Granny Magda in Message 338 writes:
No skin as believers, but plenty of skin as the main focus of their life's work.
That sounds dangerously close to creationist conspiracy theories about scientists being unable to speak candidly about evolution. The idea that there are non-Christian scholars trapped in some sort of cognitive bias is far fetched. They are arguably the ones who we might reasonably expect to be more biased toward mythicism and yet they're not.
I was only responding to your comment that they had no skin in the game. That wouldn't seem to describe anyone who spends their career studying Jesus. That's a considerable investment.
And what draws someone to studying Jesus? Disbelief that he ever lived? Perhaps for a very few. The vast, vast majority of Jesus scholars began their studies already believing he was real.
That's what I was focusing away from. I wasn't just considering one of the extremes but rather the incredibly broad range of opinion between the two extremes. Most importantly, while there is a significant consensus around the Christ of faith at one extreme, there is also a significant consensus around the Jesus of history that's not all that far from other extreme. That's a chasm of a difference of opinion.
I think that's a fair characterisation.
But then is there any meaningful difference between an obscure mystic bearing no resemblance to the Christ of faith and no mystic at all? There's little difference between 99% made up and 100% made up?
I don't know what you expect from such a culturally loaded field of study.
I expect that anyone deserving of the title of scholar would say "I don't know" when they have no evidence. When there is unanimity about the historicity of Jesus in the absence of any evidence, when mere words on a page are labeled evidence, when evidence includes speculations about what someone may or may not have made up, then that damns the entire field of study.
Inevitably the existence of Christian faith and any resulting bias are going to affect the scholarship.
And that's a very bad thing. Whether as scholars they advocate a Christ of faith or a Jesus of history, in matters of faith they all believe in the Christ of faith, and that influences their scholarship. Being a Christian believer should be disqualifying for studying the foundations of Christianity.
Also I will point out again that insofar as there are two extremes at play, the extreme anti-Christian position - mythicsim - falls outside of academia. The extreme within academia is a mundane historical Jesus.
But the position you're calling "extreme anti-Christian" is the one that's consistent with the evidence. What's truly extreme is near unanimity in the absence of evidence.
I don't think the scenario you outline is innately implausible. The thing that's truly implausible is the idea of Jesus the Messiah needing to be baptised by a lesser figure like John. This oddity falls away however if we picture the scenario where a mundane Jesus gets baptised. Of course he would want to be baptised by John the Baptist. John was already a well known figure and, as you say, having John's imprimatur would have helped Jesus' evangelism. They were operating in the same area. We have independent evidence of John's historicity. It hangs together.
I might be misinterpreting this. Are you agreeing with me that the baptism may not be factual? That's one of the two things scholars apparently agree on.
Certainly it is especially glaring that a full mythicist hypothesis leaves us with absolutely no idea where Christianity came from in the first place.
But conclusions shouldn't be drawn simply because of our great inner need for answers. This need for knowing is why the gospel stories were invented. Just because we want to believe the answers to the mystery of the real Jesus can be found buried in the NT doesn't make it so. What makes it so is not our need to know but evidence, which is absent.
Mythicists typically make little attempt to address this question. If not a real Jesus, where does any of this come from? We are left to wonder.
I'm repeating myself, but the dissatisfaction with being left to wonder cannot create evidence that doesn't exist.
Take it to its logical conclusion. Mormon scholars believe the story of the golden plates just as deeply and sincerely as they do the crucifixion, yet they're wrong about the former and right about the latter. Biblical scholars believe the story of the virgin birth just as deeply and sincerely as they do the crucifixion, yet they're wrong about the former and right about the latter.
Doesn't it make more sense that they're all wrong about everything, instead of picking and choosing which things they're right or wrong about?
No, absolutely not. In the real world most people are right about some things and wrong about others, that's almost universal. It is certainly the case with historical sources from antiquity. I don't think there's any substantial source from that far back that doesn't contain some mixture of truth, honest error, bias, outright lies, plausible and implausible.
We might not be connecting here. I meant that modern Mormon and Christian scholars are wrong in their conclusions, not ancient sources. True, the sources are at the root of the problem, but I wasn't talking about them.
The same might be said of scholars themselves, but you are being extremely uncharitable in equating the deeply held and oft inflexible faith positions of fundamentalists at one end of the spectrum with the vastly more tentative academic positions held by scholars operating as professional historians or textual critics. I think you're being a little uncharitable toward the more moderate Christian scholars too. There are Christian scholars who are candid about not being able to make an evidence based case for the resurrection.
I'm merely holding them to the traditional standards for historical viewpoints: multiple cross-confirming evidence, which includes writings. Given the absence of evidence, the fact that "Jesus didn't exist" isn't even a recognized school of legitimate thought within academia speaks volumes about the undue influence of believing upon scholarship.
Is that so hard to believe?
You tell me.
If you insist; it's not hard to believe. In fact it is completely normal for people to be right about some things and wrong about others.
But there's really only two main positions: Jesus didn't exist, and Jesus did exist. Among the "Jesus did exist" scholars, which is apparently almost all of them, there is wholesale disagreement about what is true about Jesus. They agree on only two things: baptism and crucifixion. But there's no evidence for them, either, and they, too, should be tossed into the "not impossible" box along with everything else.
The same is true of historical documents, to the point where we might even start to become suspicious if a source were too perfect.
There are too many Christian traditions for perfection to have come about, but Christian scribes have had their fingers in historical documents for literally centuries. We'll never find all their changes, additions and deletions.
But the crucifixion was not an event from Paul's life. He was not a witness.
We were talking about the resurrection, or at least I was.
Focusing on the resurrection is fine, too, though it isn't one of the two events from Jesus's life about which there is wholesale agreement (baptism and crucifixion).
Paul claims to be a witness to the resurrected Jesus, but only in a vision.
Back in the 1980's when evangelists like Oral Roberts, Jim Bakker, Jimmy Swaggert and Jerry Falwell ruled the roost, they often announced that God had appeared to them in a vision. Extrapolate backwards 2000 years and you've got Paul. You believe Paul had a religious vision but that religious visions aren't evidence. I believe that Paul, like modern evangelists, made it up. Not just the vision of the resurrection but a whole lot more, including possibly the existence of the Christian community in Jerusalem. "Come," he would preach to a crowd, "and join your brothers in Jerusalem who have experienced the saving grace of our Lord Jesus Christ who having suffered the cross rose again to be by the side of God." And what would it matter that there wasn't really any Christian community a 10 days journey away on foot in Jerusalem.
And the differences Paul had with the Jerusalem church? What is a protagonist without an antagonist? Paul was a fabricator, a teller of tales. He could craft a story.
His accounts of mundane natters are obviously more plausible.
But again,
supernatural===false does not imply that
plausible===true. It's like Rahvin's story about seeing a squirrel. Plausible, sure. Doesn't make it true. Why would he lie about a squirrel? Heck if I know. Still doesn't make it true. You can't make up a whole life out of plausibilities.
Once the supernatural elements have been cast aside we are left with a mixture of less-plausible and more-plausible material. There are ways of sifting through that. Ahistorical elements for instance cast doubt. A higher degree of concordance between independent sources is more convincing. There are arguments from embarrassment. There are linguistic arguments - some passages from the NT seem to make more sense in Aramaic. Honestly, I'm not really qualified to lay out every tool historians and critics have at their disposal, but they are all aware of the problem you raise and they have their ways of addressing it. Just the same as every other historian in every other area of study. That is the job. That's what they do. they call this "Tuesday".
Biblical scholars have been enveloped in the mist of mystical writings for so long that they've lost all sense of judgment about what constitutes true evidence. Plausibility isn't evidence of anything. All it means is that it's possible or believable. Only if we find actual cross-confirming evidence might it rise to the level of something that is likely true.
Biblical scholarship does remind me of creationists who want special dispensations for their "evidence".
--Percy
Edited by Percy, : Grammar, punctuation.
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