Jesus was Myth

[AmbiguousGuy]

But you make no mention of this person, and you can't. Because nobody has more than quite unreliable information on the author. What you do instead is treat the author and the text as equivalent to Smith and the Book of Mormon, when....

Nah. That's just your confusion. I don't know why you can't seem to follow my simple arguments, but I guess I need to leave that lie.

1) There is absolutely no reason to believe that the Book of Mormon would have inspired a following without the movement's leader (and everything we know about such movements tells us it wouldn't have)
2) We know how influential Smith's actions were in not only establishing the movement but in maintaining it and doing so in such a way that it still exists
3) We know that the Jesus cult existed before Mark was written and we know from a contemporary of Jesus who tells us of things this Jesus did (such as eating with his followers, being betrayed by one, etc.)
4) We have absolutely no evidence whatsoever that the author of Mark was at all influential other than as an author (i.e., he is not comparable to Smith except via a faulty and illogical analogy)
5) We have plenty of evidence that no author of any text was equivalent to Smith, because (among other things) we find two other authors using Mark and another source, a fourth set of authors (disciples of a disciple) producing another one, and all in the first century.

Absolutely irrelevant to my argument, but I'm getting used to that. I'll probably just start ignoring these off-point sermonettes in the future.

In fact, everything we know points to your analogy as completely and utterly flawed as you point to a sectarian leader who authored (according to non-Mormons) a text, founded a movement, and as both leader an sole author was able to sustain this movement. Yet you point to this while comparing it to an unknown author of a text which sometimes formed part of a series of texts considered to be authoritative, and no leader of a movement at all. Furthermore, the earliest texts which became canonical pre-date Mark.

Nothing to do with my argument. You've lost the logical thread of it.

Well, let's see. I have a background in discrete mathematics (i.e., various logic systems), I use formal languages for programming (again, logic), and I use mathematics for modelling systems among other uses (again, an extension of logic), and not only do I have a background in languages and linguistics, it was a central focus of the lab I worked at (i.e., the neural processing of concepts, words, language, etc.). So, although physics is merely a hobby (like history), the rest is not just something I have studied but something I work with in numerous ways constantly.

I would love to comment on this but will have to pass. I'll just say that I'm a bit startled and perplexed by your claims of having studied linguistics. Remember the time you exclaimed to me that I was using words to mean what they don't really mean? (Or something like that.)

My freshman language professors would have slapped your hand for saying a thing like that.

 

[AmbiguousGuy]

Within thirteen years of the publication of the Book of Mormon, Joseph Smith was dead at the hands of a mob. His followers were being driven out of their homes whererever they settled. For several years prior to Brigham Young succeeding Joseph Smith as President of the LDS Church, no single individual was in a position of leadership. Yet the Church, even in those difficult early days, continued to grow. One would think that, with everything the Church had working against it, it would have simply died out with the death of Joseph Smith. How do you explain that it didn't even come close to doing so?

Smith had already made the Huge Claim. People want to believe in something beyond themselves. They need meaning. It's often more important than worldy things.

We are born adrift in this world. Tell me a Big Story about how the world is organized and my place and duty within it, and I'll follow you all the way to Utah. Might even wade out into the Pacific on your coat tails.

 

[Katzpur]

Smith had already made the Huge Claim. People want to believe in something beyond themselves. They need meaning. It's often more important than worldy things.

We are born adrift in this world. Tell me a Big Story about how the world is organized and my place and duty within it, and I'll follow you all the way to Utah. Might even wade out into the Pacific on your coat tails.

Lots of people tell Big Stories and make Huge Claims. After they die, the Big Stories and Huge Claims fade into oblivion. I'm not saying that the fact that Mormonism didn't do so is proof that it's what it claims to be, but I am saying that it has appealed to a wide cross-section of people worldwide over a nearly two hundred year period. Even if I were not a Mormon, I'd have to admit that this implies that it is its teachings more than its founder that people are drawn to.

 

[LegionOnomaMoi]

Nah. That's just your confusion. I don't know why you can't seem to follow my simple arguments, but I guess I need to leave that lie.



Absolutely irrelevant to my argument, but I'm getting used to that. I'll probably just start ignoring these off-point sermonettes in the future.

Think about the origin of many religions, and I think you'll have to acknowledge that The Big Lie is the best and certainly a sure way to kickstart things. The Big Lie. It works.

Whoever decided to place the Christ/messiah in 30 CE Jerusalem, in my opinion, told the Big Lie and created a new religion.

The problem with using years of subjective observation to understand religion (setting aside for now the inherent biases necessarily involved with this) is that it is impossible to observe the thousands of years of religions and cultures which were around before you. That requires at the very least some significant familiarity with what we know about religious, spiritual, and/or ideological movements, thanks both to historical studies and the social, cognitive, and behavioral sciences.

The fact is that you aren't just wrong about how "religions" start, you're using the culturally biased conception of religion that has actually started religions to make claims about how one religion started. Religion in Greece, Rome, Egypt, Babylon, ancient Judaea, and pretty much every culture in the ancient world understood that religion was not about stories, myths, beliefs, or most of the things that the concept "religion" is today. The stories were for entertainment. The mythology collections that are still published today rely mainly on those like Ovid who wrote comical accounts of received myth that he altered just as the original Attic playwrights had centuries before and the Homeridae before that.

Religion was primarily about practice, and during Jesus' day we have perhaps an unparalleled level of various religious practices and deities freely incorporated, adapted, combined, etc., from just about every current or formerly major power in Eurasia all throughout the Roman Empire. The one exception, however, was the Jews (the original atheists followed by the next atheists the Christians).

Although Judaism is widely believed to have borrowed concepts from other cultures which caused it to take the monotheistic form it did (much like Christianity's use of Greco-Roman philosophies), the Jews did not incorporate other deities, did not incorporate other myths/stories, and didn't regard their stories as entertainment but as a vital part of their self-understanding as a people.


This "big lie" model of yours is based upon a view about the relationship between stories and religions. And it fails to hold for almost every religion that ever existed, because precious few have even had systematic religious beliefs, let alone a founding story.

So while you "explain" the 300 years it took for this exciting story to "catch fire" (i.e., for Christians to be Christians without being executed for it) by your cultural elitism that fits well with your model in how nicely it coincides with the elitist armchair historians of the 19th century, the truth is that nobody thought the story in Mark was particularly exciting. We do have the pagans on record saying the entire Jesus tradition was less exciting than basically all other religious stories, but nothing to support your view.


So you trot out an analogy to support your conception.

Smith finding the tablets = Mark placing JC in 30 CE.

Smith made the Huge Claim to start Mormonism. Mark made the Huge Claim to start Christianity.

Now, we know that before Mark Paul had already established "churches" and was writing to them, and we know that Christianity requires a Jewish matrix because the "Christ" would be utterly meaningless for non-Jews. The problem is that
1) The messiah was never supposed to be a godman, and it took a very long time before it's clear that Christians equated Jesus with god (and even longer for them to figure out how this was supposed to work)
2) The messiah was supposed to restore Israel, not become executed.
3) The messiah was supposed to be historical.

So here is this Christ-Cult that Paul is spreading around, which is too pagan to be Jewish and too Jewish to be pagan (and persecuted by both) about a godman messiah that was supposed to be historical and not a godman, and the author of Mark somehow is equivalent to Smith because Mark founded Christianity.

Only there is no parallel, as I showed. In the one case, we have a movement that is so typical in its structure it is known not only across disciplines but even across discipline types (i.e., both humanities and the sciences). We have a founder who authored a text and established a movement. It's textbook.

Then we look at Mark. Here the founder is an unknown author writing during a time when texts weren't trusted and even among Christians and even after all four gospels we know that both oral traditions and the desire to hear the Jesus tradition from the disciples of Jesus' disciples (or their disciples) remained. Here we have no single text, and not even a single type of text. Here we have a movement that wasn't founded but that (if you were correct) fundamentally changed from the non-Jewish non-Pagan Christ cult into the Jesus-as-historical version. The evidence? Your ignorance of history and Hellenistic religions and the fact that you think Smith is somehow equivalent to an anonymous text in some amorphous sense that is entirely consistent so long as we are relying on your unsupported model gleaned through years of biased observation as a scholar of the heart.

Everything you've offered as evidence, from how religions start in general (and two specifics) to how ancient cultures conceptualized religious practices vs. religious stories is utterly without support and completely incorrect.

So you don't bother either recanting or dealing with how completely inaccurate your little analogy and your "big lie" approach turns out to be, you insult my knowledge of logic, my reasoning, my knowledge of languages, along with multiple fields and the thousands of scholars who have or do work in these.

Nothing to do with my argument. You've lost the logical thread of it.

Right.

Remember the time you exclaimed to me that I was using words to mean what they don't really mean? (Or something like that.)

You're going to have to be more specific than that if you want me to know what you are referring me. If this is just another insult used to defend your position, as it appears from this:

My freshman language professors would have slapped your hand for saying a thing like that.

then clearly it doesn't matter. Of course, language professors aren't necessarily even linguists (most aren't), and some linguists are prescriptivists, but all that is irrelevant. First, modern linguistics was (unfortunately) founded by a guy who eradicated prescriptivism of one type only to base much of many successive linguistic models on another: speaker competency/linguistic competency. Also, had you gone on in your language studies you might have come across terms like register which would make your hypothetical "language professors'" reactions nothing more than you once again speaking of things you don't understand because you haven't ever studied them. Which would be fine, were it not for how quickly you write off those who do study the things you don't (and how wrong you'd know yourself to be had you their years of study rather than your years of observation bias coupled with the predictable irrationality of the human cognitive system).

 

[LegionOnomaMoi]

It contains an admission that Jesus deniers were out and about, doesn't it?

No. Because οἱ μὴ ὁμολογοῦντες Ἰησοῦν Χριστὸν ἐρχόμενον ἐν σαρκί means something like "the people who profess/believe/state with conviction [that] Jesus Christ didn't come/exist/come as one/arrive in the flesh".
ὅτι πολλοὶ πλάνοι ἐξῆλθον εἰς τὸν κόσμον, οἱ μὴ ὁμολογοῦντες Ἰησοῦν Χριστὸν ἐρχόμενον ἐν σαρκί· οὗτός ἐστιν ὁ πλάνος καὶ ὁ ἀντίχριστος|hoti polloi planoi exelthon eis ton kosmon, hoi me homologountes Iesous Christon erchomenon en sarki· houtos estin ho planos kai ho antichristos

The lexeme ὅτι/hoti is causal, in that it serves in part to explain the "cause" (reason) for the lines immediately prior. It could be translated as "because". πολλοὶ πλάνοι/polloi planoi is the subject (nominative plural), and could be translated as "many who mislead" or "the many liars" or something similar. The main verb exelthon (3rd singular aorist active indicative) means something like "have come" and is followed by the PP "into the world". Altogether, it simply explains that many liars are now around. The next line tells us what they say that makes them liars. I already covered that, but now I can state that the subject of the line is a plural participle (Greek used participles in ways English cannot) which refers to those who deceive and means something like "the ones who assert". What they assert is that Jesus, who came in the flesh, didn't come in the flesh. It absolutely does not say that he didn't come or otherwise appear on Earth.

A fairly common belief (at least relative to other early Christian beliefs) was that Jesus only appeared to be human, and thus didn't have flesh. That's why 2 John uses the synecdoche en sarki, meaning "in human bodily form". The refutation isn't that he didn't come to earth, or that he didn't come as a human (i.e., as one who appears human), but that his bodily form wasn't human. That's what 2 John is responding to: the concept that Jesus did not come in human bodily form, not that he didn't come as (one who appears to be) a human, and certainly not that Jesus didn't come into the world but was some mythic godman, which would make the whole line nonsensical.

 

[LegionOnomaMoi]

Who would have preserved the writings of those accusers and of the non believers? Christian monks? I don't think so.

Then you have no idea what you are talking about. Before we had basically any gnostic texts, we knew an incredible amount of detail about those we refer to as gnostics. Why? Because not only did Christian monks preserve the writings in the forms of lengthy quotes form numerous texts, the authors of the preserved texts (those of Origen, Irenaeus, Tertullian, etc.) not only quoted the non-believers, "heretics", anti-Christians, etc., at length, they also provided their own biased commentary which revealed other accusations, refutations, stories, rumors, etc., that were anti-Christian and which existed at the time.

Celcus' writings were destroyed. Do you know who Celcus was and how it is that some of his words survived?

Assuming you mean Celsus, the way they survived was Contra Celsum. This is more than we know about most people and most historical works, as for the majority we do not have quotations just a reference by someone. Origen, however, devoted his entire work to taking on Celsus and his claims one by one. We could imagine that he misrepresented Celsus, but that would defeat the entire purpose of the work (Origen clearly thought that Celsus' work was influential enough to require a work to counter it, which means that too many people knew what Celsus had written; what good does it do to refute what he wrote by misrepresenting his arguments when they were still around to consult and therefore demonstrate that he (Origen) had misquoted Celsus?). Also, once again the Nag Hammadi library revealed how surprisingly accurate the heresiologists' descriptions of various other "heretical" Christian sects/individuals were. One of the greatest surprises of the find was that we learned so little we didn't already know (or at least didn't already possess, even if we believed it was inaccurate because it was clearly biased). As it turns out, these biased Christian heresiologists clearly leveled numerous vindictive and disparaging comments at their opponents, but they did not misrepresent or misquote them.

Do you know why writings that would have called the gospel writers out could not have survived?

The only reason is because almost nothing that was written survived, but rather we know of such writings through references and quotations. But
1) We have anti-Christian survivals of this type
and
2) We've recovered, among other things, an entire library of heretical texts, a site filled with numerous kinds of documents relating to Judaism and to a particular community (at Qumran) so many papyri remains most don't have any translations, and a good deal else that was recovered from sources like trash heaps, broken statue inscriptions, etc.

So the answer to your rhetorical question is "because writings that would have called them out didn't ever exist".

Do you understand how it is that the writings that we do have survived?

Do you?

 

[AmbiguousGuy]

The problem with using years of subjective observation to understand religion (setting aside for now the inherent biases necessarily involved with this) is that it is impossible to observe the thousands of years of religions and cultures which were around before you. That requires at the very least some significant familiarity with what we know about religious, spiritual, and/or ideological movements, thanks both to historical studies and the social, cognitive, and behavioral sciences.

In my experience, too-close study of the social, cognitive and behavioral sciences will tend to confuse a person. Such a person can become seduced by the certainty of his own conclusions and theories. And, of course, such a person frequently becomes lost in his ivory tower, isolated from humanity and any hope of understanding how regular people think and interact with the world.

Just my view of it.

The fact is that you aren't just wrong about how "religions" start, you're using the culturally biased conception of religion that has actually started religions to make claims about how one religion started.

You are so curious to me. Just can't bear the thought that you might be wrong. It's interesting.

Religion in Greece, Rome, Egypt, Babylon, ancient Judaea, and pretty much every culture in the ancient world understood that religion was not about stories, myths, beliefs, or most of the things that the concept "religion" is today. The stories were for entertainment. The mythology collections that are still published today rely mainly on those like Ovid who wrote comical accounts of received myth that he altered just as the original Attic playwrights had centuries before and the Homeridae before that.

This, along with the rest of your lecturings, are fine opinions. I don't mind at all if you hold them. Everyone gets an opinion.

What you seem to miss is that religions are formed in many different ways.

Religion was primarily about practice, and during Jesus' day we have perhaps an unparalleled level of various religious practices and deities freely incorporated, adapted, combined, etc., from just about every current or formerly major power in Eurasia all throughout the Roman Empire. The one exception, however, was the Jews (the original atheists followed by the next atheists the Christians).

Although Judaism is widely believed to have borrowed concepts from other cultures which caused it to take the monotheistic form it did (much like Christianity's use of Greco-Roman philosophies), the Jews did not incorporate other deities, did not incorporate other myths/stories, and didn't regard their stories as entertainment but as a vital part of their self-understanding as a people.

OK, but I'm here to exchange thoughts about various religious matters. If I wanted a lecture, I'd go to church or to school.

So while you "explain" the 300 years it took for this exciting story to "catch fire" (i.e., for Christians to be Christians without being executed for it) by your cultural elitism that fits well with your model in how nicely it coincides with the elitist armchair historians of the 19th century, the truth is that nobody thought the story in Mark was particularly exciting.

Did you catch what I said earlier? I said that anyone who knows the truth about historical matters -- especially 2000-year-old matters obviously intertwined with ancient theology -- is confused about historicity.

I stand by that belief. When you tell me the 'truth' about how Mark was received, I'm afraid I see you as suffering a rather basic confusion about the human ape's ability to know things.

The evidence? Your ignorance of history and Hellenistic religions and the fact that you think Smith is somehow equivalent to an anonymous text in some amorphous sense that is entirely consistent so long as we are relying on your unsupported model gleaned through years of biased observation as a scholar of the heart.

I know that you are ignorant of history and Hellenistic religions and that you think Joseph Smith is equivalent to an anonymous text... but please don't project your own situation onto me. I suffer no such inadequacies and weird beliefs as you describe.

Everything you've offered as evidence, from how religions start in general (and two specifics) to how ancient cultures conceptualized religious practices vs. religious stories is utterly without support and completely incorrect.

I love you man -- if only for the entertainment value of declarations like this.

So you don't bother either recanting or dealing with how completely inaccurate your little analogy and your "big lie" approach turns out to be, you insult my knowledge of logic, my reasoning, my knowledge of languages, along with multiple fields and the thousands of scholars who have or do work in these.

I think there are issues, but I can't discuss those with you just now.

 

[AmbiguousGuy]

A fairly common belief (at least relative to other early Christian beliefs) was that Jesus only appeared to be human, and thus didn't have flesh. That's why 2 John uses the synecdoche en sarki, meaning "in human bodily form". The refutation isn't that he didn't come to earth, or that he didn't come as a human (i.e., as one who appears human), but that his bodily form wasn't human.

There are always ways to wave away the obvious meaning of a bit of scripture in favor of an esoteric one which better fits one's presuppositions.

So tell me: Do all 'Biblical scholars' agree with you in this interpretation of the verse?

 

[LegionOnomaMoi]

In my experience, too-close study of the social, cognitive and behavioral sciences will tend to confuse a person.

And what is your experience? That is, as you have now added another list of fields only this time in the sciences that you treat dismissively (the former list of fields being those which relate to historical Jesus studies), it would seem only fair that you give some account of what your basis for your view is other than "in my experience". The social, behavioral, and cognitive sciences combined cover most scientists in the world, and include an incredibly large number of those with different backgrounds (engineers, mathematicians, physicists, logicians, and linguists to name a few).

Such a person can become seduced by the certainty of his own conclusions and theories.

That's true of everyone. And cognitive psychologists in particular produced the research on the ways that this tends to happen. I also find it rather odd that you would say this of such broad fields based on your "experience" when you have already written off numerous fields as inferior to your subjective observations as a self-proclaimed "scholar of the heart". You have determined that your conclusions, without even an amateur study of relevant fields, is sufficient to write off the work of centuries of research and the development of interdisciplinary approaches to the origins of Christianity. If one might be seduced by certainty, surely the first logical step to determine this would be to see whether the individual has done something like proclaim their superiority to the thousands of specialists they haven't read, merely because of subjective observations?

And, of course, such a person frequently becomes lost in his ivory tower, isolated from humanity and any hope of understanding how regular people think and interact with the world.

So your experiences with these sciences has been so insufficient you aren't aware of the degree to which the above is a hopelessly inadequate description of research and the number of studies in all the named disciplines that has centered on research outside of any lab and over years and years of observation among various cultures and subcultures (from Tanya Luhrmann's controversial study of Wicca which she published after being initiated into a coven and participating in what were to the members religious rites and rituals to the years those from Sapir to Dixon spent among indigenous peoples in the Americas and Australia).

Clearly, whatever the validity of your conclusions, they aren't from any adequate degree of experience.

You are so curious to me. Just can't bear the thought that you might be wrong. It's interesting.

I'm not a big sci fi fan, but when I was a teenager one of my favorite books was Orson Scott Card's Speaker for the Dead. Something said by one of the characters has always stuck with me:

"This is how humans are: We question all our beliefs, except for the ones we really believe, and those we never think to question."

I think the OP's categories and how everyone fits into both is pretty good. I would add, though, something more. We are all confronted with views, opinions, positions, etc., all the time, from sources ranging from other people (in person, online, on TV, etc.) to billboards and books. To me, the mark of an intellectual (of wisdom) has nothing to do with education, and not much at all to do with knowledge. The intellectual (if that word means anything at all) is the person who always considers the question: "To what extent am I agreeing/disagreeing with x position because of an emotional commitment without as much of a rational basis as I'd like to think?" There's nothing wrong with being passionate about a topic (I'd say its essential in many cases), but the more one is able to question even those beliefs they "really believe", and force themselves to ask what logic, what reasoning, is behind such a belief, the more one (IMO) deserves to be called an intellectual.

Knowledge is a bunch of memorization, intelligence is all kinds of different ways in which a person can integrate new information with stored information, but one can have 5 doctorates and be the expert in a dozen fields, and still be as dogmatic as a brain-washed cult member.

I believe that nobody has infallible knowledge, but I not only acknowledge the possibility that I am wrong, I am aware that this belief logically entails that my own knowledge is necessarily fallible. And that means that I must entertain the possibility that there is a better method than the empirical one for determining the nature of reality. I try to keep a few things in mind. Among them are these two related views:

τούτου μὲν τοῦ ἀνθρώπου ἐγὼ σοφώτερός εἰμι· κινδυνεύει μὲν γὰρ ἡμῶν οὐδέτερος οὐδὲν καλὸν κἀγαθὸν εἰδέναι, ἀλλ' οὗτος μὲν οἴεται τι εἰδέναι οὐκ εἰδώς, ἐγὼ δέ, ὥσπερ οὖν οὐκ οἶδα, οὐδὲ οὄιμαι· ἔοικα γοῦν τούτου γε σμικρῷ τινι αὐτῷ τούτῳ σοφώτερος εἶναι, ὅτι ἃ μή οἶδα οὐδὲ οἴομαι εἰδέναι

["I am wiser than this man, for neither of us appears to know anything great and good; but he fancies he knows something, although he knows nothing; whereas I, as I do not know anything, so I do not fancy I do. In this trifling particular, then, I appear to be wiser than he, because I do not fancy I know what I do not know."]

Indeed, the academic study of the individual to whom the above quote is credited had a matching quotation:

“…man mag in dieses Problem sich lange Jahre und immer wieder versenken…und kann doch am Ende von Sokrates sagen, was er von sich selber bekannte: wir wissen, daß wir nichts wissen.”
“[o]ne can immerse himself in this problem for many years, but can at the end only say of Socrates what he admitted himself: we know that we know nothing.” - Joël

and this:


I don't myself believe that mystic access to knowledge is superior, but I acknowledge that my belief is formed in part by a particular upbringing in a particular culture. Also, many of the things which scientists routinely talk about would (and do still) seem quite mystical to many including those who understand the field in question:

 

[LegionOnomaMoi]

What you seem to miss is that religions are formed in many different ways.

Given that most of my posts regarding your little theory have been to say that the modern concept of religion doesn't hold for just about every religion that ever was, and to point out that your basis for your position (subjective observation) cannot, even in principle, inform you of most religions because you were not alive to observe them, then your basis for your belief about religious formation is not only elitist (as we can see by your references to the "primitive" times and peoples of the Roman empire), but completely inadequate. I'd give you more references, but as you just write these off like you do entire fields and the thousands upon thousands of scholars you mock without knowing what they've written, there doesn't seem to be a point. However, I'm more than willing to provide you with both primary and secondary sources if you so desire.

OK, but I'm here to exchange thoughts about various religious matters. If I wanted a lecture, I'd go to church or to school.

I'm giving you information about the period in question relevant to the thread topic. You can disagree, you can point to sources that show me I'm wrong, but simply doing what you always do (dismissing it as me lecturing or presenting material other than that I do) doesn't help any exchange of thoughts. It prevents it.

anyone who knows the truth about historical matters

There's a reason proofs exist only in mathematics (logic being a mathematical field). Whether a proof concerns combinatorics, statistics, or crosses most mathematical fields as it concerns e.g. a proof about a metric for most mathematical spaces, the rules and axioms are agreed upon ahead of time and everything exists in this finite abstract closed discourse realm. The sciences and humanities are not like this, and thus they do not prove things. However, we can be pretty certain about quite a bit. With Jesus, the more detail one hopes to include, the more speculative one's historical analysis becomes. There is a great deal of speculation that is acknowledged by scholars who contribute to historical Jesus studies, but this involves things like whether or not a particular line is attributable to Jesus, not whether he existed as the first century Jewish Galilean whom the gospel authors write about.

I stand by that belief. When you tell me the 'truth' about how Mark was received, I'm afraid I see you as suffering a rather basic confusion about the human ape's ability to know things.

When you present any evidence for how Mark or any other stories of godmen in antiquity actually were received, then you can accuse me of being confused with something more than "I watched people for a while so I know the human heart; ergo, this is how Mark was received".

I know that you are ignorant of history and Hellenistic religions and that you think Joseph Smith is equivalent to an anonymous text

Ignoring the clearly inaccurate insult about my statements regarding Smith, we still have your own bits of inaccuracies spread across this thread:

Yeah, that seems most likely. Mark started something which caught fire.

So it "caught fire", which you know because

Because of this, I'm in a much superior position than the average biblical scholar (or even the advanced biblical scholar) to make a judgment about why first-century folk found the Jesus story so exciting.

academics tend to be poorly-equipped to understand the thought of average folk, the sort of folk who would flock to the idea of an historical godman, even if the godman were not historical.

but somehow it carried a death penalty for 300 years despite how "exciting" it was and how it "caught fire" which is "explained" by your elitism:

It took 300 years because it was a new religion and these were primitive times. Don't let your modern-era biases make you think that it was just as easy back then to accept a new religion as it is now.

We need to try and imagine how primitive things were back then.

How exactly does the fact that these were "primitive times" and understanding how "primitive things were back then" explain why something that was so exciting and "caught fire" somehow means it was so despised and regarded with such disdain that not only do we have multiple written accounts by non-Christians equating Christianity to e.g., a disease, we know that first fellow Jews and but mostly pagans killed and persecuted Christians until Constantine finally made it a legal religion in the 4th centaury.

Whatever your elitist views lead you to believe such "primitive" people thought is completely irrelevant. If something is exciting and "catches fire", then regardless of how "primitive" any people were at any time ever, it means that this actually was rapidly accepted because of how "exciting" it was. An idea, story, religion, etc., cannot "catch fire" and be systematically persecuted, mocked, and the believers killed for over 300 years. These are contradictory things: something "catching fire" and something being systematically opposed in numerous ways by the very people you claim ("primitive" though you think them) found it so enticing.

There's other nice bits too, such as

Mormonism is the only successful religion I can bring to mind with an historical prophet, or perhaps Baha'ism.

That's it? Seriously? Try reading Cohn's The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages for a list of others without even leaving Europe. Then there's the entirety of Islam, or the multiple "heretical" movements which remain even today despite the attempts of the heresiologists to stamp them out, and innumerable other movements that either continue to exist or existed longer and were more successful than a sect within Christianity you compare to the founding of Christianity. That's without looking Eastward to the various prophets, swamis, buddhas, etc., that sparked movements that have existed for longer than either Mormonism or Bahá'í.

It's intriguing to me how theology works. In Christianity's early days, there was furious battle for the Correct Thought. Eventually a secular authority had to bring them all together and insist upon selecting a winner. So the Catholic Church was born and ruled for centuries, enforcing it's Correct Thought with the sword and even the rack.

1) Eastern Orthodox (orthodox is derived from Greek and means "correct belief") have continually existed alongside the Catholic. So "a winner" exists for you only because your knowledge of history is so very poor.
2) It's true that the Catholic church killed many over the centuries. However, apart from Hypatia (which one can hardly lay at the feet of Roman Catholicism), the Western orthodoxy was content to burn and destroy pagan sacred items, landmarks, and shrines. It put a stop the killing of "witches", not only in Rome (where the two largest of these ever occurred) but among the Germanic tribes. It wasn't until almost a 1000 years later that the European witch trials began.


You didn't even know if Paul used Jesus' name. You've stated what your position is based on (subject observation that apparently resulted in a seriously arrogant and culturally elitist view), but you have backed it up by contradiction after contradiction, supported only by insults not only of me but of any field that has relevancy here (and dismissing the evidence I give, from Celsus' position to what the Greek of 2 John actually says and even just religious practices in antiquity with everything from insults to poor use of nomenclature).

I suffer no such inadequacies and weird beliefs as you describe.

Clearly.

So tell me: Do all 'Biblical scholars' agree with you in this interpretation of the verse?

I can't speak for all scholars who have, in the last 2-3 centuries, written on this line, but as far as historians in general who have at the very least since the Nag Hammadi finds worked on either the Johannine texts or 2 John specifically, the answer is yes.

 

[AmbiguousGuy]

And what is your experience? That is, as you have now added another list of fields only this time in the sciences that you treat dismissively (the former list of fields being those which relate to historical Jesus studies), it would seem only fair that you give some account of what your basis for your view is other than "in my experience". The social, behavioral, and cognitive sciences combined cover most scientists in the world, and include an incredibly large number of those with different backgrounds (engineers, mathematicians, physicists, logicians, and linguists to name a few).

I assume you're familiar with the term 'tit for tat', Legion. I find it pretty extraordinary that you don't seem to follow what is happening here, so let me pull us aside for a moment and speak in the literal language which you seem to prefer.

Here's the thing: Every time you proclaim your authority and dominance (tat), I'm going to respond with my own claims of authority and dominance (tit). I'm going to give tit for your tat.

It means that if you never asserted the argument from authority, I would never respond with my own (faux) argument from authority. I would rarely have anything to say about biblical scholars or any other academics. They really don't interest me. And I certainly would not post the comic hubris which I post.

Do you understand what I'm saying?

Before we go on, how about we discuss this one single issue? I'm curious to know whether you can focus on it and deal with it in a simple and logical way.

What do you think of my technique of turning aside your appeals to authority with my own? Is it a legitimate and even necessary method of debate? Or is there some other technique I should use to turn aside your appeals to authority?

When a person proclaims, "All serious biblical scholars believe X!" ... should we all bow down and begin to believe X?

 

[outhouse]

When a person proclaims, "All serious biblical scholars believe X!" ... should we all bow down and begin to believe X?

To break it down. We do not bow down.

Those who are the most knowledgeable on a subject, is it not responsible research to find out why they made those decisions?

 

[AmbiguousGuy]

To break it down. We do not bow down.

I'm glad to hear it. So you will not assert that the 'scholarly consensus' is X and therefore everyone should believe X?

Or that 99.999% of all real biblical scholars support your position?

Those who are the most knowledgeable on a subject, is it not responsible research to find out why they made those decisions?

Obviously. Do you think I could make such a powerful case for the mythical Jesus if I weren't familiar with much of the scholarship?

Let me explain how I approach this issue by presenting a different example:

I know a good bit about psychology. I keep up with the major experiments; I read widely (though not academically) about psychological matters; I study and even run experiments on people in real life. But guess what? I don't know the names of any academic psychologists. I don't know the names of their books. I can't remember who did which experiment.

Why? Well, because it doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is the material itself. Why should I waste my time focusing on a particular scientist or author -- or even bothering to learn their names? It's a waste of brain space.

Much less will I bow to their views on psychological theory or truth.

Same with other fields of study. I don't worship particular experts. I read widely and tend to ignore the personalities of those who are writing about it -- preferring to focus on the material itself. I find this attitude tends to keep me more objective and able to make cleaner conclusions on my own.

To put it bluntly, I don't consider you any more knowledgeable about the HJ material than I am. We've just reached different conclusions about the data. I wish you and others could respect that -- that you could accept that other people sometimes believe differently than you do about things. It's the very essence of wisdom, I think.

 

[LegionOnomaMoi]

Here's the thing: Every time you proclaim your authority and dominance (tat), I'm going to respond with my own claims of authority and dominance (tit). I'm going to give tit for your tat.

When have I proclaimed my authority? I've specifically stated in this thread that this is a hobby for me and I'm not an authority. And do you know what the fallacious use of an argument from authority is? Or do you really think that this:

When a person proclaims, "All serious biblical scholars believe X!" ... should we all bow down and begin to believe X?

is included in the fallacious use of appeals to authority? Do you ever go to a doctor? A mechanic? Call a plumber or pay anybody ever for some service that requires particular knowledge? Because this is an appeal to authority. However, if the authority actually is an authority on the subject, it's not a fallacy. And appealing not just to an authority, but to the consensus of multiple fields is how the modern world can exist. Because every study, research paper, or other contribution to some field involves what we call "references" or "citations" of previous work. That way, when I want to say something about neuroimaging data that used the alignment of primarily hydrogen atoms I don't have to derive quantum physics just to start. I refer to previous work. Whether in the sciences or humanities, the longer something is studied and the more people criticize various theories, offer various theories, and adapt various theories, the more established the results become. For most people, the word "theory" is used for things like evolution, global warming, and other things that aren't theories so much as interdisciplinary research areas.


What you call "appeal to authority" is what allows you to go online, and spout nonsense about religious practices, times, peoples, and cultures you know nothing about because you can't be bothered to actually study anything. From computers to medicine, appeals to authority (including those of historians and philosophers) are what create the advancements you use that did not exist a few years ago, a few decades ago, and/or a few centuries ago.

 

[LegionOnomaMoi]

Obviously. Do you think I could make such a powerful case for the mythical Jesus if I weren't familiar with much of the scholarship?

Yeah, that seems most likely. Mark started something which caught fire.

It took 300 years because it was a new religion and these were primitive times.

What a powerful argument. Something catches fire while being actively persecuted and mocked for 300 years until it's finally legal. Very logical. Two contradictory processes, one this "exciting" text Mark that "catches fire" and founds Christianity, and what actually happened (300 years for this religion to even be legal, let alone "catch fire"), with no explanation for how this fits in with other religions of the time apart from your inaccurate descriptions of myth and the nature of religions and deities in antiquity.

And even better, this logical contradiction is "explained" by your cultural elitism: somehow "primitive times" means that something can both "catch fire" and be systematically opposed at the same time.

Right.

I know a good bit about psychology. I keep up with the major experiments; I read widely (though not academically) about psychological matters

Which means your exposed to the inaccurate representations of psychological research that exist in the "not academically" versions. Also, the "major experiments" are frequently not published in not academic forms because while things like support for embodied cognition are vital within multiple fields, from cognitive neuropsychology to linguistics, they are boring and/or inaccessible to most. Also, the trend towards interdisciplinary research means that the major experiments in psychology don't necessarily involve psychologists (but could involve anthropologists, sociologists, etc., instead). Finally, the "major experiments" are just those that can sell magazines the fastest unless one does read "academically".

The only thing that matters is the material itself.

Which exists almost entirely in journals and other academic material you don't read.

It's a waste of brain space.

You know that Sherlock Holmes was wrong about this, right? That is, Conan Doyle's character's reason for knowing various obscure facts and not knowing rather basic ones was as fictional as the character.

 

[AmbiguousGuy]

Do you ever go to a doctor? A mechanic? Call a plumber or pay anybody ever for some service that requires particular knowledge? Because this is an appeal to authority. However, if the authority actually is an authority on the subject, it's not a fallacy. And appealing not just to an authority, but to the consensus of multiple fields is how the modern world can exist. Because every study, research paper, or other contribution to some field involves what we call "references" or "citations" of previous work. That way, when I want to say something about neuroimaging data that used the alignment of primarily hydrogen atoms I don't have to derive quantum physics just to start. I refer to previous work. Whether in the sciences or humanities, the longer something is studied and the more people criticize various theories, offer various theories, and adapt various theories, the more established the....

OK. I was curious whether you could engage me in a simple, logical argument. Now I have my answer.

What you call "appeal to authority" is what allows you to go online, and spout nonsense about religious practices, times, peoples, and cultures you know nothing about because you can't be bothered to actually study anything.

Sure, Legion. I'm just an ignorant guy who's never read a book, while you are master of all knowledge. Whatever pleases you.

 

[AmbiguousGuy]

What a powerful argument. Something catches fire while being actively persecuted and mocked for 300 years until it's finally legal. Very logical. Two contradictory processes, one this "exciting" text Mark that "catches fire" and founds Christianity, and what actually happened (300 years for this religion to even be legal, let alone "catch fire"), with no explanation for how this fits in with other religions of the time apart from your inaccurate descriptions of myth and the nature of religions and deities in antiquity.

And even better, this logical contradiction is "explained" by your cultural elitism: somehow "primitive times" means that something can both "catch fire" and be systematically opposed at the same time.

Right.

Right. It makes perfect sense to those of us who have studied the ancient world, along with human behavior. But I can see how you might not understand it.

Which means your exposed to the inaccurate representations of psychological research that exist in the "not academically" versions.

Sure. Clearly one can't learn a thing about human behavior unless one reads every line of the actual papers of guys who have framed psychology degrees on their office walls.

Whatever pleases you to believe, I guess that's what you should believe, Legion.

 

[AmbiguousGuy]

Which means your exposed to the inaccurate representations of psychological research that exist in the "not academically" versions. Also, the "major experiments" are frequently not published in not academic forms because while things like support for embodied cognition are vital within multiple fields, from cognitive neuropsychology to linguistics, they are boring and/or inaccessible to most. Also, the trend towards interdisciplinary research means that the major experiments in psychology don't necessarily involve psychologists (but could involve anthropologists, sociologists, etc., instead). Finally, the "major experiments" are just those that can sell magazines the fastest unless one does read "academically".

By the way, I find it pretty curious that in one message you deny ever making arguments from authority, and then you follow it up with an agument from authority like this one.

You just can't seem to conceive of a world in which non-academics might have a better understanding of something than do the guys with the framed degrees on their walls.

Like the non-historical Jesus, for example.

 

[LegionOnomaMoi]

Right. It makes perfect sense to those of us who have studied the ancient world

What have you studied? Can you read Greek, Latin, Hebrew, or other ancient languages? What sources have you ever cited other than your "scholar of the heart" observations followed by questions about whether or not Paul used Jesus' name? You have claimed over and over again that your basis for knowledge of the ancient world is your own modern subjective observations (and added to that a pathetically inadequate knowledge of psychology research).

You can't even read 2 John in context to judge whether or not the original language coheres with your disdainful elitism of the Roman Hellenistic empire and it's "primitive" dynamics. Your knowledge of the ancient world is modern observations as a self-proclaimed "scholar of the heart" who writes off entire fields because he hasn't actually read the research of these enough to know even the basics and can claims that something "catches fire" by being systematically opposed for 300 years. It would be laughable if it was intended as comedy rather than the arrogant dismissal of real research because you have "observed" the "human heart" for a while.

But I can see how you might not understand it.

I doubt it. That would require you understanding logic.

Clearly one can't learn a thing about human behavior unless one reads every line of the actual papers of guys who have framed psychology degrees on their office walls.

As you don't read any such papers, the entirety of the above is meaningless.

By the way, I find it pretty curious that in one message you deny ever making arguments from authority, and then you follow it up with an argument from authority like this one.

Would you like a few references to basic logic and critical thinking so that you can stop your obvious misrepresentation of classical fallacies? Or are you content to misrepresent what arguments from authority as fallacies actually are?

You just can't seem to conceive of a world in which non-academics might have a better understanding of something than do the guys with the framed degrees on their walls.

I don't have a single degree in biblical studies, history, or most of the important fields related to the study of antiquity. I just have access to actual scholarship and the ability to read in languages you can't and the patience to study subjects. You are content with your biased and elitist views and dismissing entire fields you aren't familiar with because you are so rational you can't even see how something cannot "catch fire" and be so unpopular it was systematically opposed, let alone be bothered to actually do any real study of history before claiming your superiority to specialists because you watched people for a while.

 

[Jayhawker Soule]

Do you think I could make such a powerful case for the mythical Jesus if I weren't familiar with much of the scholarship?

:biglaugh:

Now that was funny!​