john76

Hi Poincicco. You're right, and please don't ever apologize for expressing your opinion or interpretation. We all only ever draw as best we can from our own ink wells As I said, I may be a logical agnostic, but I am still a practical atheist. I personally feel that attributing any supernatural explanation to any event is silly, but that, as you say, doesn't mean the supernatural explanation is wrong. What I find silly or obvious is beside the point. The rules of logic don't submit to my whims.

Also, regarding some other points by other posters regarding the relationship between Christianity and other earlier mythic sources, I wanted to provide two interesting quotes from Prof. Robert M. Price:

1: "I remember first encountering the notion that the Jesus saga was formally similar to the Mediterranean dying and rising god myths of saviors including Attis, Adonis, Tammuz/Dumuzi, Dionysus, Osiris, and Baal. I felt almost at once that the jig was up. I could not explain away those parallels, parallels that went right to the heart of the thing. I felt momentary respite when I read the false reassurances of Bruce M. Metzger (may this great man rest in peace), J.N.D. Anderson, Edwin Yamauchi (may I someday gain a tenth of his knowledge!), and others that these parallels were false or that they were later in origin, perhaps even borrowed by the pagans from Christianity. But it did not take long to discover the spurious nature of such apologetical special pleading. There was ample and early pre-Christian evidence for the dying and rising gods. The parallels were very close. And it was simply not true that no one ever held that, like Jesus, these saviors had been historical figures. And if the ancient apologists had not known that the pagan parallels were pre-Christian, why on earth would they have mounted a suicidal argument that Satan counterfeited the real dying and rising god ahead of time. That is like the fundamentalists of the 19th century arguing desperately that God created fossils of dinosaurs that had never existed."

2: " Another shocker: it hit me like a ton of bricks when I realized, after studying much previous research on the question, that virtually every story in the gospels and Acts can be shown to be very likely a Christian rewrite of material from the Septuagint, Homer, Euripides' Bacchae, and Josephus. One need not be David Hume to see that, if a story tells us a man multiplied food to feed a multitude, it is inherently much more likely that the story is a rewrite of an older miracle tale (starring Elisha) than that it is a report of a real event. A literary origin is always to be preferred to an historical one in such a case. And that is the choice we have to make in virtually every case of New Testament narrative. I refer the interested reader to my essay "New Testament Narrative as Old Testament Midrash," in Jacob Neusner and Alan Avery-Peck, eds., Encyclopedia of Midrash. Of course I am dependent here upon many fine works by Randel Helms, Thomas L. Brodie, John Dominic Crossan, and others. None of them went as far as I am going. It is just that as I counted up the gospel stories I felt each scholar had convincingly traced back to a previous literary prototype, it dawned on me that there was virtually nothing left. None tried to argue for the fictive character of the whole tradition, and each offered some cases I found arbitrary and implausible. Still, their work, when combined, militated toward a wholly fictive Jesus story."

Hope these help; John

poincicco

John, thanks for the magnanimous spirit and the further insight into these issues. Your academic preparation is a lot deeper than mine, as are your observations. Apart from my initial formal theological studies in preparation for the ministry, my studies for the past years have been limited pretty much to that necessary for the preparation of sermons, Bible studies and a few Bible college courses on various Bible books. Since my official defection from the faith four years ago I've been reading more science as well as some apologetic works by various agnostics and atheists. It's all been very enlightening and stimulating after so many years in a closed system. What most effectively snipped the thread on my faith and started it all unravelling was my surrender to the obvious conclusion that the Bible was definitely not a plenary verbally-inspired inerrant and authoritatively inspired revelation from almighty God. I had suspected that for years but resisted the suspicion, having been told as a new Christian that Satan would try to undermine my faith with just such thoughts. But after years of study and thinking I could no longer go on, in the words of Paul Simon, resisting the obvious, child. The Bible still commands my respect as literature, but I can no longer look to it as a source of unbiased history or divine teaching. As for its teachings on Jesus, his words and his acts, who truly knows what, if anything, is historic and what is construct? That it all might be built from older mythologies is certainly not an impossibility. I'll have to try and find your article. Thanks again for the response. RJT

poincicco

Romansh (interesting moniker, by the way), thanks for your reply. Good point. I hear what your saying here and agree, in theory I was explaining just this to a friend the other day in the context of a discussion on evolution. She's a confirmed evangelical Xtn who wanted to discredit evolution because it is a "theory", not a proven fact. I hope she understood my point when I explained that that is the beauty of science over theology. Science proposes a theory to explain the data and then CONTINUES to research the data to see if it supports the theory. If it doesn't, the theory gets modified. It's an open system always open to modification. In fact, evidence that shows any portion of the theory to be false is WELCOMED, not seen as a threat. In true scienctific research, unlike theology, truth is the objective, not proof. Evolutionary theory has changed substantially since Darwin's time and will likely go on changing as more data is uncovered, analyzed and incorporated into the theory. But so far all data has essentially confirmed the broad concept of natural selection and survival of the fittest as the mechanism that has produced the biological complexity we find all around us today. True, this is not "proof" that evolution is true, but it's close enough to convince me! Take care Romansh!

john76

Hi again Poincicco. Thanks for your response. They are all fun questions but I do think they need to be taken with a grain of salt. An atheist friend of mine never tires of reminding me that in debating against Christians, you are ultimately debating against people whose sources were also certain that the world was flat and that the sun revolved around the earth.

On the other hand, just because the 'Jesus Myth' theory presents a really compelling case, that doesn't make it true. Prof. Price has a useful caution here:

"It is not as if I believe there is no strong argument for an historical Jesus. There is one: one can very plausibly read certain texts in Acts, Mark, and Galatians as fossils preserving the memory of a succession struggle following the death of Jesus, who, therefore, must have existed. Who should follow Jesus as his vicar on earth? His disciples (analogous to the Companions of the Prophet Muhammad, who provided the first three caliphs)? Or should it be the Pillars, his own relatives (the Shi'ite Muslims called Muhammad's kinsmen the Pillars, too, and supported their dynastic claims). One can trace the same struggles in the Baha'i Faith after the death of the Bab (Mirza Ali Muhammad): who should rule, his brother Subh-i-Azal, or his disciple Hussein Ali, Baha'Ullah? Who should follow the Prophet Joseph Smith? His disciples, or his son, Joseph, Jr.? When the Honorable Elijah Muhammad died, Black Muslims split and followed either his son and heir Wareeth Deen Muhammad or his former lieutenant Louis Farrakhan. In the New Testament, as Harnack and Stauffer argued, we seem to see the remains of a Caliphate of James. And that implies (though it does not prove) an historical Jesus. And it implies an historical Jesus of a particular type. It implies a Jesus who was a latter-day Judah Maccabee, with a group of brothers who could take up the banner when their eldest brother, killed in battle, perforce let it fall. S.G.F. Brandon made a very compelling case for the original revolutionary character of Jesus, subsequently sanitized and made politically harmless by Mark the evangelist. Judging by the skirt-clutching outrage of subsequent scholars, Mark's apologetical efforts to depoliticize the Jesus story have their own successors. Brandon's work is a genuine piece of the classic Higher Criticism of the gospels, with the same depth of reason and argumentation. If there was an historical Jesus, my vote is for Brandon's version. But I must point out that there is another way to read the evidence for the Zealot Jesus hypothesis. As Burton Mack has suggested, the political element in the Passion seems likely to represent an anachronistic confusion by Mark with the events leading to the fall of Jerusalem. When the Olivet Discourse warns its readers not to take any of a number of false messiahs and Zealot agitators for their own Jesus, does this not imply Christians were receiving the news of Theudas or Jesus ben Ananias or John of Gischala as news of Jesus' return? You don't tell people not to do what they're already not doing. If they were making such confusions, it would be inevitable that the events attached to them would find their way back into the telling of the Jesus story. It looks like this very thing happened. One notices how closely the interrogation and flogging of Jesus ben-Ananias, in trouble for predicting the destruction of the temple, parallels that of Jesus, ostensibly 40 years previously. We notice how Simon bar Gioras was welcomed into the temple with palm branches to cleanse the sacred precinct from the "thieves" who infested it, Zealots under John of Gischala. Uh-oh. Suppose these signs of historical-political verisimilitude are interlopers in the gospels from the following generation. The evidence for the Zealot Jesus evaporates. I have not tried to amass every argument I could think of to destroy the historicity of Jesus. Rather, I have summarized the series of realizations about methodology and evidence that eventually led me to embrace the Christ Myth Theory. There may once have been an historical Jesus, but for us there is one no longer. If he existed, he is forever lost behind the stained glass curtain of holy myth. At least that's the current state of the evidence as I see it."

All my blessings and have a great day Poincicco;

John

john76

Just as a bit of an aside, for anyone interested in the topic, this documentary is a great place to start: http://www.thegodmovie.com/

poincicco

Yo, john76! I've had no time this week to even open up the forum web page. When I did this morning, I found your response to my last post. Thanks a lot for the good info. It's all in the same vein as my thinking these past few years, albeit much more researched and better articulated Having decided that the Jesus of orthodox Xty is NOT the Jesus of actual history, I haven't spent a lot more time researching the issue. Your posts have refreshed my interest just a bit. Thanks!

A happy Saturday to ya!

POINCICCO

john76

Back at you Poincicco!