Stein wrote:Good description here of what typifies conspiracy theorists like the mythers --

"[P]artisan bloggers .... reinforce their mutual preconceptions by echoing them back and forth, referencing each other, accepting only what evidence confirms their beliefs and ignoring the rest (when they reference evidence at all.) This is the modus oper[a]ndi of dogmatists, and it can become a prison which is difficult [to] escape"
http://www.internationalskeptics.com/fo ... st12586443

Stein

proudfootz wrote:Reinforcing mutual preconceptions by echoing them back and forth?
Referencing each other?
Only accepting evidence that reaffirms their beliefs?
Ignoring or minimizing disconfirming evidence?

Sounds like Bible studies in academia!

... So what does Ehrman think of the Christian sources? What most competent scholars would think. They are terrible sources. They are not contemporaneous, they are not from eyewitnesses, they are biased, full of contradictions, fabrications, and implausible claims. How then can a respected expert in his field like Bart Ehrman use these horrid sources to argue that what are effectively minimalists of the New Testament are completely wrong? Simple: hypothetical sources. Apparently, we can trust these untrustworthy sources because of the sources behind them. Okay, let us verify these sources’ contents. Where are the manuscripts? Nowhere to be found. They are [merely] hypothetical sources ...

... this appeal to hypothetical sources is laughable, pathetic. We can have no idea of the content of these sources had they existed, the true authors, their intent, and so forth. Worse still, we can wonder why it is that Ehrman, a historicist, is allowed to posit hypothetical sources, and so many of them, to bolster his preferred theory ... Sadly, Ehrman does not feel the need to justify his non-existing sources ‘approach’ ...

Apart from his use of hypothetical sources, Ehrman highlights two key points that apparently make Jesus’ existence a sure bet. The first is Paul’s relationships with Peter and James, who surely knew a historical Jesus. The big problem is that we know of this from later documents. Ehrman and other scholars read the later documents into the earlier Epistles. Reading the Epistles without Gospel-tainted glasses will lead to some intriguing possibilities, as we shall soon see. There are other problems, too, such as the general unreliability of the Epistles (just as with the Gospels), and the fact that such passages were tampered with (as Ehrman himself published on; see his The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture, Oxford University Press, 1993, pp.238-239).

The second is that Jews would apparently never invent a suffering Messiah. This is utter nonsense. Ehrman is wrong in principle and in fact. Judaism is and always was very diverse, and we know about the religious beliefs of only a small fraction of the Jewish population, as is made obvious by Josephus and Ehrman himself. But there is also evidence, thanks to recent discoveries, that several Jews believed in all sorts of different Messiahs, including suffering ones, dying and rising ones, celestial ones, and so forth. And that is what Ehrman brings to the table. Apart from, in the years since, publishing much that undermines his own work in Did Jesus Exist?

https://bibleinterp.arizona.edu/article ... istoricity

RÉSUMÉ
The beginning of Christianity is often associated with biblical protagonists (Jesus, Paul, the Apostles etc.) and often linked to historical events taking place around the mid-1st century. This article takes a different view, beginning with the assumption that what was later called "Christianity" should not be anachronistically projected back onto the first century. Even though it built on gradual developments taking place over the course of 140 years, "Christianity" was a novel concept, no older than the end of the Bar Kokhba revolt (135 CE). As most of the early "Christian" writings cannot be dated with certainty, we do not know whether Jews started calling themselves "Christians" prior to this time. The first texts to report such self-descriptions are Marcion’s Antitheses from around the year 144 CE and Ignatius’ Letters (middle recension) which together, and supported by growing scholarship, I take to be from after the mid second century. Before this point, "Christian" texts describe the word as a deprecating exonym (Acts 26:28 attributes use of the term to a cynical Agrippa; 1 Peter 4:16 associates "Christian" with suffering and shame). In what follows I hope to show why and how Marcion created "Christianity" as a label for a third way between Jerusalem and Rome, an innovation which proved successful and was quickly picked up by a number of "apologists" in the late years of Hadrian and the early years of Antoninus Pius. https://books.openedition.org/efr/5307

Leucius Charinus wrote:"no figure on the borderline of history and mythology has wasted more of the historian's time". (archaeologist Nowell Myres)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Arthur#Historicity

proudfootz wrote:It sometimes makes me sad the resources that have been lavished on this Jesus character. I guess it's understandable if it's thought he was/is God Incarnate and knowledge about him is the ticket to avoiding infinite torture in a lake of fire and all that. Highly motivational!

RealityRules wrote:.
Questioning Jesus’ Historicity, by Raphael Lataster, August 2019

Stein wrote: No, I don't have any personal acquaintance with Bart Ehrman, for instance. But I can recognize him as a worthy scrupulous historian. He has received all the flak from religious bigots my father's colleagues received, and then some. When someone like him stoutly maintains that Jesus was a simple mortal, and that J was also historical, that is NOT said to please the church or anyone remotely affiliated with it. It is a statement of the utmost integrity.

Leucius Charinus wrote:

Stein wrote: No, I don't have any personal acquaintance with Bart Ehrman, for instance. But I can recognize him as a worthy scrupulous historian. He has received all the flak from religious bigots my father's colleagues received, and then some. When someone like him stoutly maintains that Jesus was a simple mortal, and that J was also historical, that is NOT said to please the church or anyone remotely affiliated with it. It is a statement of the utmost integrity.

What Ehrman says about his own opinion on the historicity of Jesus, and the forgery of Christian manuscripts is fine. He is entitled to it. So is everyone. The problem is that Ehrman also has the opinion that those who deny the historicity of Jesus are comparable to "holocaust deniers". Hyperbolic. He equates an evaluation of evidence from antiquity (whether the NT Jesus existed) with an evaluation of evidence from the 20th century (whether a holocaust occurred). This kind of exposes Bart's understanding and evaluation of available historical evidence. This is not a sound comparison.

Bart and others are also not identifying all the evidence when they claim that mythicism only appeared in the 17th/18th/19th century. They claim it is a modern invention. But they don't mention the negative evidence such as the laws of blasphemy or indeed the "Index of Prohibited Books" run by the utterly corrupt Vatican church industry.

As much as we are amateur historians we should be prepared to admit that our conclusions can only ever be hypothetical and provisional.

Stein wrote:Yes, I am admittedly full of exasperation and visceral impatience because I've been steeped in the world of professional

S E C U L A R

historians since childhood, including my father who was an atheist like many of his colleagues. So I know just how demanding that world can be.. The admiration I had for the sheer rigor and the scruples of both my father and his colleagues and the routine peer-vetting they went through for all their work is seared into my brain.

The flak that those who dared to focus on ancient Middle East history regularly received, from religious associates, colleagues outside of the historian profession, friends and family, is also seared into my brain.

Terming such staunch pioneers against the forces of superstition as mere sellouts to religious woo, as the woefully historiography-ignorant mythicists always do like programmed robots, is just like terming Harriet Tubman nothing but a stooge for the Confederate establishment of the 1850s -- the very opposite of what she effing was. It is both the vilest possible slur and grossly ignorant. We would still be in the primitive world of Biblical inerrancy and ubiquitous superstition today, pal, without these intrepid academic researchers who followed and follow the facts in the face of headwinds that would terrify those of lesser fiber.

Having been dumb enough in the past to imagine I can enlighten effing mythicist robots on facts (remember those?), I now come to groups like these expressly to call out the anti-academic woo of the mythicists that I've seen on line everywhere and the ignorant stereotyping they apply to any professional specialists who dare to apply simple parsimony to the data for a STRICTLY HUMAN NON-MIRACULOUS HISTORICAL Jesus.

Mythicists, in their ignorance and kneejerk suspicion of modern historiography, effectively carry water for all the bigoted religious forces that were arrayed against my father and his beleaguered colleagues when I was growing up. No, I don't have any personal acquaintance with Bart Ehrman, for instance. But I can recognize him as a worthy scrupulous historian. He has received all the flak from religious bigots my father's colleagues received, and then some. When someone like him stoutly maintains that Jesus was a simple mortal, and that J was also historical, that is NOT said to please the church or anyone remotely affiliated with it. It is a statement of the utmost integrity.

So yes, from now on, I come here with no intention of suffering fools gladly. I now come here to call out those mythicists whose ignorance and hatred of professional historiography is no whit different from the inexcusable hatred of science coming from the fundamentalists. It's of the same piece of cloth, the same filthy stench-ridden horse____: an ignorance of serious hard research that morphs into unreasoning hatred for what it lacks the discipline and simple brains to understand.

Stein

Leucius Charinus wrote:

Stein wrote: No, I don't have any personal acquaintance with Bart Ehrman, for instance. But I can recognize him as a worthy scrupulous historian. He has received all the flak from religious bigots my father's colleagues received, and then some. When someone like him stoutly maintains that Jesus was a simple mortal, and that J was also historical, that is NOT said to please the church or anyone remotely affiliated with it. It is a statement of the utmost integrity.

What Ehrman says about his own opinion on the historicity of Jesus, and the forgery of Christian manuscripts is fine. He is entitled to it. So is everyone. The problem is that Ehrman also has the opinion that those who deny the historicity of Jesus are comparable to "holocaust deniers". Hyperbolic. He equates an evaluation of evidence from antiquity (whether the NT Jesus existed) with an evaluation of evidence from the 20th century (whether a holocaust occurred). This kind of exposes Bart's understanding and evaluation of available historical evidence. This is not a sound comparison.

Bart and others are also not identifying all the evidence when they claim that mythicism only appeared in the 17th/18th/19th century. They claim it is a modern invention. But they don't mention the negative evidence such as the laws of blasphemy or indeed the "Index of Prohibited Books" run by the utterly corrupt Vatican church industry.

As much as we are amateur historians we should be prepared to admit that our conclusions can only ever be hypothetical and provisional.

Stein wrote:Bart Ehrman is right: Those who deny the historicity of Jesus ARE comparable to holocaust deniers.

The 17th to 18th centuries DID mark the first appearance of mythicism.

Professional historians' conclusions deal in balanced LIKELIHOODS, not hypotheticals.

Stein wrote:... conspiracy theorists like the mythers --

Mythicism is NOT a conspiracy theory

RealityRules wrote:

Stein wrote:... conspiracy theorists like the mythers --

Mythicism is NOT a conspiracy theory