Jesus was Myth

[nash8]

Such as?

The Buddha Myth | Buddha as Fiction -

Was Prophet Mohammed a real person?

Not trying to argue that they did/did not exist, I am just trying to say that people question their historical existence. The same goes for Socrates, Plato, Abraham, and just about every other historical figure you can think of.

Which would make him historical.

Yeah, I was just trying to state that opinions differ on the subject. For some he didn't exist, for some he was a crazed goat herder, and for some he was a prophet of God. My personal opinion would be that he was a mix of all of these things.

 

[roger1440]

An inspiring author well of course become familiar with the setting for their story.

Because the gospels were written 35 to 70 years after the death of Jesus, there is little reason to believe they are accurate. Also, evidence suggests they were not eyewitnesses to Jesus or his ministry.

The accuracy depends on how you read it.

“Now there were staying in Jerusalem God-fearing Jews from every nation under heaven. When they heard this sound, a crowd came together in bewilderment, because each one heard their own language being spoken. Utterly amazed, they asked: "Aren't all these who are speaking Galileans? Then how is it that each of us hears them in our native language? (Acts 2:5-8)

These verses are the antithesis of the fall of the Tower of Babel.

“3 They said to each other, "Come, let's make bricks and bake them thoroughly." They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. 4 Then they said, "Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the whole earth." 5 But the LORD came down to see the city and the tower that the men were building. 6 The LORD said, "If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. 7 Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other." 8 So the LORD scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. 9 That is why it was called Babel--because there the LORD confused the language of the whole world. From there the LORD scattered them over the face of the whole earth.” (Genesis 11:3-9)

Is this accurate? Yes. We come to God by spiritual means not by physical means.

 

[steeltoes]

The Buddha Myth | Buddha as Fiction -

Was Prophet Mohammed a real person?

Not trying to argue that they did/did not exist, I am just trying to say that people question their historical existence. The same goes for Socrates, Plato, Abraham, and just about every other historical figure you can think of.



Yeah, I was just trying to state that opinions differ on the subject. For some he didn't exist, for some he was a crazed goat herder, and for some he was a prophet of God. My personal opinion would be that he was a mix of all of these things.

The Jesus myth arguments haven't been all that good for the most part, but then again, the arguments for what makes Jesus historical are no better. It's not as if those on one side of the issue are any less prejudice than those on the other.

 

[nash8]

The Jesus myth arguments haven't been all that good for the most part, but then again, the arguments for what makes Jesus historical are no better. It's not as if those on one side of the issue are any less prejudice than those on the other.

I think legions arguments have been pretty good for his existence.

1. He used scholarly documentations for communication patterns of antiquity that contribute to Jesus existence.

2. The fact that we have more accounts for Jesus' life than we do almost any other historical/religious figure (regardless of the accuracy of those accounts).

3.The emphasis of oral tradition as opposed to written record in antiquity that supports Jesus' historical existence.

4. He has also refuted, with documentation, the key mythicist that everyone refers to (cant remember his name, Kant maybe?) by showing that he did not adhere to his own theory of historical analysis when he made the mythicist argument.

5. And there are numerous other ,DOCUMENTED, logical arguments that I am sure I have forgotten.

I'm not saying that the story of Jesus does not include myth as it most certainly does in my opinion. But the inclusion of of myths, and the similarity of the "Bible" story to other arleady established myths around the story of Jesus does not prove, in my opinion, that Jesus was not a real person.

I think the mythicist argument shows more evidence for the incorporation of various, preexisting myths within the Roman empire in order to make "Christianity" more accessible to those within the Roman empire after the establishment of Roman Christianity as the state religion.

I mean it would be absurd to say that the Christianity doesn't parallel with other preestablished religions and myths, and doesn't include an aspect of myth itself. The Buddha, Mithra, Zoraster, Apollo, Christmas paralleling with the Roman festival of Saturnalia, etc.

 

[LegionOnomaMoi]

The Buddha Myth | Buddha as Fiction -

Was Prophet Mohammed a real person?

Not trying to argue that they did/did not exist, I am just trying to say that people question their historical existence.

Ironically, one of the only books (and I wouldn't call it scholarship) that I know of professing doubt about the historical Muhammad is called The Quest for the Historical Muhammad and opens with (if memory serves) a translation of Renan's life of Jesus which notes how much we can say about Muhammad but how little we can of Jesus. That was in the 19th century, when the only scholarship on the historical person of Muhammad was produced by Muslims, and it hasn't changed much. Also, the author (his pen name is Ibn Warraq) writes entirely about the evils of Islam. Not exactly the kind of individual you want putting together a volume of source material here.
However, yet another title stolen from historical Jesus research surfaced in a journal: "The Quest of the Historical Muhammad" :

"At every turn, then, historians of Muhammad and of early Islam appear betrayed by the sheer unreliability of their sources. The New Testament documents have their Tendenz, as all will quickly concede, and much of the "quest of the historical Jesus" has been in reality a search for a means to get around and behind that historical disability. However, most New Testament scholars also share a conviction that somewhere within the documents at their disposal is a grain or nugget, or perhaps even entire veins of historical truth, and that they can be retrieved. This explains the enormous and ingenious assiduity expended on the quest. Historians of Muhammad entertain no such optimism. They confront a community whose interest in preserving revelation was deep and careful, but who came to history, even to the history of the recipient of that revelation, too long after the memory of the events had faded to dim recollections over many generations, had been embroidered rather than remembered, and was invoked only for what is for historians the unholy purpose of polemic."

The problem is that, unlike with Muhammad, the people interested in the historical Jesus and the historical Socrates were the same people who developed modern history, philology, comparative linguistics, and a great deal more. They needed these tools because there was no systematic approach to dealing with source material or evidence outside of theology/philosophy and the natural sciences (and these were just barely beginning). So they developed tools and methods and out of these grew entire fields of research, including the historical-critical approach.

So while we have works from the 1700s onward that either use or are the origins of the modern historical-critical analysis when it comes to Jesus or Socrates, we don't have these for Muhammad or Buddha. Nor is our evidence (at least for Buddha) at all comparable.

That said, you listed 2 websites. I'm sure you could find more, but do you really think there is anything like the mythicist internet driven community for anyone other than Jesus? For example:

The same goes for Socrates, Plato, Abraham, and just about every other historical figure you can think of.

First, I doubt that it goes for every other historical figure I can think of, because I seriously doubt that most people know the names of many ancient historical figures that classicists, historians, archaeologists, etc., are familiar with. Literature on the Antiphons (Antiphon was a well-known orator but there is at least one other Antiphon known to us whom some have argued is the same individuals) are not only largely unknown, but irrelevant for just about everybody. Second, I haven't ever come across a book arguing that Socrates or Plato didn't exist, although I have come across those who argue that we basically can't know anything about Socrates. Third, I wouldn't count Abraham as a historical figure (anymore than I would Herakles or Achilles). I'm sure there are historians who believe that Abraham was real, just like there are historians who take the Iliad seriously as a historical source. But even such credulous scholars do not think of the people as historical figures the way that Plato, Socrates, Jesus, Muhammad, and others are.

My personal opinion would be that he was a mix of all of these things.

The Socratic problem was mainly a problem because somehow, despite all the best educated minds in the world working on this issue for several centuries, nobody really thought that maybe none of our sources is really reliable, but all have something reliable in them and by trying to look at them together and see what we get maybe we can establish a foundation upon which to build. People are not static, and no biography can encapsulate anybody. We are all a mix of various things.

Except me. I'm just a disaster pure and simple.

 

[nash8]

You kind of argued my point for me. My point is that Christianity is so engrained into American culture, and people feel so passionately about Jesus, one way or another, that it is only natural for him to recieve more attention than Buddha or Mohammed (whose religions are very minimal compared to Christianity in America).

Same thing goes for Socrates within "intellectual" circles. His philosophies and ideas helped to form the basis for modern inquiry. So it is natural that those "intellectuals" that based their "scientific processes" on his philosophies to inquire about the historicity of his existince due to their passion in the beliefs that have been attributed to him.

Buddha and Mohammed garner no such passions within mainstream America or within intellectual circles.

I have heard numerous people state the idea that Socrates, Buddha, Mohammed, and Laozi were not "real" people and their teachings were simply compiled teachings of numerous different people assigned to one "teacher". Not saying they were scholarly references, just saying it happens in response to someone posting, "Why does this only happen to Jesus" lol.

And maybe debates on the existance of historical characters doesn't happen in mainstream circles, but I seem to recall that there is one book on the historical case for Hercules that attempts to portray him as a Greek trader that established trading routes by traveling to regions previously unaccessed by Greek peoples.

I know it definitely goes on in my head. I think that every myth regardless of evidence for it is based on an actual historical person. You know as well as I before written history, stories were passed on through oral tradition. I seem to recall that many people that told the story of the Illiad memorized the story without written record.

Naturally, it is easier to remember stories of exaggerated heroism and supernatural abilities than it is to remember stories of a Greek trader. Supernatural exagerations also enhance a stories ability to be transferred through generations, especially when considering oral tradition. I mean who would want to hear a story about a Greek trader that opened up new trade routes, but who would want to hear a story about a man who killed a hydra - this guy would .

It is also my theory that myths hold symbolism to actual events that can be correlated to documented historical ideas.

EX. The Hydra in story of Hercules represents a country, group of people, or other historical reference to which other "intellectuals" of the same time period would be able to recognize. I think an in depth study of parallels between symbols of aniquity would be able to create an account actual historical events out of most myths we have.

And I would say that a disaster would be the hardest thing to biographize (is that a word?)

 

[nash8]

With that said, I think Buddha's teachings should be more of a focus within intellectual studies, especially within your field of neuroscience (did I get it right this time?)

I believe that his descriptions of Nirvana, and other "enlightened" states provide a great psychological insight into neurological functions of happiness. During meditation, I myself have experencied ,on a number of occasions, a sense of pure bliss that I can only compare to Buddhas description of attaining enlightenment. I would assume that it's a function of dopamine and seretonin release, but I would be curious to see what particular parts of the brain this occurs in. I haven't been able to decipher a particular routine to obtain this state, I always try the same method of chakra meditation and sometimes I achieve the feeling of goodness, and sometimes I don't, but it happens almost always when I feel the sensation of my third eye opening fully. But I'd be curious to see what neuroscience says is going on in my brain when I am in this state?

On this note, have you ever heard of the idea of Plato's, Allegory of the Cave, as a reference to activation of the pineal gland?

This was definitely a thread hijack, but this threads basically pointless now anyway lol.

 

[LegionOnomaMoi]

You kind of argued my point for me. My point is that Christianity is so engrained into American culture, and people feel so passionately about Jesus, one way or another, that it is only natural for him to recieve more attention than Buddha or Mohammed (whose religions are very minimal compared to Christianity in America).

That would be true, were it not for the fact that America is not the center of historical Jesus research, but is the center of mythicism. The only two scholars with relevant degrees (Carrier and Price) are Americans. And while there may be plenty of people in other countries who would answer "I don't know" or "who cares" to the question "did jesus exist?", only in the US do we have people who are asking questions at the level of detail only specialists typically do. People who have never thought twice about where our manuscripts for Julius Caesar come from, or whether Nero existed and if so what evidence is there for him, etc., will talk about textual criticism and the NT, or get into details about the use of the word "brother" in Galatians, or any number of topics that require a great degree of background research (unless one simply wants to trust the experts), will apply them to Jesus. In this very thread we are told we only have "copies of copies of copies". Which means somebody probably read Ehrman's popular book Misquoting Jesus and not his scholarship. It also means that such an individual has likely no idea who vastly more attested to the NT is from a textual critical point of view than any other corpus and that every single work within this corpus is unmatched in terms of textual critical evidence than any other.

So we have people referring to textual criticisms even though they've never looked at a critical apparatus (in many printed versions of classical works in their original languages, at the bottom of the page you may see notations that are meant to indicate variant readings among our manuscript evidence). We have a Richard Carrier whose degree is in ancient history and who argues about people based on bare shreds of evidence again and again and again in his dissertation, yet by that time had already published several papers on the use of Bayes' Theorem and how uncritical NT/Biblical scholarship was. Apparently, that only holds true when he's trying to show that we have no evidence for Jesus, but when he actually needs to produce scholarship to get a doctorate, he produces some of the most outrageously speculative claims I've come across.

The US has so many mythicists because in so many places here people still care so much about the bible that it enters into education, politics, media, etc. But that doesn't change the fact that scholars, not amateurs surfing the web and relying upon what are clearly inaccurate sources, are in agreement here as this had been argued to death by the time my grandfather graduated Harvard (and he wrote his dissertation in Latin).

Same thing goes for Socrates within "intellectual" circles.

Within intellectual circles, the idea that we can't say anything about Socrates other than that he existed has precious few proponents and in the same volume in which one such intellectual argues this point, a paper by another treats the sources uncritically and ignores the past 300 years of work on the Socratic problem.

His philosophies and ideas helped to form the basis for modern inquiry.

Aristotle mostly did that. To the extent Socrates did anything it was his influence on Plato and the degree to which Plato represented any historical Socrates in his works. Part of the fascination is that we have this philosopher who is Plato's mouthpiece in virtually all of his works, who is mocked by Aristophanes and praised by Xenophon and discussed by Aristotle, yet whom we know so little of because our sources disagree and the man wrote nothing of his own.

So it is natural that those "intellectuals" that based their "scientific processes" on his philosophies

They didn't: Galileo and the Origin of Science

 

[LegionOnomaMoi]

. I seem to recall that many people that told the story of the Illiad memorized the story without written record.

The Iliad was widely memorized (I had to memorize the opening), but even the Greeks doubted whether Homer existed and Plato argued that Homer and these myths were sacrilegious.

Naturally, it is easier to remember stories of exaggerated heroism and supernatural abilities than it is to remember stories of a Greek trader.

That's true, but there are hundreds of thousands of such names that nobody knows, all recorded in old French or middle English or even old norse, and ranging from legendary accounts to trial records. 50,000-60,000 people were executed for the crime of witchcraft in the late medieval/early modern period in Europe. They were all accused of supernatural feats, and are lost to but a few who have access to these records and can read the languages (and who give a crap to begin with).

More important within oral cultures are things like oral genres, particular mnemonics formulae, the type of control over the transmission, etc.

It is also my theory that myths hold symbolism to actual events that can be correlated to documented historical ideas.

I'm not a big Jungian or Campbell fan myself.

I think an in depth study of parallels between symbols of aniquity would be able to create an account actual historical events out of most myths we have.

It's been done. From Bachofen and Frazer to Jung and Campbell and beyond. But like psychoanalysis itself, it has largely been purged from academia as invalid and inadequate.

(is that a word?)

It is now.

 

[LegionOnomaMoi]

Naturally, it is easier to remember stories of exaggerated heroism and supernatural abilities than it is to remember stories of a Greek trader. Supernatural exagerations also enhance a stories ability to be transferred through generations, especially when considering oral tradition.

The study of orality began with those like Jacob Grimm and his brother, and in fact Dibelius and Bultmann used folklorist theories prevalent at the time in Germany and applied them to the oral transmission of the Jesus tradition. We've come a long way since then as anthropologists have studied oral tradition, transmission, and creation in various cultures around the world for the past century. Mnemonic devices, formulaic templates, stock expressions, and numerous other methods were used cross-culturally to transmit everything from philosophy to myth to the Koran in modern largely illiterate communities.

I don't remember much that I was taught in grade school of history, but I remember my times tables (up through 10, anyway). Oral tradition is capable of preserving verbatim a story or epic over time and space, although this is the exception, not the rule. However, teachers in antiquity, whether Jewish prophets or Hellenistic philosophers all relied on common techniques: repetition, pithy memorable statements, general formulae for short accounts, etc. Think of how many song lyrics you know or how many jokes. The entire Jesus tradition wasn't transmitted as a whole until written down.

 

[nash8]

I may have used the wrong term. I didn't mean ideas. I meant the hydra would actually represent a group of people, not an abstract idea that needed psychoanalysis to represent.

I guess you could relate it to the eagle to America or the bear to Russia. If someone were creating a mythological story about the cold war they would say something along the lines of, "the bear waged a great war with the eagle". In our society, those with a decent amount of knowledge of the cold war, and animal symbolisms associated with America and Russia would be able to almost immediately deduce that story was about the cold war.

Then to identify specific people I could say the man of steel started the war on behalf of the bear, while the Atomic man was the first to fight on the side of the eagle.

What 2 historical people would I be talking about in the above reference? And your honestly telling me that you don't believe that ancient people didn't have the ability to do the same thing?

The fact that I can make up a symbolic represenation of actual historical events so easily, it would almost be implausible to think that ancient peoples did not have the cognitive ability to create the same representations, as I know there were people smarter than me in ancient times no?

French, middle English, and Norse mythology does not play as an important part due to the fact that they weren't steeped in intellectual circles like greek was. As you well know Greek was the basis for much of academia for a long time, thus it is only natural that Greek myths carried on more prevalently than other ethnicitie's myths. I would also attribute the colorful language and symbolisms in certain myths, that make them carry on where others don't. Why are some movies classics, and others go straight to DVD lol?

 

[nash8]

The study of orality began with those like Jacob Grimm and his brother, and in fact Dibelius and Bultmann used folklorist theories prevalent at the time in Germany and applied them to the oral transmission of the Jesus tradition. We've come a long way since then as anthropologists have studied oral tradition, transmission, and creation in various cultures around the world for the past century. Mnemonic devices, formulaic templates, stock expressions, and numerous other methods were used cross-culturally to transmit everything from philosophy to myth to the Koran in modern largely illiterate communities.

I don't remember much that I was taught in grade school of history, but I remember my times tables (up through 10, anyway). Oral tradition is capable of preserving verbatim a story or epic over time and space, although this is the exception, not the rule. However, teachers in antiquity, whether Jewish prophets or Hellenistic philosophers all relied on common techniques: repetition, pithy memorable statements, general formulae for short accounts, etc. Think of how many song lyrics you know or how many jokes. The entire Jesus tradition wasn't transmitted as a whole until written down.

Exactly, that's why I think Jesus' teachings were incorporated into a story of heroism, instead of a book of teachings. I mean honestly, how many people want to learn something, and how many people would rather hear a colorful story, and maybe learn something in the process. As a teacher, one of the biggest things you hear is "make learning fun".

 

[FranklinMichaelV.3]

Well my question is the style of writing of the gospels. Some points it clearly says that Jesus was alone and others that the disciples were asleep. Yet they retell those points of the story. As well the flow I can't tell if its supposed to be biographical, first person or second person. They are written more seeming to me as explanations but I'm not sure can anyone explain the styles?

 

[AmbiguousGuy]

If you read up on it, you will find out what im talking about.

Nah. I just use common sense in the historical Jesus quest. The 'scholarly consensus' agrees that gJohn was written around 100 CE, give or take twenty years.

That's all I need to know.

It's the year 4050 CE. Outhouse is studying a story written by AmbigGuy back in 2013 about some supposed hero who supposedly lived in 1913. Oddly, it seems mostly to be a theological story. AmbigGuy is painting the 1913 hero as an actual mangod. It's clear that AmbigGuy never met the 1913 hero. There are no news stories or other historical evidence for the 1913 mangod. There are only a couple of previous theological stories about the 1913 mangod.

I think Outhouse should discount Ambig's story as unhistorical. That would seem the most rational course for Outhouse to take.

 

[AmbiguousGuy]

So now the best bits of evidence that Jesus was fiction was the amount written about him of a particular type and over so short a period. Right.

Yes. That obviously makes the best sense. It was an exciting idea -- to claim that the godman Christ had actually lived on the earth just a few years earlier. I think that the Christ myth would have mostly died out except for someone's idea to claim that he had been historical.

The author of Mark wrote a rather poorly connected jumble of accounts and sayings of that were not particularly interesting....

Not particulary interesting? Where did you get that idea?

... and certainly had nothing on the great epics and budding genre of novel current at the time.

The gospels aren't novels, surely.

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.

He didn't write a novel. He just had an idea.

Paul started out persecuting the church, converted, and was executed.

So some say. Me, I don't form hard-and-fast opinions about historical matters.

All because an anonymous person, who at best wrote Mark around the time Paul was dead, sparked so great a flame with a work that wasn't great...

Just an idea. All the power was in the idea.

But there was, according to you, no Jesus.

I seriously doubt that I've made such a simplistic claim as that, although I do use shortcut language sometimes.

So Paul either didn't know this, which is pretty odd given how far he travelled and whom he did know within Christian circles, or he did know and spread the word and establishing churches about a Jesus that never existed on earth until his death.

I'm confused. You think that Paul considered Jesus to have been a real man?

because Paul's references to an earthly and a resurrected Jesus both make sense,

Seriously? You think that Paul believed Jesus was physically killed and resurrected? I find that an extraordinary position, if so.

...nobody bothered to check out whether or not anybody in Galilee had heard of this guy Jesus of Nazareth...

Why do you make that assumption? You think there were never any Jesus deniers back in the day? If so, why do you make that assumption?

That's what historical study is about: explaining evidence and finding the best explanation. Not explaining it away to fit preconceived notions or wants...

Yes, Legion. That's exactly how I've been trying to convince you to see historical matters -- for some time now.

 

[steeltoes]

I think legions arguments have been pretty good for his existence.

1. He used scholarly documentations for communication patterns of antiquity that contribute to Jesus existence.

2. The fact that we have more accounts for Jesus' life than we do almost any other historical/religious figure (regardless of the accuracy of those accounts).

3.The emphasis of oral tradition as opposed to written record in antiquity that supports Jesus' historical existence.

4. He has also refuted, with documentation, the key mythicist that everyone refers to (cant remember his name, Kant maybe?) by showing that he did not adhere to his own theory of historical analysis when he made the mythicist argument.

5. And there are numerous other ,DOCUMENTED, logical arguments that I am sure I have forgotten.

I'm not saying that the story of Jesus does not include myth as it most certainly does in my opinion. But the inclusion of of myths, and the similarity of the "Bible" story to other arleady established myths around the story of Jesus does not prove, in my opinion, that Jesus was not a real person.

I think the mythicist argument shows more evidence for the incorporation of various, preexisting myths within the Roman empire in order to make "Christianity" more accessible to those within the Roman empire after the establishment of Roman Christianity as the state religion.

I mean it would be absurd to say that the Christianity doesn't parallel with other preestablished religions and myths, and doesn't include an aspect of myth itself. The Buddha, Mithra, Zoraster, Apollo, Christmas paralleling with the Roman festival of Saturnalia, etc.

1. One can use "schollarly documentation" whatever that is, to garner any results one likes.

2. This chestnut is exactly what I mean about hj arguments being no better than mythic arguments, in fact this one is about as bad and inaccurate an argument as one can make. If we had the small amount of evidence for Jesus as we have for Pilate we would not be having this discussion, the debate would have been over long ago.

3. Not to mention the reliance on written tradition. I like the idea that we know what people were saying in the first century though, that must be what separates our species from monkeys.

4. There is no "key" mythicist that everyone refers to, there is just no shortage of straw man arguments.

What we have is a storied narrative wherein the myth is obvious and the historical merit not so obvious and epistles that give us nothing prior to a risen Christ. I haven't been so quick to take a stance either way in this debate because it's emotionally charged, bad arguments coming from both sides. The amount of sholarship required to flesh out an historical Jesus is suspect, if only it were a simple cut and dried case as it is for Pontius Pilate. A Jesus from Galilee with followers, I don't think the most ardent mythicist disagrees with that, but for what it's worth, his words and deeds, whether he was baptized and executed is still debated regardless of how ironclad confident biblical scholars are of what they claim to know by interpreting the literature.

 

[AmbiguousGuy]

A Jesus from Galilee with followers, I don't think the most ardent mythicist disagrees with that, but for what it's worth, his words and deeds, whether he was baptized and executed is still debated regardless of how ironclad confident biblical scholars are of what they claim to know by interpreting the literature.

I'm fine with the idea of a Jesus from Galilee with followers. I just suspect that he lived earlier than is claimed for him. And that he served mostly as inspiration for the stories told about him. I also think that Robin Hood and Beowulf and Paul Bunyon were most likely inspired by real men.

 

[LegionOnomaMoi]

not an abstract idea that needed psychoanalysis to represent.

I wasn't clear.
I was told in high school that Beowulf's Grendel represented another tribe. This approach to myth has a long history of "armchair" historians. There were 2 central trends: for those like Bachofen, Marx, Frazer, Bulfinch, Evans-Pritchard, Tylor and others, it was the use of Western philosophy (so thoroughly influenced by the scholastics that gave birth to the university system in the first place) and particularly Christian teleology. For those like Campbell, Slater, a slew of both amateur and professional authors of works particularly in literary theory, women's studies, early sociology, etc., myths transcended history and were symbols. In particular, for the latter approach, universal archetypes were the method to analyze religions of any culture.

Spoiler: An aside

Marx's (undoubtedly unconscious) use of Christian teleology is often overlooked because it is trivial compared to how Marxian theory is typically understood. Marx believed that capitalism was the best system yet. However, it suffered from a flaw that would inevitably result in the overthrow of the factory owners.
When this failed to occur, not unlike the early Christians after the eschatological teleology of Jesus and Paul, Marxists were reluctant to part with their doctrine and an entire generation of academics were suddenly desperately creating various theories to account for the lack of the overthrow predicted. Gramsci developed a more universal theory of hegemony which was adopted by the deconstructionists and social-relation theorists. Transfigured versions of social contract theories from Locke through Rousseau's Du contrat social ou Principes du droit politique replaced social with an intersubjective mutated structure of social discourse designed to reinforce social norms as in e.g., Habermas' Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit. Academics, especially in the humanities and social sciences, were influenced by philosophers of science (Popper, Kuhn, Quine, Lakatos, Feyerabend, Putnam, etc.) and drew on to basically create history, rather than analyze it. For the most part, it's Einstein's fault.

Bachofen envisioned a series of stages of socio-cultural evolution, from the more primitive (matriarchal prehistory) to the most advanced (where naturally men were rulers). Unlike e.g., Hesiod, Marx, Bachofen & others viewed successive epochs as not only going from worse to better but eventually to the perfect society.

More importantly, Bachofen used classical literature to freely construct a historical account of progressive eras. The Amazons were real. The ages of Hesiod were real too (they just needed some tweaking and ad hoc explanations, interpretations, and alterations so that we don't start from a golden age and go downhill from there). Yet Bachofen didn't use even a single criterion to determine whether or not he wished to use a source and even when he did use one, he usually distorted it.

Frazer wasn't much better. He combed the classical sources to find history, but had ideology (both anti-Christian and a desire to legitimize the "science" of early sociology/anthropology), but not much method. His enormous work, rivaled only perhaps by Gibbon in its combination of literary skill and bad methods, remains a classic and was incredibly influential to mythicist Arthur Drews. But it still relied on a selective use of myths and a liberal interpretation of these. After Frazer, we see a split. On the one had, the early ethnologists like Pritchard or sociologists like Malinowski proceeded to establish a still primitive but increasingly well-founded science, and on the other hand literary theorists, counter-intellectuals, academic radicals, and even mainstream epistemologists turned earlier use of myth-as-history and into history-is-myth. Foucault is perhaps the most famous of these, but even before he was popular outside of French circles the seeds of deconstructionism in which all texts are fiction were sown.

Yet another branch carried on the myth-as-history tradition of Frazer and relied in particular on Jungian archetypes: the idea that myths represent universals which we can uncover by comparing different cultures' mythologies. Campbell is the most influential by far here, but he is not alone. Unfortunately, by creating parallels to demonstrate these universal archetypes, utterly different cultural spiritual and religious practices were equated by ignoring inconvenient practices or glossing over inconvenient parts of myths. The most influential field of study here is that of feminism and goddess worship, where the name Marija Gimbutas reigns supreme. As one critic remarked, looking through her (especially later) work, it is hard to find any shape or symbol that doesn't represent the divine feminine, even "abstract female with breasts":

Maybe it's me, but I don't see how Gimbutas gets "abstract female" anything from looking at that. At any rate, before 1969, matriarchal prehistory was actually fairly mainstream. Andrew Fleming's 1969 article "The myth of the mother Goddess" and Ucko's monograph a year or 2 later changed all this.

Spoiler: Feminist: an aside

Gimbutas remains both a champion and a bane for feminists, depending upon whom you ask. Cynthia Eller wrote a scathing review of her work in a monograph devoted to the ways in which it was not only wrong, but held back feminism. In Goddesses and the Divine Feminine Rosemary Radford Ruether agrees with Eller's analysis, but believes her approach overly critical. Both women find critics in papers like "Who's afraid of "Who's afraid of 'the Goddess Stuff'?" Few historians and archaeologists now believe much of anything that Gimbutas produced, and some feminists who work in these fields have been her most vicious critics because they view her as another way that legitimate feminist scholarship can be dismissed by equating it with Gimbutas. Outsider academia, Wiccans, non-wiccan Witches, radical feminists like Z. Budapest and the Dianic Wiccan movement she likely inspired, etc., have incorporated Gimbutas alongside Merlin Stone and others as part of the framework for their spiritualties.

you don't believe that ancient people didn't have the ability to do the same thing?

Quite the contrary. It's just that later 20th and 21st century scholarship has seen an increasing amount of challenges to the notion of religion as has been generally understood. In particular, many modern religions are argued to have been created by Western imperialism and Western imposition of definitions on e.g., Eastern practices in a dynamic exchange going back 400+ years. Religion, with few exceptions, has been culture. That is, to most cultures throughout time the distinction between culture and religion wouldn't make sense. There was no word for religion in Latin or in Greek. Herodotus describes the "religion" of another people by naming their deities.

While most of Greek comedy is lost to us, Plautus' plays are not nor is the brilliant Batrachomyomachia. Myths were stories told frequently to amuse and even mock the gods. The symbols that were important were almost entirely practices, not myths/beliefs. One could be executed for profaning a cultic site or ritual, but not making fun of the gods in a play or poetry.

to think that ancient peoples did not have the cognitive ability

You are a victim of Romanticism (and still wronged by the Renaissance). Once Rome collapsed, what little of learning remained was walled up with monks and much more would be lost had not the Muslims translated Greek texts. It wasn't until the early modern period that Greek was re-discovered and with it Greek texts. Naturally, the early scholars did what the missionaries had to the Germanic tribes: they interpreted just about everything through Christianity. As Homer and myths were the closest parallel to the bible, it was only logical from a biased Christian perspective to view these as the foundations of religion. This same Christian bias perverted works like Beowulf because the only people able to record such stories were missionaries who had no problem editing whenever they felt like it.

French, middle English, and Norse mythology

Norse mythology comes down to us primarily through Christian sources and through the basis of the Eaters of the Dead made into the film The 13thWarrior. The main character was a real Arab who described a Viking funeral. But precious little else comes to us from non-Christian hands. The oldest Germanic text known is also basically the only evidence for the Gothic language we have: a translation of the bible.

By the time of Old French and Middle English, everyone was Christian.

Greek was the basis for much of academia for a long time

More Latin, actually. Scholars wrote (even in private journals) in Latin, spoke in Latin, and people like Descartes had someone else translate his writings into French even though it was his native language. Greek was nearly forgotten and had to be re-learned, and for a long time only Aristotle was really important.

Greek myths carried on more prevalently

There is another author who said that all of Homer and Hesiod is lies. Not just lies, but profane, blasphemous lies. This was not a Christian fundamentalist, or a 19th century academic armchair historian, but Plato.

I describe in greater detail in that thread and that post, but the notion that these myths were the foundation for Greco-Roman religion is simply incorrect.

 

[LegionOnomaMoi]

Exactly, that's why I think Jesus' teachings were incorporated into a story of heroism, instead of a book of teachings.

Clearly you've never studied under a traditional martial arts master . There are stories (which are usually false in the particulars but reflect a general tendency) of disciples wishing to be trained and being tested by having to spend 5 years standing all day in one position (the "horse" stance mabu). Indentured servitude, Freemasons, and plenty of other examples are closer to the kind of instruction I'm talking about. The point was definitely not to make learning fun. C. S. Lewis, perhaps the greatest Christian apologist of the 20th century, is known mostly for his Chronicles of Narnia. Unlike his fellow Inkling and friend Tolkien (born Catholic), he was a convert and did not "abhor allegory in all its forms" (part of the preface to the LOTR, but I'm going off memory here so it might not be Tolkien's exact words).

There's a part where Eustace Scrubb ("once there was a boy named Clarence Eustace Scrubb, and he almost deserved it"), having turned into a dragon, despairs and is visited by Aslan (Jesus). Aslan tells him to turn back into a boy he has to rip of his dragon skin. So he does, as painful as it is. Aslan tells him that isn't enough, and he rips harder and it hurts more but still he is a dragon. Finally Aslan basically tears him to shreds, but despite the agony at the end of it we find the boy again. The allegory is intended to represent what Jesus asked: complete renunciation of one's way of life and total devotion to a hard way of life. One main reason some have said he was influenced by Cynic philosophy was the asceticism of Diogenes and the Cynics, who believed the way to live was to forgo all worldly goods. Buddhism has similar doctrines (the noble truths and suffering). The study of Rabbis was so influential that a friend I had growing up in the most liberal state in the US and raised by liberal non-orthodox Jews still attended Hebrew school and had to study Hebrew. That's because after the temple fell, the functional replacement was torah study (in the loose sense of the word, the law of YHWH not the Books of Moses or the Tanakh but these and more). It was hard work and those who came to be called Rabbis when the term meant more than "teacher" but was a social role dedicated years to study. I never was confirmed, but the rest of my family was (and my father was a convert), so I know that even today they had to do things in order to become full members of the Catholic church. I also know that this as nothing compared to early catechism and that was still less than what Jesus asked for.

This kind of education wasn't just to a matter of learning but of learning a doctrine and way of life that must be ingrained into someone through memorization, correction, dedication, and discipline. Beating school children seems monstrous to most of us, but it is nothing to the kind of torment "education" could be long before Jesus. Master/disciple relationships, whether the master was a philosopher or skilled laborer, was not fun and not intended to be.

I mean honestly, how many people want to learn something, and how many people would rather hear a colorful story, and maybe learn something in the process.

I'm with you. Which is probably why I never got beyond a 2nd Dan in any style and stopped going with traditional martial arts years ago (I'd rather come home beat to hell from a krav maga class than perfect kata; the Japanese literally have an entire martial art called iaido, which is nothing more than drawing one's katana). And as a graduate student who had to leave for monetary reasons, I can tell you that endured servitude lives on in the halls of academia (where many fall down, and few return to the sunlit lands).

On the other hand, think how many people have endured paid, suffering, exhaustion, and more to master a craft, earn the Budweiser (the emblem of an eagle gripping a trident presented to SEALs upon completion of BUD/S), master a game or sport, or any number of things which require years of dedication and a lot of work and learning that isn't at all fun. It's a matter of motivation. I'd like to think that if I hadn't had to choose between the marines and my fiancé I would have passed through training, but it would have been rough. Being instructed in antiquity wasn't teacher/student so much as master/disciple and the dynamics were qualitatively different.

As a teacher, one of the biggest things you hear is "make learning fun".

As I teacher, I mostly hear whispering, the sounds of students checking smartphones, or (worst of all) tutoring a student and hearing nothing but "I don't know" because they are being forced to be there. But I do try to make it fun or at least interesting.

 

[LegionOnomaMoi]

Yes. That obviously makes the best sense. It was an exciting idea -- to claim that the godman Christ had actually lived on the earth just a few years earlier.

Apart from your modern era biases, what makes you think this would have been exciting? What, in the historical record (which is littered with references, stories, legends, even histories of gods, demigods, magi, and wonder-workers) makes you think that a messiah would be exciting when he didn't do anything messianic? Why would we have a "godman Christ" when the entire notion is contrary to everything the word "Christ" meant outside of Jewish circles until it was applied to Jesus, and when it was the earliest testimony tells us the sect was first persecuted by other Jews? If it was so exciting, why do we know that Celsus, a 2nd century anti-Christian philosopher whose work is known only through Origen's Contra Celsum, said there was nothing special about Jesus that hadn't been said about others? Why, if this idea was so exciting, did it take 300 years before the practice was made legal?

I think that the Christ myth would have mostly died out except for someone's idea to claim that he had been historical.

Which presumes that the Christ myth existed before this claim. Which means that somehow a Jewish role that was supposed to result in the restoration of Israel or something like it (and not the execution of the messiah), was a myth that didn't fit into Judaism, didn't make sense among pagans, and we have no record of apart from tracing it all back to one person at one time and region, was all somehow put together before Mark. Moreover, this thoroughly non-Jewish messiah was introduced to the world by a text that required a Jewish matrix of understanding, was poorly written (especially if we're going with the budding author theory) and yet was so exciting that the non-Jewish non-Pagan Christ godman worshippers who we have no record of dropped their godman worship and started saying he was historical. And nobody else, within Judaism or paganism, either thought of this idea first or imitated it later by writing a biographical-type narrative of a godman, despite who exciting it was? That's how unbelievably stupid and uncreative the Jews and Pagans were: they couldn't even come up with a historical fiction-type account of their gods and/or demi-gods.

Not particulary interesting? Where did you get that idea?

From having read the gospel of Mark and compared it to the lives written by Greco-Roman biographers, from the way it reads by itself (in Greek especially), and from the way in which two later authors used it and other material in a superior manner showing that this could be done rather easily. So our anonymous literary innovator possessed the foresight and familiarity with a story to know how effective a fictional account of this godman that seemed like a biographical writing would be, but did not possess the ability to write it well. Finally, there is the testimony of a few centuries of Christian/pagan writings which are informative here. Marcion chose Luke, perhaps the best written, as his gospel (rejecting the others) along with Paul's letters. Church tradition held that only Matthew and John were written by disciples, while Mark as written by John Mark, Peter's secretary. Nowhere is it given pride of place until the 19th century.

The gospels aren't novels, surely.

They are akin to novels. Again, ancient historians were story-tellers. The difference was that they aimed to tell the truth of what happened (even if they did it poorly).

Think about the origin of many religions

I can't. Because there are very few that fit the Western conception of religion and even among those many were created by Western conceptions. Hinduism, for example. See e.g.,

Turner, A. M. (2009). Buddhism, Colonialism and the Boundaries of Religion: Theravada Buddhism in Burma, 1885-1920 (Doctoral dissertation, University of Chicago, the Divinity School).

De Michelis, E. (2005). A history of modern yoga: Patanjali and Western Esotericism. Continuum International Publishing Group.


Pennington, B. K. (2005). Was Hinduism Invented?: Britons, Indians, and the Colonial Construction of Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

King, R. (2002). Orientalism and Religion: Post-Colonial Theory, India and" The Mystic East". Routledge.

Urban, H. B., & Doniger, W. (2001). The economics of ecstasy: Tantra, secrecy, and power in Colonial Bengal. New York: Oxford University Press.

that should be a good start. There's a whole different set for the problematic definition of "religion" you use, but as the above gets into that somewhat I'll wait.

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

I know that's your opinion. What I want is some evidence for it besides vague claims about how religions are started.

He didn't write a novel. He just had an idea.



So some say. Me, I don't form hard-and-fast opinions about historical matters.

The first statement is a hard and fast opinion on a historical matter. The second statement is you denying you have such opinions. Which one should I go with?

I'm confused. You think that Paul considered Jesus to have been a real man?

Yes.

Seriously? You think that Paul believed Jesus was physically killed and resurrected? I find that an extraordinary position, if so.

Why?

You think there were never any Jesus deniers back in the day? If so, why do you make that assumption?

It's not an assumption. Most of what we know about individuals comes to us from single lines, inscriptions, etc. It doesn't give a good idea about these people, but it gives us a much better idea about what literature is now lost. This has been tested by the number of times we've discovered a lost text that we knew of compared to a lost text we didn't.

Also, we have the nag hammadi find and other "heretical" texts that were once lost. One of the most important issues that settled was whether or not the heresiologists were spreading lies about the beliefs of their opponents because some scholars argued that the descriptions and quotations we had were too clearly fantastical and esoteric to be accurate. Then we found lots of gnostic texts, and it turns out that whatever asides and comments the heresiologists inserted into their attacks and defenses, they did accurately quote and summarize the views of their opponents. So we have a few hundred years of writings filled with anti-Christian sentiment preserved by those who sought to counter it. We have Celsus telling us Jesus is a ******* son of a Roman soldier, the Emperor Julian's Against the Galileans, the scorn of Pliny and Tacitus, and numerous other sources which either mention Jesus in passing or devote a great deal to him and his worshippers yet never did anybody say "he didn't exist". On the contrary, at least some used Jesus' ignoble birth to mock him and his followers. So we have evidence of Christians defending attacks against Jesus having a miraculous birth, we even have Christians trying to explain away why Paul refers to James as Jesus' brother, and we have late 3rd and 4th century texts that are more like your "godman Christ" as he only appeared to be human, but no where in all the attacks we have on Christians that are preserved by those who sought to counter them is there a single hint that anybody ever claimed he didn't exist. Why (given, among other things, that the earliest Christian texts we have state that the entire faith stands or falls not on historicity but whether Jesus rose from the dead) do we have so many records of heretical movements, anti-Christian sentiments from pagans, anti-Christian sentiments from Jewish Christians and other movements which aren't really Christian but aren't really pagan (and almost all recorded by those who were attacking and/or defending these groups and individuals), is there no mention or reference anywhere to anybody either insisting that Jesus existed or defending a claim that he didn't? Even after Constantine, Julian tried not only to form a more unified pagan religion but also wrote anti-Christian treatises (recorded, again, by those like Cyril who quoted the attacks and tried to counter them). This is the emperor of the then still powerful Roman empire, after Constantine, and we are still running into Christians mounting defenses by writing rebuttals with lengthy quotations attacked one at a time. Yet not one is about Jesus being a myth.

Had we no real evidence at all about the various ways in which Christians were maligned, insulted, mocked, etc., then we could assert that censorship was the reason for this silence. However, not only do we find evidence of all such treatments, almost all of it survives by Christians who preserved them to attack them. So we have about 400 years of exchanges and a wealth of anti-Christian sentiments recorded alongside of (and often in the same document as) our wealth of Christian apologetics, but not a single solitary defense of Jesus' historicity or evidence that one was ever necessary.