Thoughts on this paragraph

[Stein]

I'm curious: What might be your takeaway from this paragraph? What kinds of implications do you find in what the writer says, and can you give a detailed paraphrase of what's written here, please?



"There are earlier references, but they aren't any good. They either just repeat what Christians were telling them -- Christians who were just riffing on the New Testament -- or they're actually fabricated by Christians themselves and the most famous example is a whole paragraph in the early Jewish historian, Josephus, which nearly everyone agrees was snuck into that book by a later Christian scribe, who was evidently annoyed that Josephus forgot to mention Jesus, so when he copied the book out he made sure to -- you know -- just add a paragraph. You generally don't have to add paragraphs to other people's history books for a guy who actually existed. Pretty much if you're inserting a guy into history who wasn't there before, usually that means he really wasn't there before. Now that leaves us just with the New Testament..."



Thank you,

Stein

[Xamonas Chegwé]

Looks like he's claiming that 'historical' evidence for the existence of jesus (outside of the babble) was fabricated by later christians - which is credible. What he doesn't do is cite any references. He just makes sweeping statements like, "nearly everyone agrees", "usually that means". Basically, he's doing bad history - whatever the truth of what he is claiming.

[JimC]

The historical existence of Jesus, although interesting in its own right, is not material to discussions as to the existence of an entity corresponding to the christian god...

[FBM]

What they said. It's insubstantial and irrelevant to the question of divinity.

[FBM]

What they said. It's insubstantial and irrelevant to the question of divinity.

[Animavore]

Who wrote this?

[hiyymer]

I'm curious: What might be your takeaway from this paragraph? What kinds of implications do you find in what the writer says, and can you give a detailed paraphrase of what's written here, please?



"There are earlier references, but they aren't any good. They either just repeat what Christians were telling them -- Christians who were just riffing on the New Testament -- or they're actually fabricated by Christians themselves and the most famous example is a whole paragraph in the early Jewish historian, Josephus, which nearly everyone agrees was snuck into that book by a later Christian scribe, who was evidently annoyed that Josephus forgot to mention Jesus, so when he copied the book out he made sure to -- you know -- just add a paragraph. You generally don't have to add paragraphs to other people's history books for a guy who actually existed. Pretty much if you're inserting a guy into history who wasn't there before, usually that means he really wasn't there before. Now that leaves us just with the New Testament..."



Thank you,

Stein

http://www.provethebible.net/T2-Divin/D-0201.htm

I went poking around and found this. I think it's quite interesting, in that all the evidences provided seem to be later reports of the activities of people that believed Jesus existed, rather than any actual testimony that he did exist. I suppose if there was something more concrete this guy would have come up with it. What I find more convincing is the biblical mention of the disciples of Jesus and their supposed disagreements with Paul and their travels and their supposed authorship of some biblical texts etc. It's one thing to embellish the popular mythology of the day with a new twist, but another to go to all the trouble of making up stories about the disciples.

[HomerJay]

It doesn't really add to the debate, as jewish historians would have had good reasons for not mentioning all the various cult leaders who they had heard about and christians would have wanted to large up jebus.

[Stein]

Who wrote this?

Time to let the other shoe drop on this OP.

A few of the mythers do get the distinction between the entirely human Jesus of Nazareth and the magic man called Christ. But they often pretend that it doesn't exist and that Jesus of Nazareth and the Christ are one and the same in order purely to confuse. Keep in mind that they are not real scholars in that they are out to frame the data around an a priori point of view rather than arrive at a point of view through examining all the data first. The latter is what an honest scholar does. The former is what a propagandist does and is what many a myther does. In fact, the former is very much like the judge in Alice In Wonderland, who announces "Verdict first, evidence afterwards".

It's time to let readers know what I was after in the OP.

I had cited the following remarks from an apparent myther I had encountered on the Web --

"There are earlier references, but they aren't any good. They either just repeat what Christians were telling them -- Christians who were just riffing on the New Testament -- or they're actually fabricated by Christians themselves and the most famous example is a whole paragraph in the early Jewish historian, Josephus, which nearly everybody agrees was snuck into that book by a later Christian scribe, who was evidently annoyed that Josephus forgot to mention Jesus, so when he copied the book out he made sure to -- you know -- just add a paragraph. You generally don't have to add paragraphs to other people's history books for a guy who actually existed. Pretty much if you're inserting a guy into history who wasn't there before, usually that means he really wasn't there before. Now that leaves us just with the New Testament..."

Please note what this lecturer is doing. He strongly implies that the extant text of Josephus's Antiquities only provides one mention of Jesus of Nazareth, not two! That is the plain implication in "a later Christian scribe, who was evidently annoyed that Josephus forgot to mention Jesus". Forgot to mention Jesus of Nazareth? Even if we take one of Josephus's TWO mentions of Jesus of Nazareth as interpolated -- the myther's favorite fall-back position -- this lecturer is still referencing only one of the two mentions as being scribally interpolated, not both. How sloppy -- or sneaky. This lecturer plainly references this meddling scribe only in connection with a "paragraph", which clearly points to the mention of Jesus of Nazareth in Antiquities 18 only, since the other one, in Antiquities 20, is a sentence, not a paragraph. The lecturer is strongly implying here that in the absence of his scribally interpolated mention in Antiquities 18, no further mention of Jesus of Nazareth exists in the extant text of Antiquities at all! How sloppy this lecturer is, at best, and at worst, what a bald-faced liar. What this lecturer strongly implies as a result is simply and manifestly wrong. There IS another mention of Jesus of Nazareth in Antiqs., and it's in the form of a sentence, not a paragraph, and it's in Antiq. 20, not Antiq. 18.

Now the mention in Antiq. 18 has already occasioned some general doubts among peer-reviewed surveys, due to certain turns of phrase that seem rather unlike Josephus. Josephus's other Jesus mention in Antiq. 20 has not occasioned the same kind of peer-reviewed doubts at all, and how suspiciously convenient that our lecturer here completely ignores this second mention entirely -- in fact, seems to imply that the second mention in Antiq. 20 doesn't even exist in the extant text of Antiqs. at all! How very, very, VERY convenient -- and seemingly deliberate -- for our lecturer to imply so strongly that the only Jesus mention in Josephus is the one -- in Antiq. 18 -- for which there are already some peer-reviewed doubts! To seem to pretend that the less questioned Antiq. 20 doesn't even exist is highly misleading at best. I wanted to see if anyone would spot that. No one here did.

Ironically, though, I did encounter privately one poster, a myther, who ended up doing something quite similar! So I called him on it. And he replied "The reference in Book 20 is so obviously an interpolation and certainly not about Jesus, I didn't even think of it." I have no reason to believe he's not being entirely candid here. Mythers like him and the lecturer I reference here have gotten so used to assuming that their bizarre opinions are fact that they sometimes don't think twice in coming out with their more absurd statements.

It's time to identify the lecturer I was referencing. It was Richard Carrier in a video'd lecture at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pX4LvKvIWJw. The remarks I quote come at 01:48 - 2:31.

Stein

[Elegant Mule]

Keep in mind that they are not real scholars in that they are out to frame the data around an a priori point of view rather than arrive at a point of view through examining all the data first. The latter is what an honest scholar does. The former is what a propagandist does and is what many a myther does. In fact, the former is very much like the judge in Alice In Wonderland, who announces "Verdict first, evidence afterwards".

There are very few people even in the hard sciences who would agree with this sort of hard-line Baconian theory of induction, and almost no one who studies philosophy of history. This sort of objectivity is nice to talk about, but it's absurd to demand of mere humans. Anyone who looks to the historical record with any hope of finding a narrative arch will be bound to bring with them biases. This isn't to say that one can't try to 'let the fact lead where they may', but rather that we will always be the ones tracking those facts, and our preconceptions are bound to color our judgments.

And, of course, the claim is always implied "they're biased! we're objective!" No, you're not either.

[egbert]

Euhemerists. YAWN.

[egbert]

Let's assume for a microsecond that you and Tim O'Neil are correct, and this Jesus dude actually existed.
Other than you two feeling triumphantly vindicated and beaming with thoughts of how Sister Agnes
would be so pleased, who gives a flying flick, and what changes?
Doesn't add any credibility to the rest of the myth, does it? AAMAOF, it would make the forgeries rather redundant wouldn't it.
But I guess it gives historians a meaningful quest, while Bishops examine pinheads for dancing angels.

[egbert]

http://jameshannam.proboards.com/index. ... 719&page=3

And there is a Tim who is an ardent catholic apologist who claims to be an atheist for street cred on atheist websites. This faux-atheist credits the catholic church with not only the advancement of science but also as the engine of the Enlightenment, and he relentlessly bashes any actual atheist that attempts contradictory comentary.

BTW, I read (but have no cite, sorry) that certain religious organizations employ a key word search program that notifies them when internet postings are made that might warrant their response. If true, this would explain how when discussions on the Dark Ages occur, apologists so quickly appear on the threads to defend the church’s revisionist version of history. I’d be interested if anyone else has heard of this.

[Stein]

http://jameshannam.proboards.com/index. ... 719&page=3

And there is a Tim who is an ardent catholic apologist who claims to be an atheist for street cred on atheist websites. This faux-atheist credits the catholic church with not only the advancement of science but also as the engine of the Enlightenment, and he relentlessly bashes any actual atheist that attempts contradictory comentary.

BTW, I read (but have no cite, sorry) that certain religious organizations employ a key word search program that notifies them when internet postings are made that might warrant their response. If true, this would explain how when discussions on the Dark Ages occur, apologists so quickly appear on the threads to defend the church’s revisionist version of history. I’d be interested if anyone else has heard of this.

Whether this is a slur on Tim or not -- and I'm inclined to guess it is, although I don't pretend to know for sure -- anyone with an ounce of decency would post this link as well --

http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/201 ... /#comments

-- where Tim defends himself personally against this conspiracy charge.

It seems to me I've seen Tim go after fundies in general discussions unconnected with either mytherism or science's beginnings, and in such colloquies with fundies volunteer his reasons for viewing any notion of such a thing as divinity as absurd. I'm not quite sure why he would do that if his only "mission" were to "mix it up" in discussions on mytherism and science's beginnings.

Not to mention the fact that Christians -- and especially Catholics -- are especially uncomfortable with all the secular scholarship concentrated on the historical human Jesus of Nazareth. That secular scholarship is what propagandists like the careless Carrier go after and distort, and it's where better-educated skeptics and atheists like Tim set the record straight. Catholics, unlike Tim, would be the last ones to want to set the record straight on this secular scholarship into the historical human Jesus of Nazareth, because this secular scholarship shows a human Jesus of Nazareth with nothing miraculous about him, directly contrary to the mumbo-jumbo that the Catholic Church defends. Yet Tim reminds mythers over and over that the newest scholarship makes it more likely that Jesus was just a normal human being who got nailed by the Romans. He frequently volunteers such info about today's historical scholarship whenever mythers typically go "straw-man-ing" modern historicists as defenders of the magic man in the N.T., WHEN MODERN HISTORIANS

D O N ' T

DO THAT AT ALL. Instead, modern historians show the greater likelihood of Jesus of Nazareth having been an ordinary human being with an ordinary non-miraculous biography, which no Catholic, even a Catholic on some secret mission, would ever bring himself to say, since the notion that Jesus is part divine is central to their belief. Tim's constantly reminding mythers of the modern historicist's Jesus of Nazareth model being the epitome of ordinariness, and Tim's frequent and overt assent to that, is probably the last thing a Catholic operative would propagate, whether in disguise or not.

Candidly, the apparent absurdity of such a charge against Tim only helps reinforce the impression that much that goes on in the myther world is nothing but a racket run by cranks.

Stein

[egbert]

Candidly, the apparent absurdity of such a charge against Tim only helps reinforce the impression that much that goes on in the myther world is nothing but a racket run by cranks.

Stein

Yes, these misguided mythers and their conspiracy theories - what a laugh! Why, next thing
you know, they're gonna be accusing the Catholic Church (the Lighthouse of ethics and
morality) of all sorts of nefarious things, like running "ratlines" for Nazi war criminals
to escape to South America, or running crooked banks, replete with bodies hung from London bridges! And poisoning Popes. And supposedly giving the culprit "diplomatic immunity". As if there ever WAS a Bishop Marcinkus.
And all this baloney about harbouring pedophiles and covering up child molestation - why,
just wait a few centuries and the revis, er historians will clear up that nonsense.
I tell ya, we NEED blasphemy laws to put a stop to this, and teach our children some REAL TRUE history.