are publishing - why at BYU? BYU has an admitted agenda that is not some mystery so I really don't get the problem here. I knew of BYU's agenda when I was heading off to college myself, and for me, I was more interested in the strict intellectual growth and so I went to other institutions - I really don't see the problem here for THINKING people.
mikwut
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Blah, blah, blah Re: Re: THINKING IS A SIN - OH THE IRONY! -- mikwut Top of thread Archive
Posted by: Martin ®
12/21/2002, 10:32:12
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Now that you're done slavering and ranting as if anyone might find anything credible in your desperate rationalizations, please note that I simply used Abanes' own subchapter heading for the post title. I did not invent either of them myself; I merely used his headings for the post titles.
Furthermore, as I made clear at the outset, none of those words were my own, so your mindless remonstrations against "my" thinking are correctly seen to be incredibly stupid and misdirected. Take it up with Abanes if you like.
As for your laughable "logic", I would certainly agree that thinking of a sort is absolutely essential for Mormons: Thinking of excuses and rationalizations to try desperately to defend their own non-credible belief system to themselves!
- Martin
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*The NOTES are now available again!* Re: Irony - Mormonism and the mythicists. -- mikwut Top of thread Archive
Posted by: Martin ®
12/23/2002, 10:49:43
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The Occult and Joseph Smith (with note links)
Please let me know if you have further problems accessing them.
- Martin
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Re: *The NOTES are now available again!* Re: *The NOTES are now available again!* -- Martin Top of thread Archive
Posted by: nofaith ®
12/23/2002, 12:13:37
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-Dan
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Supplement to D&C changes Re: *The NOTES are now available again!* -- Martin Top of thread Archive
Posted by: nofaith ®
12/23/2002, 12:49:20
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The Perfidous Truth-HatingTrickster Returns Re: Mythical Jesus - A Mythical Idea! -- mikwut Top of thread Archive
Posted by: Martin ®
12/14/2002, 19:01:14
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Thank you most sincerely for your gracious words of praise. It is gratifying to know that although we've been bitter opponents on nearly all of our run-ins here, we're both insightful and perceptive enough to recognize the extent of the other's abilities.
Your return is not surprising. Was lurking in the dark all this time without proselytizing and pummelling your opponents insufficiently satisfying for you? That's fine! All are welcome! I've really missed a keenly intelligent and highly knowledgeable theistic opponent (Bob knows there's none here!), and your intellect and erudition outclasses my own. I estimate that my clinical depression has lowered my IQ in the neigborhood of 70-80 points over the past few years, and my memory is a large-bored sieve. But more's the challenge and thus the fun!
Let it be known, my fellow readers, that my friend mikwut here is a lawyer. And a fine lawyer he must surely be! I wouldn't hesitate for an instant to try to hire him to represent me at trial for any serious crime for which I was truly guilty, for I've seen him at work on these fora and have never failed to have been impressed by his remarkable ability to take a deeply flawed -- most often even completely bogus -- case and turn it into a real tour de force! He could probably have convicted Abraham Lincoln of his own murder! He's a rhetorical master: A syllogistic smuggler and a misdirecting verbal magician of enormous talent and there's just no deterring it. Ladies and gentlemen, we are in the presence of a truly silver-tongued aureate! Be sure to stay alert and duck the sophist shrapnel that will be coming your way!
But while I'm sure that mikwut could convince a drowning man to change his long distance service on the way down, in this particular arena he is utterly outmatched by the honest evidence (and lack thereof), the genuine scholarship, and the plain truth that's allied entirely against him and his desperate and insipid old historicist arguments. The intellectual and scholarly tide has turned and mikwut's left holding a rather foul smelling bag of old tricks that simply can't sustain him. Scholars of the inestimable prestige of Burton Mack and others are publicly dismissing their previous -- if always rather tentative -- tendency to let the old-fashioned credulist pseudo-scholars who believe in a historical Jesus have their way and focus on other, more pressing issues. But no more!
The main sucker-suckering shticks in mikwut's disingenuous apologetic repertoire are desperate denials of both the evidence against his position as well as the profoundly significant lack of evidence supporting his position which would be there for all to see if Jesus had been an actual historical figure. Another oldie but moldy is his boring old routine of "arguing" that if the earlier mythical, theological, and philosophical ideas which formed the raw materials for the manufacture of Jesusian Christianity are not 100% perfect parallels, they couldn't have had any influence at all! All in all, it's pretty sad -- if also sadly amusing -- stuff.
I wonder -- quite rhetorically -- how many days, weeks, or months of mikwut's forsworn absence were spent preparing his many large cluster bombs he then detonated simultaneously, making his attack virtually impossible to react to in a timely manner and thus assuring that his blitzkrieg will seem all the more impressive to the more provincial among us. Hat's off, sir, for your effective military strategy!
- - -
With the niceties behind us, shall we begin?
I'd like to start with your typically mikwuttian story by that fustian old blowhard, C.S. Lewis. Shouldn't you guys find better apologists and give the bum's rush to that self-important prevaricator? Maybe find people with a basic sense of intellectual honesty for a change? I know the field of Christian apologetics doesn't lend itself to people who are inclined to be honest and forthcoming, but really! C.S. Lewis?
Lewis, of course, remains infamous in the circles of honest thought because he vehemently attacked scholars -- even all the deeply committed Christians among them -- for approaching the New Testament stories which he personally felt were not parables with anything less than brainless servility to orthodox tradition. When some far better and more honest scholars than he would ever be saw the allegorical symbology of the New Testament miracle stories (without feeling that they detracted, in their minds, from the basic historicity of the Gospels), Lewis launched broadside after broadside against any New Testament scholarship which didn't come up with orthodoxy-affirming "answers", including the unquestionable veracity of the miracle fables. He was, in the last analysis, a closed-minded intellectual fraud. If he lived in America, his car would likely have borne the fundamentalist bumper sticker: "God said it and I believe it and that's the end of it." Although Lewis would not have labeled himself a fundamentalist (in fact, his opinions are rather slippery and hard to pin down, and there's every reason to think that was deliberate), a great many fundamentalists certainly consider him one of their own!
However, I must say I enjoyed reading of the times he spectacularly contradicted himself! I admit I was especially fond of how even his genteel biblical equivocations bit him in the ass... One of his favorite "arguments" against biblical scholars was that they were inept in their literary ability to distinguish fables from accurate historical record. Lewis placed the Book of Jonah correctly in the category of obviously invented fabulous myth. But his far more knowledgable and intelligent nemeses, clear-thinking people and biblical scholars, pointed out that the Bible reported that Jesus himself accepted Jonah's fable -- including its famously silly fish story -- as factual history! (Well, to put it more precisely, as "historical" as his alleged forthcoming resurrection...)
Disgracefully, the world never heard Lewis' "Oops!" He might have been an apologist, but actual apologies seemed to be out of the question for him.
One more comment on Lewis and I'll leave him and his self-deluded fatuity (I mean after all, according to mikwut, Lewis couldn't even define the term "argument" correctly!) behind us. He insists that excepting the parables, the Gospels are "historical reportage". One is forced to wonder which reporter was direct witness to the scene of Satan carrying Jesus around through the air! Perhaps it was the Chopper Four Eyewitness News team?
The same devastating criticism must be leveled at all who admire Lewis' absurd apologetics or share in his historicist naivete.
- - -The tired old arguments of dishonest anti-mythicists like mikwut have long been utterly demolished in the minds of intelligent and sober-minded thinkers, but unlike mikwut's pretense of viewing me askance for arguing the ahistoricity of the Jesus story, I see his own clearly desperate defense as quite insipidly predictable, especially given his hilariously crackpot boat argument. To refresh the readers' memories, mikwut argued that archaeologists' discovery of a first century boat somehow -- don't ask me how! -- is confirmatory evidence that the New Testament myth is actually historical truth. To clearer-headed thinkers, such an argument is equivalent to asserting that the existence of magnifying glasses in 19'th century London confirms the historicity of Sherlock Holmes! Who but a desperate crackpot would endorse such an argument? No one!
Mikwut proceeds to trot out all the insipid old anti-rational propaganda that the historicist cranks have been spewing for over a century. Ho, hum. They include such howlers as, in his words:
-- "passion of the few"
As if no Marxist died during the October Revolution!
-- "triumph in closed locales"Psychic surgeons still do land-office business in the Philippines!
-- "resistance to modification by subsequent cultures"Let's hear it for the Office of the Holy Inquisition!
-- "uniformity in variegated sources"That's just a ludicrous, flat-out lie!
-- "stretching silence arguments to credulity’s limit"But Satan did really fly Jesus around in the air!
-- depending on outdated, outmoded and already refuted sources and materialsLike the Bible! And blatant fabrications inserted into Josephus! And self-refuting sloppiness of the Annals which were never mentioned until the middle ages! And every other so-called "source" the historicists have ever tried -- unsuccessfully -- to rely on over the years, all of which are either of miserable provenance or actually mock their own claims!
-- "attempting to logically connect it to myth which is not necessarily connected so doubling the errors"No connection required! This is one of mikwut's exceedingly desperate, half-assed strawman ploys -- to mock a claim that no one actually makes!
Mikwut then re-doubles the extent of his anti-rational LIES by claiming that any reference to pious fraud in the furtherance of sincere proselytization efforts AUTOMATICALLY invalidates any argument anyone might bring against his position!!By FAR, the most adroit, sensible, and parsimonious explanation for the utterly inexplicable silence of Paul and the early epistle writers about a historical, biological Jesus and ministry; the total absence of contemporary, extra-biblical references to Jesus or any of even the major events of his alleged life; the cluelessness about any historical Jesus of the early Church Fathers and their complete inability to empirically defend his historicity; along with the shocking incongruity and irreconcilable discrepancies of the Gospels, even the canonical ones (and one must count all of them or none of them if one wants to be intellectually honest); must be that the story of a first century Jesus is a pious myth. A myth that was never intended by its pious creators to ever be considered to represent a biological, historical personage.
Mikwut's desperately impossible and preposterous position boils down to singing to the choir while plugging his ears and loudly screeching to coverup the voices of rational, responsible, credible scholarship. That's all there is to it! He's done the same thing for Joseph Smith and he'd do the same thing for Mary Baker Eddy if he happened to have been born a Christian Scientist.
- - -
The position that the New Testament actually represents the Christian Myth rather than a historical account of empirical events is a rapidly growing new consensus in the field of highest-level biblical scholarship, as can be seen by the recent book by the enormously well respected New Testament scholar Burton L. Mack in his 2001 book The Christian Myth. Pay no attention to mikwut's foolish sophistry tempting the clueless and gullible to the false impression that historicism isn't being handed its hat and being shown the door! The historicist's position has been under fatal assault for more than a century, and it's dead to all but the fundamentalists and the desperately orthodox such as mikwut himself. Even if that weren't the case (and it is), what kind of simple-minded nitwit would be persuaded by mikwut's laughable "argument" that the majority is right merely by virtue of its being the opinion of the majority? Truth -- contrary to mikwut's previously asserted post-modernist leanings -- is NOT DEMOCRATICALLY ELECTED! Does anyone besides mikwut and the post-modernists need to be reminded of that?
- - -
Mikwut's shamefully desperate ploy of mocking the formal credentials that G.A. Wells earned as a young man would be amusing if it wasn't so vile and pathetic. Please note that no respectable scholar on either side of the issue is so moronic as to engage in such despicable tactics, where Wells is more than given his due as a scholar of very real importance and credibility. Mikwut and ultra-conservative fundamentalist Rev. Greg Neal are two people I've seen bash Wells like this, and that the two are in each other's company in this regard frankly doesn't surprise me in the least. Let's also recall that Einstein was a lowly patent clerk when he published his paper on special relativity! Wells' first-rate Germanic scholarship -- he's actually Emeritus Professor of German at the University of London, no small feat -- was absolutely essential to his biblical scholarship because the very best such scholarship was all done in German at the time he entered the field, and the most important and erudite works in the field of the day were only available in German for many years afterward (the English translations were terrible and terribly misleading). Don't let mikwut get away with his contemptible tricks!
As for mikwut's EXTREMELY objectionable OUTRIGHT LIE falsely reporting Wells' claim regarding Q, I'm not surprised at all that he doesn't offer a citation for such a contemptibly bogus assertion. I have Wells' latest books and nowhere does he make such a foolish claim! Note this and what it tells us about mikwut: he will not flinch from falsehood if he feels he needs to bear such before us to win an argument.
Here's what Wells actually says... Please note how very far it is away from mikwut's fanciful baloney, while also noting that unlike anti-rational historicity propagandists like mikwut, Wells possesses that most necessary and laudable characteristic of the truly intellectually honest (like our colleague TLC has amply demonstrated here to his enormous credit): The willingness to change one's mind! Well's writes:
More important than all this, apropos of the gospels, is that Neal ignores the change in my position concerning the traditions on which they drew which is clearly stated in my two most recent books, JL [The Jesus Legend] and JM [The Jesus Myth]. Recent work on Q led me to accept that the gospels (unlike the Pauline and the other early epistles) may include traditions about a truly historical itinerant preacher of the early first century. So it is not true to say, as Neal does, that I deny this. Likewise, my acceptance of recent Q scholarship means that I am no longer asserting that all the traditions about Jesus in Mark must have evolved after the Pauline period -- a position which Neal nevertheless imputes to me. His interlocutor takes him to task for ignoring my change, but is rebuffed with the comment that my new arguments are "LEAST likely", are "not supported by ANY historical evidence" and "violate parsimony, so much so that William of Ockham must have cut himself shaving as Wells was formulating them!"I URGE one and all to read one of Well's responses to his small-minded mikwuttian critics in this essay: G. A. Wells Replies to Criticisms of his Books on JesusThe "law of parsimony" is something to which Neal at every turn appeals in his criticisms. [Sound familiar?] He states it as: "The least complicated argument is most likely to be correct". It would be more accurate to formulate it as: The true account is likely to be the simplest one that does justice to all the relevant evidence. It is usual to suppose, with Neal, that Christianity is most simply understood as arising from a Jesus who preached and worked miracles in Galilee, was baptized by John and died in Jerusalem under Pontius Pilate. My case is that, while some elements in the gospels may have elaborated the career of an actual itinerant Galilean preacher (who was not crucified and certainly not resurrected), the dying and rising Christ of the earliest extant Christian documents cannot be accounted for in this way; and that not until the gospels are these two very different figures fused into one. I cannot here repeat all the details of my argument. They are summarized in the section headed "The Origins and Development of Christology" in JM.
A particular passage is most relevant here, and I shall repeat it here also:
My [Wells'] view of Christian origins is based on the fact that the earliest extant Christian documents (comprising the seven genuine letters of Paul, the deutero-Paulines Ephesians and Colossians, Hebrews, James, 1 Peter and 1, 2 and 3 John) fail to confirm the gospel portraits of Jesus. Only when the gospels had become generally known (i.e. from the early second century) do we find other Christian documents depicting him as they do. This overall disparity between the earlier documents and the gospels, and its abrupt termination from the early second century, is something that many NT scholars have been unwilling to face. Those who have done so have admitted it to be serious. For instance, the Toronto theologian S. G. Wilson -- surely one of Neal’s "real" scholars -- has surmised, with candour characteristic of him, that the whole topic is often "instinctively avoided because to pursue it too far leads to profound and disturbing questions about the origin and nature of Christianity".So much for mikwut's most important but intellectually shameful "arguments" against the views of Wells and myself and others! But let me emphasize here and now that I do not share all of Wells' central opinions; my views stand on their own -- they're guided by Wells and other scholars, but they're not in complete accord with any single one of them. Like Christianity itself, my views are syncretic in origin. But one aspect in which I am largely in agreement with Wells on and that I probably need to make clear at this point is that I do not deny the possibility that the fictional Jesuses of the New Testament (and there is certainly more than one!) were modeled in some part on some biological persons. What I deny is that those Jesuses were actual biological persons (one or many) as they are represented in the NT.As for mikwut's sophomoric, small-minded, and incredibly dishonest bashing of Earl Doherty and others, we've already seen that mikwut will LIE whenever he feels like it to belittle the vast and highly regarded scholarship allied against his childish, painfully conservative and old-fashioned traditionalist views, which few scholars take seriously outside of quasi-fundamentalist circles. Mikwut isn't at all eager to honestly and with genuine integrity tackle the arguments themselves, and in his OP he vapidly resorts to flagrantly deceptive reputation bashing and other anti-intellectual stupidities. Take his lies for what they're worth in intellectual circles: nothing at all.
I have great disdain for the egoTists and credulous wackos such as mikwut and his fellow self-deluded pseudo-scholars for continually spitting out the same regurgitated arguments over and over and over after serious critical scholars gave them a more than fair hearing over the last century, the same disdain mikwut has for honesty and truth and modern science. It is credulous yahooligan belief in its crudest form.
Mikwut's "scholars" would laugh pejoratively at his execrably stupid antics, but I'm reasonably sure that they're influencing the intellectually lazy, anti-scholarly, overly credulous theists here such as Vicki, Dave, Jesse, and Jrmh. Well, that's of no account since they're not willing to research the questions carefully anyway and they'll never have any truck with honest scholarship and so must be considered lost causes in the debate. Mikwut's lies and fatuous crackpottery in the egregiously imbecilic ranting paragraphs that follow are too numerous to bother correcting, and I suggest to the honest thinking reader that they simply not take mikwut's allegations seriously, since they can't be seriously given in the first place. Their just trademarks of mikwut's well-known addiction to sophistry and misdirection.
I'll just point out how hilarious mikwut's assinine remarks about dismissing consensus are considering what a stupid fuss he made about what he believes is the "scholarly" consensus in his opening remarks! And I'll also point out that the highly regarded works by esteemed scholars such as Wells and others (and even less well-known researchers such as Earl Doherty) are just as filled with scholarly citations and references as the ossified, brain-dead "scholars" that the wretched mikwut admires so for their ignorance, closed-mindedness, and blind credulity.
Mikwut's a perfidious anti-rational fraud, and he's not even a very pious one.
- Martin
Modified by Martin at Sat, Dec 14, 2002, 19:48:08
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Entertaining for sure, but adjectives don't..... Re: The Perfidous Truth-HatingTrickster Returns -- Martin Top of thread Archive
Posted by: mikwut ®
12/14/2002, 21:20:06
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Martin,
"Thank you most sincerely for your gracious words of praise. It is gratifying to know that although we've been bitter opponents on nearly all of our run-ins here, we're both insightful and perceptive enough to recognize the extent of the other's abilities."
Thank you as well, and correct you are that I surely respect your well thought out and studied position I just don't agree with it.
"Your return is not surprising. Was lurking in the dark all this time without proselytizing and pummelling your opponents insufficiently satisfying for you?"
I do apologize for the sudden and massive attack. And I will again leave you to your imagination on where I go after I once again leave after this post. Too much time here is unhealthy, for you as well my friend. Your depression, although possibly stayed at bay by your enormous amount of time spent here, is surely not helped by it. I thought the ZLMB could offer me a sort of weening away altogether, but alas one is not challenged there. I simply saw such an overbalance of positions offered on a subject I (even against my admitted better judgment) am familiar with (something this board is very good at) at couldn't resist at least offering the other side.
"I wonder -- quite rhetorically -- how many days, weeks, or months of mikwut's forsworn absence were spent preparing his many large cluster bombs he then detonated simultaneously, making his attack virtually impossible to react to in a timely manner and thus assuring that his blitzkrieg will seem all the more impressive to the more provincial among us. Hat's off, sir, for your effective military strategy!"
As I mentioned, this is a topic I studied at great length years ago, I read a few of the new attempts and mythicist origins that are published, although Freke and Gandy got thrown in the trash instead of placed next to Wells on my bookshelf. With a little cut and pasting and 4-5 hours I posted my argument. I was going to level you with it while I was posting actively and we briefly touched on it, but I set you up by calling you out on it and quite frankly didn't have the time with all the "god-sense" posts to reply to as well. As when you showed such ineptitude concerning why I brought up the boat and can't seem to grasp the arguments for the reliability of the Gospels as relevant here, I threw my hands in the air concerning your unthinking towards the subject.
you desperately grasp at my introductory arguments by stating to following quips:
-- "passion of the few"
As if no Marxist died during the October Revolution!
It is not PROOF Martin, not offered as such, but it is evidence that is considered. Your irrelevant refutation notwithstanding.
-- "triumph in closed locales"
Psychic surgeons still do land-office business in the Philippines!
Repeat above.
-- "resistance to modification by subsequent cultures"
Let's hear it for the Office of the Holy Inquisition!
Your steering the crowd Martin, we are not discussing the Inquisition and it is irrelevant to a historical Jesus.
-- "uniformity in variegated sources"
That's just a ludicrous, flat-out lie!
I have provided myriad respectable sources from scholars to back it up, I am remiss as to how it is a lie.
-- "stretching silence arguments to credulity’s limit"
But Satan did really fly Jesus around in the air!
Again, this is irrelevant and you are desperate by such a silly retort. For the Gospels to historical they don't have to be COMPLETELY real as if they are a news report or police report. They can contain allegory and still be historical.
-- depending on outdated, outmoded and already refuted sources and materials"
[Martin] Like the Bible! And blatant fabrications inserted into Josephus! And self-refuting sloppiness of the Annals which were never mentioned until the middle ages! And every other so-called "source" the historicists have ever tried -- unsuccessfully -- to rely on over the years, all of which are either of miserable provenance or actually mock their own claims!"
I have substantiated my claim. You have not.
[mikwut]"attempting to logically connect it to myth which is not necessarily connected so doubling the errors"
[mikwut]No connection required! This is one of mikwut's exceedingly desperate, half-assed strawman ploys -- to mock a claim that no one actually makes!
You make the claim that a historical real Jesus akin to the Gospel narrative did not exist, even in a lack of supernatural origin. You also make the claim that myth explains the absence of such. The two are both seperate claims and BOTH must be substantiated. A strawman it is not.
[Martin]"The position that the New Testament actually represents the Christian Myth rather than a historical account of empirical events is a rapidly growing new consensus in the field of highest-level biblical scholarship, as can be seen by the recent book by the enormously well respected New Testament scholar Burton L. Mack in his 2001 book The Christian Myth."
Hardly a rapidly growing consensus, it is regurgitated myth of its own.
"The historicist's position has been under fatal assault for more than a century, and it's dead to all but the fundamentalists and the desperately orthodox such as mikwut himself."
It is truly laughable what you call fatal. If liberal Jesus Seminar scholars are what you call desperately orthodox or fundamentalist I guess you could be right. If Robin Lane Fox - an atheist is such, I guess you could be right. If the other scholars I mentioned that in lengthy posts who are nonbelievers are I suppose you could be right. Oh, there not.
[Martin]"Even if that weren't the case (and it is), what kind of simple-minded nitwit would be persuaded by mikwut's laughable "argument" that the majority is right merely by virtue of its being the opinion of the majority? Truth -- contrary to mikwut's previously asserted post-modernist leanings -- is NOT DEMOCRATICALLY ELECTED! Does anyone besides mikwut and the post-modernists need to be reminded of that?"
Now, that is a strawman Martin. Remember it the next time you falsely accuse. I didn't argue that. Truth is not democratically elected and you don't have to convince a theist in this age of that fact. What I did argue and which I find very disturbing that you even offer a strawman accusations against is that when we DO go outside of scholarly consensus or majority opinion caution flags should go up, we should be at our very best. Peer review does not determine truth, but it is a part of the evidence that should atleast be taken seriously.
But, you already read that right?"Mikwut's shamefully desperate ploy of mocking the formal credentials that G.A. Wells earned as a young man would be amusing if it wasn't so vile and pathetic. Please note that no respectable scholar on either side of the issue is so moronic as to engage in such despicable tactics, where Wells is more than given his due as a scholar of very real importance and credibility."
Read Martin, read. I never robbed Wells of any position of a scholar, only a relevant one. He is not a historian, he is not a anthropologist critically studying myth origins. He can be the most important German professor on the planet, I won't take Stephen Hawking's word for a mythical Jesus either and that says nothing about his relevant scholarly credentials to the field of physics.
"As for mikwut's EXTREMELY objectionable OUTRIGHT LIE falsely reporting Wells' claim regarding Q, I'm not surprised at all that he doesn't offer a citation for such a contemptibly bogus assertion. I have Wells' latest books and nowhere does he make such a foolish claim! Note this and what it tells us about mikwut: he will not flinch from falsehood if he feels he needs to bear such before us to win an argument."
Maybe you'll take a couple of your own atheistic brethren at their word. - http://www.positiveatheism.org/mail/eml9138.htm
"But let me emphasize here and now that I do not share all of Wells' central opinions; my views stand on their own -- they're guided by Wells and other scholars, but they're not in complete accord with any single one of them."
Right. I thought I made that same point for you, that makes your position worse because your on an island by yourself in an already minority scholarly opinion for which you are borrowing from.
"As for mikwut's sophomoric, small-minded, and incredibly dishonest bashing of Earl Doherty and others, we've already seen that mikwut will LIE whenever he feels like it to belittle the vast and highly regarded scholarship allied against his childish, painfully conservative and old-fashioned traditionalist views, which few scholars take seriously outside of quasi-fundamentalist circles."
Surprise is all I can say. True surprise. Your reaching is unbelievable. Robin Lane Fox an orthodox, fundamentalist? I simply pointed out the relevance of the education of Earl Doherty and the others for which you are open to challenge. But let's make sure everyone is keeping score, The early Christians were liars, the Church Fathers were liars, the majority of modern scholars regarding this issue are liars, and I am a liar. O.K. Martin. You totally took Trypho out of context to where it is no longer even recognizable yet I still give you the benefit of the doubt that your not lying, just didn't read it yourself, but from one of your "scholars". You don't need to stoop that low if your case is as strong as you claim it to be.
The rest of your post was just repositioning my challenge to you against myself with my own words and a few of your entertaining adjectives added, the difference is you don't cite anything you simply assert and assert and assert. I am more than willing to change my mind - you just don't offer me reason to do so.
Regards good man,
mikwut
Related link: http://www.positiveatheism.org/mail/em19138.htm
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Mikwut the Perfidous Truth-HatingTrickster Evades Re: Entertaining for sure, but adjectives don't..... -- mikwut Top of thread Archive
Posted by: Martin ®
12/15/2002, 16:22:04
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I see you failed to make much logical sense at all in your "rebuttal", and was clearly unable to make any rational dent in my reply. I'm not surprised, of course; the truth-avoiding fatigue, pseudo-scholarly orthodoxy, and faith-affirming ignorance of your position and argument obviously manifest that there's simply nothing you can effectively do about it without resorting to still more outright LIES, misdirection, and sophistry.
I don't believe you when you claim that you'd only been preparing your assault for 4-5 hours! You don't appear to be on a first name basis with the truth. Why do I doubt you told the truth? For the hell of it, I checked my "null-device" email address "noemailhere" and found a letter from you dated November 27 in which you tried to start this very debate with me again! Now, I understand that to hold the hopeless position you do requires an inordinate amount of faith-affirming self-deception, but you need to try harder to keep it from spreading through the rest of your life. Just some advice...
I notice you again mentioned your hilarious boat argument, but I also saw that you didn't bother to actually state it and merely mocked me for laughing at it as it so richly deserves. You know its a stupid argument as well as everyone else does, but since you are in possession of nothing but irreparably flawed and/or laughable arguments, perhaps I shouldn't have expected anything else.
You had previously alleged that the historicity of Jesus was buttressed on several points which you asserted could NOT be answered by the honest truth of the nonhistoricists, and you set about listing them. Let's go through them and your responses...
[mkw]: -- "passion of the few"
[mar]: As if no Marxist died during the October Revolution!
[mkw]: It is not PROOF Martin, not offered as such, but it is evidence that is considered. Your irrelevant refutation notwithstanding.
You're right in your irrelevant strawman argument that your statement cannot be considered PROOF of anything, but then I never claimed it did! But the truth is that you claimed those of us who can see the plain truth of the ahistoricity of Jesus couldn't provide a rebutting answer to it or otherwise show it's of no probative value. But the fact is that passion is cheap and has no relationship whatsoever to the truth and so you and your fellow slaves to orthodoxy should stop trying to argue that it means anything at all viz. the historical truth of your belief. People commit their very lives to false doctrines all the time.
[mkw]:-- "triumph in closed locales"[Mar]: Psychic surgeons still do land-office business in the Philippines!
[mkw]: Repeat above.
Repeat above!
[mkw]:-- "resistance to modification by subsequent cultures"[Mar]: Let's hear it for the Office of the Holy Inquisition!
[mkw]: Your steering the crowd Martin, we are not discussing the Inquisition and it is irrelevant to a historical Jesus.
Bullshit! By FAR the primary reason Christianity wasn't much modified during the bulk of its 2000 year history is that the Iron Fisted Church of Rome vehemently attacked heresy and divergence wherever it occurred, and that was the very task of the Office of the Inquisition. As soon as "modifiers" had the power to act independently of Rome, the splitters divided Christianity into hundreds -- perhaps thousands -- of wildly divergent sects. In NO WAY is that simple truth irrelevant to your ridiculous assertion that Christianity was "resistant to modifications by other cultures".
[mkw]:-- "uniformity in variegated sources"[Mar]: That's just a ludicrous, flat-out lie!
[mkw]: I have provided myriad respectable sources from scholars to back it up, I am remiss as to how it is a lie.
You're still intent on maximum intellectual dishonesty, I see! There's not two scholars or churchmen or historians or texts in all of history who agree with each other "uniformly" when it comes to Christianity and Jesus and the interpretation of the texts! Your assertion of "uniformity" remains a ludicrous, flat-out LIE. On the contrary, the sources contradict or at least differ significantly with each other over and over again, and there are huge divisions among biblical scholars.
[mkw]:-- "stretching silence arguments to credulity’s limit"
[Mar]: But Satan did really fly Jesus around in the air!
[mkw]: Again, this is irrelevant and you are desperate by such a silly retort. For the Gospels to historical they don't have to be COMPLETELY real as if they are a news report or police report. They can contain allegory and still be historical.
Evasion! The story of Satan flying Jesus around through the air was NOT given as a parable or other teaching story but was actually given in the same literary style that the claims of Jesus' birth and ministry and passion are given. The story of Satan flying Jesus around was NOT given to us differently from the rest of what you erroneously consider to be "historical" material. The most logical conclusion to be drawn from those facts is that ALL of the material represents fabulous Christian myth and is not historical.
[mkw]:-- depending on outdated, outmoded and already refuted sources and materials
[Mar]: Like the Bible! And blatant fabrications inserted into Josephus! And self-refuting sloppiness of the Annals which were never mentioned until the middle ages! And every other so-called "source" the historicists have ever tried -- unsuccessfully -- to rely on over the years, all of which are either of miserable provenance or actually mock their own claims!
[mkw]: I have substantiated my claim. You have not.
Ah! "Argument" by empty assertion! You have substantiated NOTHING. Those of us in the rapidly emerging mythicist consensus have rebutted or offered more plausible explanations for EVERY SINGLE CLAIM you hopelessly naive historicists have ever put forward!
[mkw]:-- "attempting to logically connect it to myth which is not necessarily connected so doubling the errors"
[Mar]: No connection required! This is one of mikwut's exceedingly desperate, half-assed strawman ploys -- to mock a claim that no one actually makes!
[mkw]: You make the claim that a historical real Jesus akin to the Gospel narrative did not exist, even in a lack of supernatural origin. You also make the claim that myth explains the absence of such. The two are both seperate claims and BOTH must be substantiated. A strawman it is not.
First, I make the claim that a real historical Jesus as given in the NT did not exist and that the supposition of any historical models are pointless and unwarranted because we can know absolutely nothing about such hypothetical models, and further that they are actually quite unnecessary to explain exactly what we see in the evidence. Second, when you claim that I claim that myth "explains the absence" of something, you need to be far more specific. Otherwise you are misrepresenting me and my position.
Your strawman argument is your suggestion that my fellow ahistoricists and I simplistically "connect" earlier myths directly to the Jesus myth in the sense that they were merely "copied", and that is manifestly false and represents an argument I've never made. The syncretism of philosophy, theology, politics, eschatology, soteriology, non-Christian myth, pre-Jesusian Christian myths, and social experimentation that went into the manufacture of the Jesusian Christian Myth (there were pre-Jesusian Christian myths) was very subtle and complex and for you and your disingenuous fearful orthodoxy-addicted peers to try to invalidate our position by characterizing it as a crude, deliberately deceptive, first-generation myth is a disgraceful strawman argument!
- - -The blatantly deceptive mikwut initially asserted that consensus is of great importance and that since the views I hold are not held by the majority of biblical scholars (which includes a vast over-representation of mikwut's fellow closed-minded, orthodoxy-enslaved yahoos with typically conservative divinity school backgrounds who would never publicly admit to doubts about Jesus' historicity no matter how strong their private doubts were), our views could not possibly be correct. (I found this quite amusing when he later asserted that consensus is unimportant!) He also alleged, quite speciously, that all scholars who doubt the historicity of Jesus are actually no scholars at all and are merely poorly educated clowns who can't possibly know what they're talking about. Mikwut is, of course, counting on his contemptibly dishonest and laughably bigoted assertions to cover over the fact that there's not a single historicist argument that hasn't completely failed to achieve what mikwut desperately needs them to accomplish.
I then pointed out that there's at least one first-rate scholar (there's actually quite a number of them, but in his desperation mikwut must lie to try to humiliate them) against whom not even the supremely arrogant and intellectually shameless mikwut can deploy his juvenile "nyah, nyah" argument on: the enormously esteemed scholar Burton L. Mack, whose 2001 book The Christian Myth makes clear that the quests for a historical Jesus have all failed miserably and that scholars need to get on with the valuable work of trying to reconstruct exactly how the Christian Myth was invented and the historical stages it went through during its development in the early centuries. He makes it plain that all of the historicity arguments have failed and that no sober-minded critical scholar should waste any more time continuing the search but instead get on to the real work of explicating in detail the construction of the Christian mythology.
The self-embarrassing mikwut asserts -- quite shamefully, as usual -- that Mack and others merely "regurgitate" their own myths, but as we've already seen, mikwut is someone with absolutely no genuine respect for the truth. Read Wells and Doherty and Mack and judge for yourselves. You will find that mikwut is simply lying once again, as his fatally flawed position desperately requires him to do.
But as far as "regurgitation" goes, take a look at mikwut's goose-stepping choir singing millennia old orthodoxy by rote and see who's really vomiting forth pre-digested "answers"!
The historicist's position has been under fatal assault for more than a century, and it's dead to all but the fundamentalists and the desperately orthodox such as mikwut himself.
Mikwut replied to that simple (if slightly overstated) observation by claiming that there are some liberals and even atheists who are not fully cognizant of the truths and arguments that the nonhistoricists have revealed over the last century. But what mikwut fails to understand is that the liberals and even atheists who believe in a historical Jesus are embracing a particular -- if very narrow -- orthodoxy. Over and over again I have encountered atheists and agnostics and liberal believers who simply assume the historicity of Jesus as a result of their being born into a Christian culture where questions or doubts about Jesus' existence never -- or extraordinarily rarely -- come up. And when they do, most people simply don't feel (quite understandably) that carefully investigating the issue over a course of months and years to represent a wise investment of their time and energies. There are also liberals and agnostics and atheists who simply grant the traditionalists their position regarding the historicity of Jesus to avoid wasting their time in debates with orthodox theists on such matters and thereby allowing them to move on to issues they feel are more interesting or critical. Thus this orthodoxy -- however narrow -- persists less because liberal-minded thinkers accept a historical Jesus but more because they're not interested in spending time disputing it.
Some nonhistoricists have correctly pointed out that certain atheists have been far more orthodox on that narrow question of Jesus' biological existence that even some conservative scholars. I can only hope against hope that mikwut is not so lacking in understanding as to imagine I believe that atheists are correct in their beliefs merely because they are atheists! Let me assure him that atheists and agnostics can be just as wrong and wrong-headed as any theist. Any atheist, agnostic, or liberal who -- upon investigating the question after reading Wells and Doherty and Mack (and perhaps also the Dead Sea Scrolls and Josephus and the Dialogue with Trypho) -- contends that the New Testament's Jesus was a historical person, simply hasn't done their work with sufficient care. And Robin Lane Fox is no exception.
Mikwut then goes on to claim that consensus is the only sure guide to truth, echoing his well-known post-modernist worldview. Ho, hum. What a crock of orthodox bovine excrement. Outside of empirical science, it is my experience that the majority is usually wrong (at least to some significant extent) about most everything and that the truth is arguably more frequently found in one or another minority view. Atheists are in the minority, agnostics also, so are skeptics and all manner of free-thinker. The American majority praises both George W. Bush and Jesus. Again, the truth is with the minority.
The despicable mikwut then ignores everything I said about Wells and contemptibly tries to dismiss his ARGUMENTS by merely mocking the credentials that Wells earned as a young man. In a just world, mikwut should disgust EVERYONE for his ugly, anti-rational, anti-intellectual fraudulence!
Mikwut's shamefully desperate ploy of mocking the formal credentials that G.A. Wells earned as a young man would be amusing if it wasn't so vile and pathetic. Please note that no respectable scholar on either side of the issue is so moronic as to engage in such despicable tactics, where Wells is more than given his due as a scholar of very real importance and credibility. Mikwut and ultra-conservative fundamentalist Rev. Greg Neal are two people I've seen bash Wells like this, and that the two are in each other's company in this regard frankly doesn't surprise me in the least. Let's also recall that Einstein was a lowly patent clerk when he published his paper on special relativity! Wells' first-rate Germanic scholarship -- he's actually Emeritus Professor of German at the University of London, no small feat -- was absolutely essential to his biblical scholarship because the very best such scholarship was all done in German at the time he entered the field, and the most important and erudite works in the field of the day were only available in German for many years afterward (the English translations were terrible and terribly misleading). Don't let mikwut get away with his contemptible tricks!
And did you notice how the perfidious reprobate mikwut tried to slink out of his absolutely intolerable LIE? By employing the massive disingenuousness for which he is deservedly infamous and pointing to what some unknown and irrelevant people think who are as sadly mis-informed as mikwut is an orthodoxy-subservient liar? Let me cite once again the evidence of his foul intellectual crime. Mikwut writes:
G.A. Wells is a Professor of German and the most complex thinker but he himself has recently backtracked and stated that if the Q hypothesis is correct it would refute his mythical Jesus.Now let's look again at WELLS' ACTUAL WORDS THAT MIKWUT LIES ABOUT!. Please note how very far it is away from mikwut's wretched lie, while also noting that unlike anti-rational historicity propagandists like mikwut, Wells possesses that most necessary and laudable characteristic of the truly intellectually honest (like our colleague TLC has amply demonstrated here to his enormous credit): The willingness to change one's mind! Well's writes:More important than all this, apropos of the gospels, is that Neal ignores the change in my position concerning the traditions on which they drew which is clearly stated in my two most recent books, JL [The Jesus Legend] and JM [The Jesus Myth]. Recent work on Q led me to accept that the gospels (unlike the Pauline and the other early epistles) may include traditions about a truly historical itinerant preacher of the early first century. So it is not true to say, as Neal does, that I deny this. Likewise, my acceptance of recent Q scholarship means that I am no longer asserting that all the traditions about Jesus in Mark must have evolved after the Pauline period -- a position which Neal nevertheless imputes to me.Verdict: Mikwut LIED about a critical matter to make his pathetically desperate case look more plausible than it really is!- - -
Now let's look at this thoroughly detestable comment from the intellectually dishonest mikwut that demonstrates just what an anti-rational fraud he really is! I had written that I do not slavishly conform to each and every opinion of anyone else on this or any other issue, but mikwut then mocks me for my independence of thought!! He writes:
[T]hat makes your position worse because your on an island by yourself in an already minority scholarly opinion for which you are borrowing from.How shameful! I'll tell you what, mikwut: YOU go ahead and wormishly, slavishly conform to every single opinion of ONE other person and argue your miserably dishonest case on that basis alone! What a malevolent fraud you are!- - -
As for mikwut's sophomoric, small-minded, and incredibly dishonest bashing of Earl Doherty and others, we've already seen that mikwut will LIE whenever he feels like it to belittle the vast and highly regarded scholarship allied against his childish, painfully conservative and old-fashioned traditionalist views, which few scholars take seriously outside of quasi-fundamentalist circles.
Mikwut then stoops (he doesn't have far to go) again to lies and laughable strawmen when he foolishly writes: "The early Christians were liars, the Church Fathers were liars, the majority of modern scholars regarding this issue are liars, and I am a liar."
NO sir! Only YOU are a liar! I never claimed the others were, and you know it and hence are deliberately misrepresenting my views as part of your wretchedly dishonest tactics. The early Christians were NOT liars, no more so than any other creators of mythologies. There are no grounds to claim that they ever expected their myths to be interpreted as history, and thus they were absolutely NOT liars! The Church Fathers were people of faith who saw their role as perpetuating a CREED rather than a historical record; they were NOT liars. The sad majority of biblical scholars, of which only a minority are critical scholars and thus the only ones worth listening to, are not liars, they aren't intellectually courageous enough to investigate the truth. I stand with what Wells and Wilson said about them:
My [Wells'] view of Christian origins is based on the fact that the earliest extant Christian documents (comprising the seven genuine letters of Paul, the deutero-Paulines Ephesians and Colossians, Hebrews, James, 1 Peter and 1, 2 and 3 John) fail to confirm the gospel portraits of Jesus. Only when the gospels had become generally known (i.e. from the early second century) do we find other Christian documents depicting him as they do. This overall disparity between the earlier documents and the gospels, and its abrupt termination from the early second century, is something that many NT scholars have been unwilling to face. Those who have done so have admitted it to be serious. For instance, the Toronto theologian S. G. Wilson -- surely one of Neal’s "real" scholars -- has surmised, with candour characteristic of him, that the whole topic is often "instinctively avoided because to pursue it too far leads to profound and disturbing questions about the origin and nature of Christianity".As far as your lies about Trypho go, Dan has answered them with his truly admirably calm reason and outstanding scholarship. You can employ your sophist tricks and verbal gamesmanship with me because you know I'll call you on them and fight rhetoric with rhetoric, but there's no way you can outmaneuver either one of us, even though our styles are as different as wine and vinegar (and I have no illusions as to which is which). Dan has nailed you and your empty rhetoric about Trypho and we can all see that I was telling the truth all along.You accuse me of not citing any evidence in my earlier reply, but everyone can see what a reckless lie that is. Why did you think you could get away with it with everyone watching? All you do is assert and lie, assert and lie, assert and lie. You are a man who has completely sublimated his intellectual conscience in order to prop up your sad, massively deluded faith.
- Martin
p.s.: For the record, when you stop adding to the length of this subthread, I will get to your "arguments" in which you try to say something intelligent. That is why I haven't engaged you on the details of your hopeless argument here.
Modified by Martin at Sun, Dec 15, 2002, 16:57:39
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more nasty adjectives with little substance Re: Mikwut the Perfidous Truth-HatingTrickster Evades -- Martin Top of thread Archive
Posted by: mikwut ®
12/16/2002, 10:11:20
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"I see you failed to make much logical sense at all in your "rebuttal", and was clearly unable to make any rational dent in my reply."
That's what you call a reply, hundreds of adjectives a few quips about the inquisition somehow being relevant to a biological Jesus and calling someone a liar?
"I don't believe you when you claim that you'd only been preparing your assault for 4-5 hours! You don't appear to be on a first name basis with the truth."
This is really ridiculous, but alright. All I said was I took 4-5 hrs to WRITE it. I had clearly stated this as a subject I have studied years ago and have read a few of the books you listed. But what does this have to do with anything? Next time I'll make sure to post my dayplanner for you so we can skip your misdirection ploys.
"For the hell of it, I checked my "null-device" email address "noemailhere" and found a letter from you dated November 27 in which you tried to start this very debate with me again!"
What a coincidence. I thought you were just plain rude. If you call asking you a question about how you relate the church fathers into your position "trying to start a debate with you" alright I thought I was very respectful and would certainly have no qualms about you posting the email here for all to see. Anyway I was discussing the church fathers concerning the apostasy on the ZLMB board, interestly this topic came up concerning that. I made a comment concerning the sophisticated arguments for the existence of the historical Jesus, you can read it and see the date and time stamp here: http://pub26.ezboard.com/fpacumenispagesfrm23.showMessage?topicID=347.topic. But, hey no big deal, I'll remember not to e-mail you if I have any questions.
"but you need to try harder to keep it from spreading through the rest of your life. Just some advice..."
You really need to get a life outside of this forum Martin, just some advice back at you. You also need to stay on topic your misdirected feeble attempts to paint me as something I am not will not make your mythicist arguments any stronger even if you were right.
"I notice you again mentioned your hilarious boat argument, but I also saw that you didn't bother to actually state it and merely mocked me for laughing at it as it so richly deserves. You know its a stupid argument as well as everyone else does, but since you are in possession of nothing but irreparably flawed and/or laughable arguments, perhaps I shouldn't have expected anything else."
I notice your throwing darts wherever they land and hoping some of them with your adjectives will stick somewhere. You can read my reply to Dan concerning the boat argument, I will not address with you the reliability of the Gospels, for as far as I am concerned without ANYTHING else and just the Gospels we are historically warranted in believing in a historical Jesus. But your waving your hand at anything and everything that shows the invisible rationality your are using to make your disdain towards Christianity stronger don't work with me, it is historical study and nothing to do with metaphysical anything.
"You had previously alleged that the historicity of Jesus was buttressed on several points which you asserted could NOT be answered by the honest truth of the nonhistoricists, and you set about listing them. Let's go through them and your responses..."
I mentioned them in introductory paragraphs and didn't go into great detail. If you want we can forget them and move onto the articulation of the arguments themselves O.K. How about this, your right Martin, your right the inquisition is relevant here and the Bolsheviks anything you want.
"First, I make the claim that a real historical Jesus as given in the NT did not exist and that the supposition of any historical models are pointless and unwarranted because we can know absolutely nothing about such hypothetical models, and further that they are actually quite unnecessary to explain exactly what we see in the evidence. Second, when you claim that I claim that myth "explains the absence" of something, you need to be far more specific. Otherwise you are misrepresenting me and my position."
To be honest with you Martin I need not even get to your "complex" and "syncretic" claim because Tacitus alone, or Josephus alone, or any ONE of the many arguments I make, make your sophisticated gymnastics irrelevant concerning the existence of a biological actual historical person. Now I am refuting you concerning your statements where you use the words "biological" and "historical", if you are now backtracking to a more neutral stance of the "Jesus presented in the N.T." well I find that argument about as interesting and symantical as are Mormons Christians and we can stop right here.
"The blatantly deceptive mikwut initially asserted that consensus is of great importance and that since the views I hold are not held by the majority of biblical scholars (which includes a vast over-representation of mikwut's fellow closed-minded, orthodoxy-enslaved yahoos with typically conservative divinity school backgrounds who would never publicly admit to doubts about Jesus' historicity no matter how strong their private doubts were), our views could not possibly be correct."
I knew this was against my better judgment for a reason. Your really tiring sometimes in your namecalling and then hypocritically doing exactly what your calling. I NEVER made such an argument. I simply in introductory paragraphs pointed out the reality simply is that the majority of scholars historically warrant an historical Jesus and the minority doubts that. With that being understood, we should at least realize that and then precede with caution when we are going against scholarly opinion. Please don't inflate that or attempt to characterize it as something else Martin, it's embarassing, your better than that. This is the second time I have had to clear you up on that.
"Some nonhistoricists have correctly pointed out that certain atheists have been far more orthodox on that narrow question of Jesus' biological existence that even some conservative scholars. I can only hope against hope that mikwut is not so lacking in understanding as to imagine I believe that atheists are correct in their beliefs merely because they are atheists!
No, it is a response to feeble attempts to throw rationality and all the relevant rational arguments concerning this issue out the door because Christians have done some of the research. It goes to bias not to a category title making someone correct.
"Let me assure him that atheists and agnostics can be just as wrong and wrong-headed as any theist."
Thank you I am beoming more and more aware of that by each post in this thread you make.
"Any atheist, agnostic, or liberal who -- upon investigating the question after reading Wells and Doherty and Mack (and perhaps also the Dead Sea Scrolls and Josephus and the Dialogue with Trypho) -- contends that the New Testament's Jesus was a historical person, simply hasn't done their work with sufficient care. And Robin Lane Fox is no exception.
Your entitled to your opinion Martin.
"Mikwut then goes on to claim that consensus is the only sure guide to truth,"
What contorting you participate in. Sad it must be.
"echoing his well-known post-modernist worldview. Ho, hum. What a crock of orthodox bovine excrement. Outside of empirical science, it is my experience that the majority is usually wrong (at least to some significant extent) about most everything and that the truth is arguably more frequently found in one or another minority view. Atheists are in the minority, agnostics also, so are skeptics and all manner of free-thinker. The American majority praises both George W. Bush and Jesus. Again, the truth is with the minority."
I suppose my belief that Mormonism is the true religion is now warranted due to its minority status - or maybe we could add up all the agnostics and atheists and Mormons and see who wins. Your being ridiculous, I have no problem with the majority of PROFESSIONAL historians and the majority of PROFESSIONAL anthropologists being wrong about something - do you really think that we simply flip them off as silly Christians with nothing to offer us and then look at just one side? Are you really arguing against this? We simply should procede with caution when we go counter the peer-reviewed, journal discussed ad infinitum PROFESSIONAL consensus historically and anthropologically. Please Martin. That is all I said, move on for God's sake.
"The despicable mikwut then ignores everything I said about Wells and contemptibly tries to dismiss his ARGUMENTS by merely mocking the credentials that Wells earned as a young man. In a just world, mikwut should disgust EVERYONE for his ugly, anti-rational, anti-intellectual fraudulence."
Martin, again for the second time. Wells is a SCHOLAR a wonderful one, the finest in land Martin. He is not a credentialed historian or anthropologist, or ancient religions expert. That is all I said. And concerning what you think I lied about concerning Wells, he has backtracked his stance Martin, do you have his original book, Does Jesus Exist? He has changed many ideas - no problem Martin - quit reading so much into simple factual statements.
"Mikwut replied to that simple (if slightly overstated) observation by claiming that there are some liberals and even atheists who are not fully cognizant of the truths and arguments that the nonhistoricists have revealed over the last century. But what mikwut fails to understand is that the liberals and even atheists who believe in a historical Jesus are embracing a particular -- if very narrow -- orthodoxy. Over and over again I have encountered atheists and agnostics and liberal believers who simply assume the historicity of Jesus as a result of their being born into a Christian culture where questions or doubts about Jesus' existence never -- or extraordinarily rarely -- come up."
Dear Mary and Joseph Martin, stay on track will you? Again it goes to bias Martin. We aren't discussing nor did I bring up those that don't understand the argument or just assume because of the culture they were raised in, we are discussing the INFORMED and your position is in the minority with the INFORMED. I don't believe that makes me right and you wrong, but the fact you can't even just admit that, make a statement that you believe the majority is wrong and move to the arguments makes you appear silly.
"Now let's look at this thoroughly detestable comment from the intellectually dishonest mikwut that demonstrates just what an anti-rational fraud he really is! I had written that I do not slavishly conform to each and every opinion of anyone else on this or any other issue, but mikwut then mocks me for my independence of thought!! He writes:
[T]hat makes your position worse because your on an island by yourself in an already minority scholarly opinion for which you are borrowing from."
Martin, you are not a professional historian, I am not a professional historian. It's great that you think your creative combination of mythicists constructions is "independence of thought for you" - go Martin - to me it is reckless to be in such a position and then make the proof positive statements you make such as "no reason to doubt" when you declare your position.
Your quoting Well's to somehow refute me is ridiculous as well for he and his position are the very one in question here Martin.
"As far as your lies about Trypho go, Dan has answered them with his truly admirably calm reason and outstanding scholarship."
I love it, I genuinely love it. Dan was certainly calm and reasonable and he at least had the decency to present it as a possible interpretation rather than the reckless explicit way you presented your argument, but he is no more correct than you are. I am now certain you have not read Trypho yourself but are simply, yes, regurgitating. Dan at least read it.
"Trypho and we can all see that I was telling the truth all along."
I never accused you of lying, thats your bag remember? I told you your repeating a nonsensical claim made by your mythicist authors you read from, you trusted it unceasingly and parrot it in argument, that is more clear now than ever. You are not lying Martin, you are deceived by others who I think DO know better.
"For the record, when you stop adding to the length of this subthread, I will get to your "arguments" in which you try to say something intelligent. That is why I haven't engaged you on the details of your hopeless argument here."
I think it has a lot more to do with your stubborn nature of not being able to admit in the slightest degree your overly zealous or overbalanced or simply wrong and your deep need to always have the last word. So I will give you another shot at calling me a liar and then wait for your more constructive replies.
Have a good day Martin,
mikwut
Oh yeah,
"I then pointed out that there's at least one first-rate scholar...."
O.K. wonderful. You don't find such a statement the least bit funny? Pitiful maybe?
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More LIES & fatuous nonsense from mukwit... Re: more nasty adjectives with little substance -- mikwut Top of thread Archive
Posted by: Martin ®
12/16/2002, 13:32:25
Author Profile Mail author
As an example of your repeated LIES, you wrote: "And concerning what you think I lied about concerning Wells, he has backtracked his stance Martin, do you have his original book, Does Jesus Exist? He has changed many ideas - no problem Martin - quit reading so much into simple factual statements."
Let's review the PROOF that mikwut LIED previously and LIED again above...
Here is mikwut's first LIE on this specific issue:Now let's look again at mikwut's new LIE on this issue: "And concerning what you think I lied about concerning Wells, he has backtracked his stance Martin, do you have his original book, Does Jesus Exist? He has changed many ideas - no problem Martin - quit reading so much into simple factual statements."G.A. Wells is a Professor of German and the most complex thinker but he himself has recently backtracked and stated that if the Q hypothesis is correct it would refute his mythical Jesus.Now let's look again at WELLS' ACTUAL WORDS THAT MIKWUT LIES ABOUT!. Please note how very far it is away from mikwut's wretched lie, while also noting that unlike anti-rational historicity propagandists like mikwut, Wells possesses that most necessary and laudable characteristic of the truly intellectually honest (like our colleague TLC has amply demonstrated here to his enormous credit): The willingness to change one's mind! Well's writes:More important than all this, apropos of the gospels, is that Neal ignores the change in my position concerning the traditions on which they drew which is clearly stated in my two most recent books, JL [The Jesus Legend] and JM [The Jesus Myth]. Recent work on Q led me to accept that the gospels (unlike the Pauline and the other early epistles) may include traditions about a truly historical itinerant preacher of the early first century. So it is not true to say, as Neal does, that I deny this. Likewise, my acceptance of recent Q scholarship means that I am no longer asserting that all the traditions about Jesus in Mark must have evolved after the Pauline period -- a position which Neal nevertheless imputes to me.Verdict: Mikwut LIED about a critical matter to make his pathetically desperate case look more plausible than it really is!But that's not what you said before, LIAR! You claimed that Wells "recently backtracked and stated that if the Q hypothesis is correct it would refute his mythical Jesus", NOT that he has merely revised his opinion on some other matter as you so blatantly LIE here!!
Of course, you also LIED about Trypho, whose words and overall position denying the historicity of Jesus and asserting that Christians invented Jesus I reported with complete accuracy. You have done NOTHING but lie about that. Hell, you even lied about Dan, who can now see more clearly what a cheat and pseudo-intellectual fraud you are, but I'll let him speak for himself.
You have absolutely no respect for intellectual honesty, mikwut, and will LIE whenever you feel it's necessary (and it usually is) to try to make your truly desperate case.
- Martin
Modified by Martin at Mon, Dec 16, 2002, 15:18:14
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Re: Mikwut the Perfidous Truth-HatingTrickster Eva Re: Mikwut the Perfidous Truth-HatingTrickster Evades -- Martin Top of thread Archive
Posted by: Kyle ®
12/26/2002, 02:47:52
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I found this statement while searching for remarks and responses to and about Wells, and I thought it would be prudent to offer a few remarks here regarding what you've said about Rev. Neal. Specifically, I find it amazing that someone would identify Neal, of all people, as being an "ultra-conservative fundamentalist." Perhaps such a tag is being applied out of ignorance? Whatever the case may be, while Neal may be many things, including very strange, he can't honestly be called a conservative or a fundamentalist. Just ask some of the skeptics and free-thinkers with whom he has debated on AOL in prior years. Most of Neal's views would be best-classified as "liberal." For example:
1. Rev. Neal denies the Fundamentalist concept of Biblical Inerrancy, including the idea of verbal inspiration. Neal's stated beliefs on the subject make it utterly impossible for one to label him a "fundamentalist" by ANY stretch of the definition.
2. Rev. Neal supports and actively engages in the historical-critical and literary-critical methods of Biblical interpretation. He accepts the probable existence of the hypothetical Q document, denies that eyewitnesses wrote the Gospels, and asserts that Jesus probably did NOT say everything that is attributed to him in the Gospels (i.e., he admits that there is much embellishment and theological interpretation projected back into Jesus' mouth by the Gospel authors). He also affirms the existence of the JEDP sources in the Torah, denies the Mosaic authorship of the same, and asserts that most Hebrew prophecy had very little to do with seeing the future and far more to do with the then-current political, social, and moral circumstances. Needless to say, none of these positions can be even remotely considered "conservative" or "fundamentalist" in character.
3. Rev. Neal asserts that many of the Old Testament accounts are to be understood as mythological in nature. For instance, he states that the two Biblical flood-stories are NOT historical, that the creation account should be understood as entirely a myth, and that the Hebrew people evolved in their understanding of the nature of God from being one among many deities to being the only deity. Does any of THAT sound like an "ultraconservative fundamentalist" to you?
4. Rev. Neal believes in Theistic Evolution. That's RIGHT ... he believes in Evolution, not Creationism. His stated position is one of "Intelligent Design," but he doesn't define that the way some theists do; rather, he rejects the use of Genesis in establishing the order or events of creation, and only asserts that God created the universe, and life, through the means and in the manner that the observations of science reveal.
5. Rev. Neal supports the Separation of Church and State and equal-rights for homosexuals, promotes the legalization of Gay marriages, and the ordination of same.
Rev. Neal is an interesting mix of sometimes apparent contradictions. Yes, some of his articles which are critical of skepticism and atheism have been posted by others on a truly ultra-conservative-fundamentalist website, and it is also true that he has been quite critical of Wells and likes to contend with atheists and agnostics on several issues. However, Rev. Neal nevertheless holds the above theological, social, and political positions, all of which clearly label him as a liberal Christian. He has Church-of-Christ, Baptist, and other fundy-brand Pastors as friends, and yet he is an ordained Methodist minister, in good-standing with his church, a graduate of a couple of prestigious, non-conservatve universities, and friends with skeptics, scholars, and Christians of many theological stripes.
He IS a very strange man, but he is in NO way an "ultra-conservative fundamentalist." Check out his own website at www.revneal.org, if you want examples of what he believes. I've been there several times, and it is always an interesting experience. I can't say I agree with everything he says, or even with most of his views, but I think you have unfairly characterized him; and, for that matter, so has Wells.
Kyle
Modified by Kyle at Thu, Dec 26, 2002, 02:56:38
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Re: Mythical Jesus - A Mythical Idea! Re: Mythical Jesus - A Mythical Idea! -- mikwut Top of thread Archive
Posted by: nofaith ®
12/15/2002, 03:49:11
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However, even before I set about to peruse the debate (which, let us remember, is told from the apologist's point of view), I was entirely unconvinced that the quotes you provided somehow negated Martin's assertion that Trypho accepted the existence of Jesus. I will explain why hereafter.
First, mikwut, your derision of Martin's "pychological tactics," whether warranted or not, it misplaced, since you employ such tactics yourself (and quite frequently, I might add).
Martin: "despair of modern historists"
You : "complete embarrassment for skeptics"
You : "it was killed, buried, forgotten decades ago"Martin: "over and over again they laughed out loud"
You : "which is laughable"
You : "I truly laughed out loud"Martin : "most ignore the important work"
You : "tired old shoe of the mythical Jesus"Martin : "dynamite to historicists claims"
You : "egoists and wackos"
You : "smoke and mirrors"
You : "trumped and parroted statement"I could go on, but my point has been made. Your rhetorical question of "how many Oxford or Cambridge scholars do you EVER read with such unabashed language" might easily apply to you. Now, onto the issue at hand.
You suggest that it should be exceedingly obvious to the reader that Martin's quotes are pulled from context. Your more extended quote simply confirms that Trypho was skeptical about Justin's Christ. Calling Justin's belief of [Jesus] Christ a "groundless report" suggests he did not accept even the most basic claims therein. To accuse them of "invent[ing] a Christ" is interesting: it suggests that their entire story about "Christ" was a fabrication. If Trypho had accepted the basic tenets of the Jesus story, he would more likely have said, "You have foolishly accepted the man Jesus as your Christ." Instead, he accuses them of "invent[ing] a Christ" for themselves, failing to acknowledge that the object of their affection even existed.
You then claim that "throughout the entire debate with Justin the historicity of Jesus is taken for granted." I have read the entire debate, and I completely disagree. There is not one point where it is clear that Tryhpo accepts the historicity of Jesus the man. Let's look at your quotes:
xxxii -- "...But this so-called Christ of yours was dishonourable and inglorious, so much so that the last curse contained in the law of God fell on him, for he was crucified."
First of all, it should be easy to see that this sentence might very well have been couched in a hypothetical tone. Numerous times, when debating the issue with believers, I have said, "Jesus did x" and "Jesus did y," as part of the debate. Trypho simply draws from the story that has been given regarding Jesus' life. This does not mean he accepts it as accurate (indeed, we know that he rejects much of it). The single historical point that he appears to accept (although, I believe, for hypothetical purposes) is the crucifixion of Christ. But, a reading of the another section of the debate reveals that Trypho did not definitely accept this as a historical fact:
XXXIX:
Now, then, render us the proof that this man who you say was crucified and ascended into heaven is the Christ of God. For you have sufficiently proved by means of the Scriptures previously quoted by you, that it is declared in the Scriptures that Christ must suffer, and come again with glory, and receive the eternal kingdom over all the nations, every kingdom being made subject to Him: now show us that this man is He. [emphasis added]
Trypho here clearly implies that it is only Justin's belief that Christ was crucified (and resurrected). Surely, if the historicity of Jesus was unquestioned, Trypho would not have needed to emphasize that the crucifixion was merely a part of Christian belief. According to the Bible, the crucifixion was an event of very high profile. If Trypho accepted any part of the historical record, he would have known about this event. Instead of accepting it as accurate, however, he leaves it in the realm of the unconfirmed: "this man who you say was crucified." Not only does this further suggest Trypho did not accept a historical Jesus, it shows that the quote from XXXII does not prove Trypho took the "historicity of Jesus ... for granted."
xx[x]vi -"Now show if this man be He of whom these prophecies were made."
First, the longer version is a bit more revealing:
"Let these things be so as you say-namely, that it was foretold Christ would suffer, and be called a stone; and after His first appearance, in which it had been announced He would suffer, would come in glory, and be Judge finally of all, and eternal King and Priest. Now show if this man be He of whom these prophecies were made."
How does this show that Trypho accepted a historical Jesus? Because he said, "this man"? After reading the entirety of Justin's response, I fail to agree. Justin appeals to the mystical components of the Jesus story (which clearly Trypho did not accept) to prove that "this man" did indeed match the prophecies. He [Justin] makes no attempt to match the historical Jesus with the Christ prophecies, but rather, matches the Christ prophecies with his own beliefs about Christ: "our Christ rose from the dead and ascended to heaven...He who is King of glory may enter in, and having ascended, may sit on the right hand of the Father...." His answer confirms that Trypho was simply asking Justin to match his Christ with the Christ of prophecy (which Trypho also appears to doubt--"let these things be as you say..."). Calling the hypothetical figure "this man" does not suggest that he accepted him as a real person.
xxxviii - "For you utter many blasphemies, in that you seek to persuade us that this crucified man was with Moses and Aaron, and spoke to them in the pillar of the cloud; then that he became man, was crucified, and ascended up to heaven, and comes again to earth, and ought to be worshipped."
Once again: "this crucified man". But, as I have already shown, Trypho did not accept that such a man existed or that such an event had occurred, having referred to him as the man whom Justin [and Christians] claimed was crucified. Trypho's intent in referring to him as "this crucified man" was probably to mock Justin for believing God could be reduced to such a state. It's not as if Trypho and Justin were standing next to the cross, and Trypho was pointing at him saying, "this crucified man...." There is nothing to suggest Trypho's meaning was not purely hypothetical.
xxxxix [XLIX] -- And Trypho said, "Those who affirm him to have been a man, and to have been anointed by election, and then to have become Christ, appear to me to speak more plausibly than you who hold those opinions which you express. For we all expect that Christ will be a man [born] of men, and that Elijah when he comes will anoint him. But if this man appear to be Christ, he must certainly be known as man [born] of men; but from the circumstance that Elijah has not yet come, I infer that this man is not He [the Christ]."
Trypho's point, as I understand it, is that it would be more plausible to claim Christ was a man than to claim Christ was God. He was responding to the following statement from Justin:
"Now assuredly, Trypho," I continued," [the proof] that this man [149] is the Christ of God does not fail, though I be unable to prove that He existed formerly as Son of the Maker of all things, being God, and was born a man by the Virgin. But since I have certainly proved that this man is the Christ of God, whoever He be, even if I do not prove that He pre-existed, and submitted to be born a man of like passions with us, having a body, according to the Father's will; in this last matter alone is it just to say that I have erred, and not to deny that He is the Christ, though it should appear that He was born man of men, and [nothing more] is proved [than this], that He has become Christ by election. For there are some, my friends," I said, "of our race, who admit that He is Christ, while holding Him to be man of men; with whom I do not agree, nor would I, even though most of those who have [now] the same opinions as myself should say so; since we were enjoined by Christ Himself to put no faith in human doctrines, but in those proclaimed by the blessed prophets and taught by Himself."
In the American edition of "Ante-Nicene Fathers", footnote 149 (above) in "Dialogue of Justin" offers an alternate translation for "this man" as "such a man." This is the only time the alternate translation is offered, and without checking the original, I can't say how often it would have been accurate. The phrase, "this man" is certainly kinder to those who believe Trypho accepted the historicity of Jesus, but then, the translators were Christians. Thus, I think we should be careful to not interpret the use of this man as acceptance of existence.
None of Trypho’s other arguments make any sense if Martin’s contortion were valid such as the argument that Trypho makes parallel many other Jews, that the body of Jesus had been removed to refute the empty tomb argument.
Please state where Trypho ever makes this argument. I have yet to find it.
In CVIII, Justin accuses the Jews as a whole of making such an argument, but nowhere that I am aware of, does Trypho make such an argument. Justin, in the middle of a long tirade of accusations against the Jews (during which Trypho is allowed to say nothing), accuses them [Jews] of sending messengers to the world to proclaim that Jesus preached a "godless and lawless heresy," and that his body was stolen from the tomb. But Trypho himself never refers to Jesus so directly, but instead constantly refers to Christian beliefs about Christ and whether they are compatible with the scriptures.
Let me finish by stating that I personally find it irrelevant whether Jesus existed or not. Surely a man by the name existed at some point in time (heck, I know a guy named Jesus--Latino). To me, all that is important is whether the Bible is an accurate record. If it is, Jesus existed and was what he claimed to be. If it isn't, it matters not whether he existed, because we have no accurate record of his doings. Because the Bible simply cannot be accepted at face value with all of the mystical occurrences and clearly pro-religious style, every single event must be independently verified before it can even be considered plausible. I don't really care whether a real person was the foundation of the Bible myths, or whether the person himself was contrived as well. However, I do find it very significant that so few have anything to add to the already abbreviated story, and that I cannot find one trustworthy source to confirm anything about the Biblical account.
-Dan
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Hungry Are the Damned Re: Re: Mythical Jesus - A Mythical Idea! -- nofaith Top of thread Archive
Posted by: Alf Omega ®
12/15/2002, 06:36:17
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Puff away, mikwut. What hidden context awaits us now?
Modified by Alf Omega at Sun, Dec 15, 2002, 06:59:15
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lol Re: Hungry Are the Damned -- Alf Omega Top of thread Archive
Posted by: nofaith ®
12/15/2002, 06:41:42
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Re: Mythical Jesus - A Mythical Idea! Re: Re: Mythical Jesus - A Mythical Idea! -- nofaith Top of thread Archive
Posted by: mikwut ®
12/16/2002, 00:51:18
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It is a pleasure to forum meet you and thank you for the dialogue.
"For the record, this is not an area that I have researched extensively. I say this, not for forgiveness in error, but rather to inform. Before Martin's comments, I really hadn't studied Trypho much at all. Thanks to your comments, mikwut, I endeavored to educate myself on the subject.
I am pleased to be the impetus of your deepening research.
"However, even before I set about to peruse the debate (which, let us remember, is told from the apologist's point of view)"
I told it from such a point of view, but remember Martin has voiced it for some time on the forum and as of late from my short reading it seems to dominate as if it has clearly been settled so I simply offered refutation. Also remember, your point of view is the "apologist's" to me.
"First, mikwut, your derision of Martin's "pychological tactics," whether warranted or not, it misplaced, since you employ such tactics yourself (and quite frequently, I might add)."
Agreed. Conceded. You betcha. I apologize my good Dan if I implied that I was innocent of such a charge. For I readily admit, I have a bias, an agenda, I use persuasive speech and argument. I in fact find it amusing that my atheistic opponents so often shrug from admitting the same. I am not shy about it at all.
"I could go on, but my point has been made. Your rhetorical question of "how many Oxford or Cambridge scholars do you EVER read with such unabashed language" might easily apply to you."
Indeed it could, but now to my point. I wasn't counter positioning the rhetorical question against Martin via myself, rather Martins stated scholars contra my historicist scholars. In that regard the unabashed language is certainly telling and unwarranted. Here, on an internet forum I could care less either way. But I have no problem being respectful and cordial in disagreement where I prefer to swim, or in swimming in shallow (or deep if you prefer) waters with Martin where such rhethoric is supposed to be medicating to my brainwashing.
"Now, onto the issue at hand."
Indeed, Martin is a big boy and can defend himself.
"You suggest that it should be exceedingly obvious to the reader that Martin's quotes are pulled from context."
Indeed as well.
"Your more extended quote simply confirms that Trypho was skeptical about Justin's Christ."
Yes, I concede he is skeptical about the "Christ", the "Messiah", he is a Jew. But nowhere does he explicitly state skepticism for "Jesus" the biological being.
"According to the Bible, the crucifixion was an event of very high profile"
According to who? You? A commonplace crucifixion in a backwater province was "an event of very high profile"? I simply disagree.
"To accuse them of "invent[ing] a Christ" is interesting: it suggests that their entire story about "Christ" was a fabrication."
"Christ" agreed, as in the title, and the subject matter being discussed. Your searching for a further implication is to me unwarranted and baffling.
"If Trypho had accepted the basic tenets of the Jesus story, he would more likely have said, "You have foolishly accepted the man Jesus as your Christ." Instead, he accuses them of "invent[ing] a Christ" for themselves, failing to acknowledge that the object of their affection even existed."
I will go back and make an even longer list if you would like. As far as I am concerned I am arguing the self evident. Dan, if you and I are arguing over was Lincoln the greatest president and I don't believe Lincoln existed wouldn't I make that claim explicit or would I expect it to be found hidden within implication and strange verbiage to the contrary? Would I even bother as to the "meanings" of such fictional happenings such as miracles, the crucifixion, his preaching, his riding on an ass to fulfill prophecy if he DID NOT EVEN EXIST?
Secondly, and for ALF, here's another puff. So we don't have to argue over an infinite regress of interpretation let's just assume for the moment that the quotes I first provided for which you responded are the ONLY (this is not the case by any stretch of the imagination) ones that could be interpreted to a assumed biological Jesus. Well, ironically, if anyone's real existence is most assuredly extremely doubtful it is Trypho's. I would be surprised if Martin argued differently. (O.K. I take that back) Justin is a philosopher and common and normal to the style of philosophy he employs a fictional dialogue companion created for Justin to defend his position against is Trypho. So why would Justin create an implicit argument that no Jesus existed or even keep that open and not even have an argument in response to it - ala Martin's thinking on the topic?
Concerning the empty tomb I was referring to Chapter VII. Even if Trypho himself was not making the argument would he not simply respond to the tirade that no Jesus existed akin to the common trilemma argument theists make and atheists simply respond with another option? Would hidden implication that Trypho just explicitly doesn't state so be acceptable?
"Let me finish by stating that I personally find it irrelevant whether Jesus existed or not."
Obviously, I often find myself reading long dialogues concerning matters I find irrelevant all the time.
"Surely a man by the name existed at some point in time (heck, I know a guy named Jesus--Latino). "
I agree such a man named Jesus existed.
"To me, all that is important is whether the Bible is an accurate record. If it is, Jesus existed and was what he claimed to be."
I agree. I also find the Bible to be historically reliable. But that's the rub isn't it. I find it historically reliable from empirical evidence AND the epistemological significance of the witness of the spirit concerning scripture and its message. Martin scoffs at the latter, and I assume you don't deem it as significant. That is why I find all of the minute detail that archeology has confirmed concerning the gospels to be relevant, such as the boat argument that Martin found so silly but doesn't seem to grasp.
"If it isn't, it matters not whether he existed, because we have no accurate record of his doings."
Well, I am a believing Mormon Dan so I do have other records, but please my fault let's not right now.
"Because the Bible simply cannot be accepted at face value with all of the mystical occurrences and clearly pro-religious style, every single event must be independently verified before it can even be considered plausible."
Ridiculous to say the least. Your setting an impossible standard. There are mystical elements concerning Constantine and the historical record, do you dismiss his existence or doubt it at all until we have independently verified the cross floating above him the air? Alexander, Atilla I could go on and on all are replete with mystical happenstance in the records we have of them but where do ever ask for "every single event must be independently verified before it can even be considered plausible"? Considered plausible that a man existed as recorded? Nonsense.
"I don't really care whether a real person was the foundation of the Bible myths, or whether the person himself was contrived as well."
Interesting. I do, I care a lot.
"However, I do find it very significant that so few have anything to add to the already abbreviated story, and that I cannot find one trustworthy source to confirm anything about the Biblical account."
You will have to elaborate. Do you mean concerning Jesus' existence, the gospel narrative, to mystical elements? Jesus' existence is not a mystical anything, it is no different than me or you and is simply empirical - just like a boat. If we can verify minutia of of existences within the text plausibility for the person Jesus, then his existence becomes plausibly extremely high.
Again Dan, a real pleasure. Please keep throwing punches I do enjoy it.
kind regards,
mikwut
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Re: Mythical Jesus - A Mythical Idea! Re: Re: Mythical Jesus - A Mythical Idea! -- mikwut Top of thread Archive
Posted by: nofaith ®
12/16/2002, 03:07:29
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I appreciate your response. I think you may be misinterpreting some of my comments, and on others I will just have to disagree. Let's go to it.
I told it from such a point of view, but remember Martin has voiced it for some time on the forum and as of late from my short reading it seems to dominate as if it has clearly been settled so I simply offered refutation. Also remember, your point of view is the "apologist's" to me.
The debate in question was that of Justin's with Trypho. It was told from Justin's point of view. I mention this only to point out that it will almost certainly favor Justin's side of the argument. How frequently, when recounting an argument one believes himself to have won, does he accurately recount the points made by the other side? It's a bit of an unfair standard, I realize, but we would expect Justin to dramatize the dialogue in his favor.
According to who? You? A commonplace crucifixion in a backwater province was "an event of very high profile"? I simply disagree.
It was probably the most significant event of Jesus' life, if true. Everyone who knew anything about Jesus would have known about it. According to Matthew 27, all of the chief priests and elders gathered to accuse him, and he was presented before a "multitude" gathered for a feast, to be freed in place of Barabbas (a "notable prisoner"). Was it high profile to the whole world? Of course not. Was it high profile for the Jews? According to the Bible, yes! It would have been unrealistic for someone to know the story about Jesus in the "backwater province" without being familiar with this event. To challenge the crucifixion is to challenge the historicity of Jesus, because it was an important event that should have been easily verifiable through other means. Of the more intimate moments recorded in the Bible, we would not expect Trypho's ready acceptance. But of the public execution of the person in question, we would.
"Christ" agreed, as in the title, and the subject matter being discussed. Your searching for a further implication is to me unwarranted and baffling.
If the biblical account is accepted, it would have been Jesus himself (and his closest followers) who claimed he was Christ. If this account were accepted by Trypho, we might expect him to say something like, "You foolishly accepted Jesus' messianic claims." Instead, he accuses Christians of inventing a Christ. That is essentially accusing them of making him up. Christians would have had no need to "invent a Christ" if they were simply following Jesus--he had already done that for them. He also accuses them of accepting a "groundless report"--what report did Trypho consider groundless? I am not searching for a "further implication"--it is right there. Trypho accused Christians of accepting a "groundless report" and "inventing a Christ." Justin's response that they had "not believed empty fables or words without any foundation" demonstrate how seriously he took the claim. I think the dialogue clearly implies more than questioning the messianic role of Jesus (which Trypho already clearly doubted), but also attacks the historicity of the "report."
Dan, if you and I are arguing over was Lincoln the greatest president and I don't believe Lincoln existed wouldn't I make that claim explicit or would I expect it to be found hidden within implication and strange verbiage to the contrary?
Actually, I think the answer is "no." I often discuss Jesus with my father, and although I do not believe he existed, I do not always point that out. If you were to say, "The US has accepted a history with no basis in reality, and you have invented a President for yourselves," I would probably consider that to be a censure of the historical record, meaning that you don't accept anything in it. If I consider the whole history false, I do not need to point out that I don't believe a particular person in the record existed. If it is a "groundless report," that covers everything.
So why would Justin create an implicit argument that no Jesus existed or even keep that open and not even have an argument in response to it
I would probably agree that Trypho could very well have been invented. As I say, the argument is pretty one-sided, and told from Justin's point of view. Why would he invent that argument? First of all, it allows him to insert a testimony about the accuracy of the account. But I don't believe he did make it up. The point of apologetics is to respond to real arguments. If Justin did invent Trypho, it gave him an unfair advantage in the debate. But this doesn't prevent him from responding to real concerns that had been voiced. Why make up criticisms of Christianity when there were hundreds to be found? Apologetic literature needs to respond to claims that the readers might encounter. So Justin, even if he did invent Trypho, could still have been responding to a real argument.
Concerning the empty tomb I was referring to Chapter VII. Even if Trypho himself was not making the argument would he not simply respond to the tirade that no Jesus existed akin to the common trilemma argument theists make and atheists simply respond with another option? Would hidden implication that Trypho just explicitly doesn't state so be acceptable? [Chapter VII has nothing to do with this...do you mean CVIII?]
Your argument for the non-existence of Trypho answers this perfectly--Justin was just responding to popular arguments against Christianity. Those several paragraphs are complaints against Jews for their unfair accusations, and Trypho doesn't even try to respond. Personally, I can't believe anyone would have just sat there and listened to such a long tirade, but that's just me. Again, if I say the whole Bible is myths, do I really need to state that I don't believe Adam existed? It should be obvious, IMO.
Ridiculous to say the least. Your setting an impossible standard. There are mystical elements concerning Constantine and the historical record, do you dismiss his existence or doubt it at all until we have independently verified the cross floating above him the air? Alexander, Atilla I could go on and on all are replete with mystical happenstance in the records we have of them but where do ever ask for "every single event must be independently verified before it can even be considered plausible"? Considered plausible that a man existed as recorded? Nonsense.
You misunderstand. I did not say everything in the Bible would have to be verified for me to believe Jesus existed. I said, "every single event must be independently verified before it [the event] can even be considered plausible." What I mean (and have now clarified) is that I find the biblical account to be impossible to believe in toto. If I don't accept the resurrection, why should I accept the crucifixion? The same amount of evidence is available for both, IMO. This should be taken in context of me saying I find Jesus' existence irrelevant. I'm not setting a standard for believing Jesus existed, I'm setting a standard for accepting the Bible as a historical record.
"Considered plausible that a man existed as recorded? Nonsense."
The record states he was born of a virgin after the "power of the Highest overshadow[ed]" her, that a new star appeared to fortell his birth, that he was diety, that he did many miracles and taught some principles, was murdered for it, was resurrected and reappeared to his followers, and rose up to heaven in their presence. Is it "nonsense" to say that the "record" should be taken with a grain of salt? It is replete with mystical events from beginning to end, and those events directly relate to his birth, death, and yes, very existence. The question of whether he "existed as recorded," for Jesus, cannot be so easily answered.
Jesus' existence is not a mystical anything, it is no different than me or you and is simply empirical - just like a boat.
Wrong. See above. Everything about [the Bible's] Jesus' is mystical. If a person named Jesus existed, but the biblical account is false, then for all intents and purposes, the Bible's Jesus didn't exist!. Mystics explains his birth, most of his life, and much of his death. Without a mystical Jesus, you aren't left with much Jesus at all. In spite of this, if some historical evidence could be given of the crucifixion, the parables he taught, the fights he had with Jews, etc., I would accept that a real person was at the root of the Bible myths. This, by the way, is what the original debate was about. But my argument is that it is irrelevant whether a real person was at the root--I only care if the biblical Jesus existed. To know that, we would have to verify much more than the historical components.
If we can verify minutia of of existences within the text plausibility for the person Jesus, then his existence becomes plausibly extremely high.
Ok. Do it. Then we can debate those issues.
Nice talking to you.
-Dan
Modified by nofaith at Mon, Dec 16, 2002, 03:16:34
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(aside mikwut) Re: Mythical Jesus - A Mythical Idea! -- mikwut Top of thread Archive
Posted by: Jersey Girl! ®
12/15/2002, 13:42:21
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Just a brief note to tell you how good it is to see you posting here! I actually read through all of your lengthy posts and part way through Martin's. I'll lurk my way through it as the two of you proceed. Once again, I'm glad to see you here!
Vicki
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Darr, where do you fall on this issue? Re: Mythical Jesus - A Mythical Idea! -- mikwut Top of thread Archive
Posted by: Fer-de-lance ®
12/16/2002, 13:17:12
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Re: Darr, where do you fall on this issue? Re: Darr, where do you fall on this issue? -- Fer-de-lance Top of thread Archive
Posted by: Martin ®
12/16/2002, 16:34:28
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I just wanted to step in and suggest a very few books for you so as to allow you to make an informed judgement of your own...
Earl Doherty's: The Jesus Puzzle. Did Christianity Begin with a Mythical Christ?: Challenging the Existence of an Historical Jesus
G.A. Wells': The Jesus Myth
Burton L. Mack's The Christian Myth: Origins, Logic, and Legacy
- Martin
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Re: Darr, where do you fall on this issue? Re: Darr, where do you fall on this issue? -- Fer-de-lance Top of thread Archive
Posted by: Darr ®
12/18/2002, 07:30:06
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Q for Mikwut Re: Re: Darr, where do you fall on this issue? -- Darr Top of thread Archive
Posted by: Fer-de-lance ®
12/18/2002, 11:02:20
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I don't have anything to add to this discussion per se as it's all quite a bit over my head.
If I'm understanding the mythicist position, we simply can't say that any book or fragment of the NT in reference to Jesus be considered historical, not to say that a man never existed that at least some of the NT accounts are based on.
So my questions for Mikwut: Is the historicist position that all the accounts in the NT are factualy based on a real historical figure or that only some of them are? While it's been a few years, I have read from some scholarly commentaries of the NT written by what appeared to be libral scholars (I wouldn't be able to remember any names). It seemed like if there were any consensus, they tended to argue that there was in fact a man Jesus who's life and teachings were embellished as time went on (or as they put it, how the "kerygma" evolved). So for instance, Mathew would be fairly solid, Paul would be pushing it, and John would be really changing things around. Would these kind of liberal scholars be considered historicist (I'd guess yes)?
In your own historicist view, which portions of the NT would you consider as historically trustworth? The crucifiction? Jesus' appearence to thomas? The virgin birth? Jesus as the incarnate logos? It would help me quite a bit to understand your position if I had some concrete examples of factual vs. fictional portrayals of Jesus.
Modified by Fer-de-lance at Thu, Dec 19, 2002, 00:34:37
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Re: Q for Mikwut Re: Q for Mikwut -- Fer-de-lance Top of thread Archive
Posted by: mikwut ®
12/19/2002, 06:36:30
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Good to talk to you. You ask:
"If I'm understanding the mythicist position, we simply can't say that any book or fragment of the NT in reference to Jesus be considered historical, not to say that a man never existed that at least some of the NT accounts are based on."
This is the first semantical contortion the mythicists present us with. It is a serious reason why they have not, are not and will not be taken as seriously as Martin is pleading they should be or even are in his scholarly fantasy land. You are correct when you say "we simply can't say that any book or fragment of the NT in reference to Jesus be considered historical" is the mythicist position, but, I have a problem when you add, "not to say that a man never existed that at least some of the NT accounts are based" because now you are squarely in the historicists ballpark. This is a historical question, not a metaphysical one, not a theological one. It is my opinion that the whole enterprise is based on a turning apologetics on its head move by some atheists. Instead of doing the real work of attacking Christianity at its foundation it attempts to undercut the whole thing by dismissing the whole existence of the founder. If your second phrase was part of the mythicist position (which Martin is not unlike others in his convenient switching around to add "complexity" to his position) then there is no reason to question it all? Why have a problem with Josephus, why have a problem with Tacitus, Pliny, etc. it might be neat trivia to point out you could possibly interpret them as forgeries and conspiricies but why POSITIVELY believe and actively teach and write on it? The exact same stance of cultural and foreign influence into Christianity can be had, and is had by many a scholar that still thinks Wells is a meatball. I don't argue against this semantical gymnastics akin to Are Mormons Christians, where all the mythicist does is whittle Jesus down to nothing buttery, there has been a liberal movement in this regard for years. I argue his "Existence", and that is what Wells, and Doherty and the rest of Martins pals are arguing as well, and I take it what Martin means when he uses the word "biological".
The Christian does build and construct a foundation both historically and metaphysically upon a historical figure and Christianity is NOT Christianity without one.
"Is the historicist position that all the accounts in the NT are factualy based on a real historical figure or that only some of them are?"
The historicist position is simply that a person of Jewish heritage did in fact preach for example the Sermon on the Mount, Charity, and was in fact Crucified and others claimed him to have risen from the dead. The position includes the most liberal to the most conservative of scholars. The historist accepts the evidence outside of the N.T. as warranted and valid for accepting the existence of such a person. Look at it this way. I am remiss to find much of anything in my LOEB Library that does not include magical, mythical, wild or bizarre happenings and beliefs. THIS WAS 2000 years ago!!! Think of Constantine's Cross, Atilla's witch, (hell, Joseph Smith for that matter) the stories and legends accompany all the historical figures we have record of. We don't dismiss the record of EXISTENCE because we find mythical language or stories or happenings. We don't doubt the existence of the figures because we don't have a introduction to all of the records concerning them that explicitly states "HE Biologically existed in space and time". So with that said, the historicist position here is not "what does Jesus' existence MEAN" but simply was there a Jesus at all? Wells and Doherty love to mix those two issues into a confusing heap of nonsense. IF he existed then we can THEOLOGICALLY move forward and the existence is telling for the actual theology. See my post to Martin regarding mystery religions where he has done this exact thing, I will be posting it tonight. He is now offering scholars that I wouldn't dare put in the category of Wells and Doherty, they are HISTORICIST scholars not mythicist. They all accept a biological Jesus. For example, if this same issue were being had concerning Joseph Smith rather than Jesus of Nazareth Brent Metcalfe and myself (the disparity I think you are clearly aware of) are BOTH squarely in the historicist camp and Martin offering Brent's naturalistic theories says nothing to whether the man Joseph indeed existed. Heck, Martin and I might find pretty solid agreement, maybe just disagree on order and dating and such, if we were just discussing "influence" and "borrowing" - but when you add the historical question of existence it dismisses reason and the whole historical enterprise to find yourself in Martin's bannana land.
Hope this helps a little,
mikwut
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Re: Q for Mikwut Re: Re: Q for Mikwut -- mikwut Top of thread Archive
Posted by: Fer-de-lance ®
12/19/2002, 10:47:35
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Well, I'm off to Utah for a couple weeks. Hope you all have a good Dec. 25--and 26th.
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The Quest for a Historical Jesus has Failed Re: Mythical Jesus - A Mythical Idea! -- mikwut Top of thread Archive
Posted by: Martin ®
12/17/2002, 11:48:27
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Although it's just another one of his many falsehoods, mikwut has accused me of not providing any citations at all to support my views. For some peculiar reason, for example, he refuses to consider this essay which I encourage all of you to read: G. A. Wells Replies to Criticisms of his Books on JesusTo further put the lie to his accusations and his desperate attempt to try to invalidate the exceptional credibility of the views I hold by employing fallacious ad hominem "arguments" against the scholars who have advanced the ahistorical position; and to demonstrate undeniably that my views are based on this very best New Testament and related historical scholarship; I will now provide an excerpt from Burton L. Mack's 2001 book The Christian Myth: Origins, Logic, and Legacy. Dr. Mack, for many years Professor of Early Christianity at the highly esteemed Claremont School of Theology, is almost universally held in the very highest regard among New Testament scholars of all stripes. He is the author of such highly regarded books as: A Myth of Innocence: Mark and Christian Origins, The Lost Gospel: Q and Christian Origins, and Who Wrote the New Testament?: The Making of the Christian Myth
Please note as you read what follows that Mack is specifically addressing those in the New Testament "guild" who are still stuck in one or another form of historicism, and writes the following from that perspective as if it was his own in the way that we've seen one or two people fail to grasp. But the truth is that he does NOT hold a historicist position, and if I read him correctly elsewhere in his book, he never had professionally held any historicist position.
I have not used block quotes or quotation marks, but please understand that except for bold emphasis (which I've added), every word that follows are Mack's:
Journalists and producers usually report on the phenomenon by comparing the views of scholars with those of churchmen, theologians, and the average Christian. The difference between the scholars' historical Jesus and the Christ of the gospels imagined by the average Christian is usually portrayed as radical and sensational. That, of course, has created consternation. And since neither the guild of New Testament scholars nor the media have been able to adjudicate differences among the many profiles of Jesus at the level of historical criticism, the differences are always explained in terms of the personal attitudes of the scholars themselves toward Christianity and the church. Thus all of these views of and about Jesus, including the various scholarly portrayals, are treated as personal opinions if not "faith statements," and there is no way for the American public to know whom to believe or what to think.
At the End of the Quest
I want now to offer four criticisms of the quest for the historical Jesus, especially as it has been pursued in recent American scholarship, and then suggest a better approach to the examination of Christian beginnings. (1) A first criticism is that the quest has not produced any agreement about a textual data base from which to work. The textual units used for this or that profile change from scholar to scholar without any agreed-upon theoretical framework to adjudicate the differences among them. This is a serious indictment of the guild of New Testament scholarship. The guild pretends to be an academic discipline, but in fact resists the pursuit of a theoretical framework and the accompanying rules of argumentation necessary for coming to agreements about matters of data, method, explanation, and replication of experiments or research projects. These are foundational matters for an academic discipline. To resist them indicates that something else of importance must be driving the energies of the quest for reasons other than academic. Thus it is the case that most reconstructions of the historical Jesus have started with prior assumptions, unexpressed, about the importance of a certain kind of Jesus. With this assumed profile in mind, textual material has then been collected in its support. Thus, in the case of sorting through the sayings of Jesus, the Jesus Seminar used criteria such as the principles of "dissimilarity" and "most difficult reading" on the assumption that sayings coming from Jesus must have been unique, novel, without cultural precedence, and therefore catching, surprising, important, and capable of changing the way people thought (and think!). This means that a certain kind of Jesus was assumed as the measure for distinguishing "authentic" sayings from later attributions. This is clearly circular reasoning, and even if the assumption of Jesus's novelty were correct in some respect, it would require additional argumentation to support that rationale. Crossan's criterion of "triple attestation" requires scholarly agreements about being able to delimit three early, completely independent textual traditions, agreements that are simply not present in the current state of New Testament scholarship. And even Crossan has not been careful about applying his rule of three, as for instance in the privilege granted to the parable of the good Samaritan for which there is only one, very late textual tradition (Luke). In the cases of Horsley, Sanders, Fredriksen, and others, the lack of control over the database requirement is even more egregious. If there is no agreement about what texts count and how to turn them into data for historical reconstructions, it means that the quest cannot be thought of as an academic discourse within a scholarly discipline. There are no rules for conducting research in the quest for the historical Jesus; there is no common, agreed-upon basis for debate about theories of memory and mythmaking. Proposals of all types are brought down to the level of personal opinions, explained by brief personal profiles of the scholars involved and left there. Naturally, those opinions tend to prevail in the popular mind of the guild and the public that are most congenial to the traditional ways of imagining Christian origins.
(2) A second criticism is that none of the profiles proposed for the historical Jesus can account for all of the movements, ideologies, and mythic figures of Jesus that dot the early Christian social-scape. We now have the Jesuses of Q1 (a Cynic-like sage), Q2 (a prophet of apocalyptic judgment), Thomas (a gnostic spirit), the parables (a spinner of tales), the pre-Markan sets of pronouncement stories (a lawyer for the defense), the pre-Markan miracles stories (an exorcist and healer), Paul (a martyred messiah and cosmic lord), Mark (the son of God who appeared as messiah, was crucified, and will return as the son of man), John (the reflection of God in creation and history), Matthew (a legislator of divine law), Hebrews (a cosmic high priest presiding over his own death as a sacrifice for sins), Luke (a perfect example of the righteous man), and many more. Not only are these ways of imagining Jesus incompatible with one another, they cannot be accounted for as the embellishments of the memories of a single historical person no matter how influential. Thus the link is missing between the historical Jesus as reconstructed by scholars and the many figures of Jesus imagined and produced by early Christians. Since the quest for the historical Jesus has been pursued in the interest of explaining Christian origins, this missing link is a very serious consideration. It means, in fact, that the quest has failed. The object of the quest has purportedly been to remove the fantastic and miraculous features of the Christ myth and gospels from the "real Jesus of history," but the more important problem for explaining Christian origins is to account for the diversity of mythic claims about him. No reconstruction of the historical Jesus has done or can do that.
(3) A third criticism is that the link between the teachings of Jesus on the one hand and the story of his crucifixion on the other is missing. None of the scholars that start with the sayings of Jesus has ever been able to account for the crucifixion of Jesus on the basis of those teachings. This means that something is wrong. The teachings and the crucifixion should make sense when put together, but they do not. This is a very serious criticism of the quest. It is also a very serious criticism of the narrative logic of the gospels where the teachings and the crucifixion are in fact interwoven. Only two of the questers for the historical Jesus have dared to tackle this one. Crossan's study of the "gospel story of the death of Jesus" (Who Killed Jesus?, 1995) is a large accumulation of historical and cultural data in the interest of arguing that many details of the crucifixion story, especially those details that suggest Pilate's innocence on the one hand and the complicity of "the Jews" on the other, are not history but "Christian propaganda." This looks at first to be a good start toward a recognition of the gospel accounts as mythmaking. But Crossan is not interested in pursuing that question. What interested him were present day hermeneutical issues dealing with Christian anti-Semitism. Thus his study begs the questions of (1) whether the story of the crucifixion was based on fact, and (2) whether the reasons for killing Jesus had anything to do with his activity as a "peasant preacher," the portrait Crossan had painted earlier in his reconstructions of the historical Jesus. The book is therefore a clever tour de force and a potentially deceitful arrangement of smoke and mirrors. Although it argues against the historical plausibility of detail after detail in the gospel account, the outline of the book follows the gospel story and thus leaves it in place as the narrative account the reader continues to have in mind. The strategy here is similar to that of Crossan's book about Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography (1994), a book that marks episode after episode of the gospel story as implausible history, yet leaves the gospel outline in place as the way to imagine Jesus's "biography." Worse yet for the Who Killed Jesus? book, even the details held to be implausible are sensationalized by re-descriptions taken from the social and cultural histories of the time external to the gospel framework. The "fact" of the crucifixion is left in place as certain even if still in need of explanation (!), and the problem of accounting for the crucifixion is left at the level of the reader's imagination of a temple incident that, though admittedly implausibly provocative, nevertheless must have triggered the entire crucifixion scenario. Thus the reader is left with the impression that something of the sort must have happened, crucifixion and "resurrection" included, and that it was these events that generated the Christian religion.
Sanders's book, referred to above, is more honest in that he struggles valiantly to work out the logics of the various rationales and misunderstandings that "must" have converged in the decisions and behaviors of those who played a role in the event as storied in the gospel account. But neither Sanders, nor Crossan, or any other scholar in quest of the historical Jesus, whether working primarily with the teachings traditions or the narrative logic of the gospels, has been able to connect them in a convincing account. This must mean that the textual data for reconstructing the historical Jesus are inadequate or have been wrongly construed, or that the texts available for a reconstruction of the historical crucifixion are inadequate or wrongly construed. What if both sets of data are inadequate and incompatible because they are the products of early Christian mythmaking?
(4) A fourth criticism is that the publication of books about the historical Jesus as well as the public discussion of them has assumed a purpose for the quest that is unreasonable and ill-conceived. That purpose has been to rectify and rejuvenate Christian faith and self-understanding. Christians approach the question of Jesus and Christian origins as a seriously definitive enterprise. That is because Christian mentality, especially in its Protestant variety, locates the message, authority, events, and power upon which the Christian churches draw precisely at the moment of origin, and that moment has always been defined by the appearance of Jesus "in human history." The conventional view is that, by recall and ritual, Christians can strike once more the magic flint that ignited and can reignite the Christian vision and faith. The problem for the historian and for the quester of the historical Jesus is that the Jesus of importance for the Christian faith is the Jesus as portrayed in the gospel story.
The scholarly approach to Christian origins is critical with respect to the gospel accounts in the New Testament. The quest for the historical Jesus and his teachings is an attempt to reconstruct the "real" Jesus behind the gospels. Scholars have thought of this effort as a requirement for intellectual honesty in the face of the extravagant and mythic features of the gospels, and therefore as a helpful correction or revision of Christian origins. But Christian mythic mentality is not thereby called into question. It functions still in the hope that the true, originary core of the Christian vision or revelation can be found at the beginning in the person of Jesus before the gospels were written. Many new questers, such as Funk and Borg, have expressly stated that they would like their portraits of Jesus to substitute for the gospel picture and thus make it possible for Christians to be followers of Jesus without the entanglements of conventional Christianity. Many are the Christians who have wanted to believe them. The problem is that it was not and is not the historical Jesus whom scholars are able to reconstruct and imagine that created, creates, and sustains the Christianity that made Jesus such an important figure in the first place. It is the Jesus Christ of the gospels, creeds, myths and rituals of the Christian religion that resides in the collective imagination and that influences social and cultural attitudes. As Kenneth Woodward, editor of Newsweek, said in a Reuters news service interview, his concern was that "[The leaders of the historical Jesus movement were] weakening what is remarkable about him. His social teaching is not that remarkable and diluting him into a kind of 1960s revolutionary is not interesting. What is interesting is that he says, `Not my will but thine be done.'" How is that for putting the Jesus Seminar and company in their places? How is that for the final line on what it was that Jesus said that matters? How is that for the confidence of a major critic and editor in the self-evident truth of the gospel story? It has apparently not dawned on Woodward, or on any major journalist I know of, that the quest for the historical Jesus started with and is rooted in a scholarly consensus about the mythic aspects of the New Testament gospels. But that apparently does not matter. Reading a book about the historical Jesus is not enough to erase the gospel portrait. The gospel portrait continues to be the narrative source for imagining the historical Jesus even when the reconstruction of the historical Jesus is set to challenge the gospel story. If we want to render a cultural critique, it is the relationship of the Christ of the gospel story to the cultures that pattern our social constructions that needs to be addressed. Skirting the narrative gospels to get "back" to the historical Jesus will not work. No reconstruction of the historical Jesus can account for the narrative gospel in the first place, or challenge the narrative gospels and the portrayal of Jesus they present in the popular imagination. The current quest for the historical Jesus does not raise questions about the supposed reasons for the importance of the historical Jesus. It does not raise questions about the effective difference Christianity makes as a social presence and cultural influence in our world. It has not asked what it is about the Christian gospel and religion that is inappropriate, inadequate, troubling, or even dangerous as we face the social and cultural issues of our time. New Testament scholars have not found a way to broach, much less discuss questions such as these in public forum. The quest for the historical Jesus actually avoids these questions. It seeks, on the model of the Protestant reformation, to leapfrog over the "wrongheaded" myths and rituals of the Christian churches to land at the beginning where the pure, clean impulse of an uncontaminated Jesus can rectify and rejuvenate Christian faith. That is mythic thinking with an apron-string attachment to Christian mentality. It will not produce a scholarly account of Christian origins. And it will not produce a rejuvenated (Christian) spirituality unbeholden to the gospel accounts.
Changing the Focus
This means that we need to start over with the quest for Christian origins. And the place to start is with the observation that the New Testament texts are not only inadequate for a Jesus quest, they are data for an entirely different phenomenon. They are not the mistaken and embellished memories of the historical person, but the myths of origin imagined by early Christians seriously engaged in their social experiments. They are data for early Christian mythmaking.
- Martin
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