After reading through a whole batch of Qumran Thanksgiving Hymns I turned back to continue my draft post only to discover it had for some time escaped into the real world of RSS feeds, emails, and this damn blog.
I have since shot it down from public view. So if you are trying to find it via a subscription link it ain’t here no more.
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Neil Godfrey
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LOL! So the criterion of embarrassment opens up the likelihood of Christ’s homosexual activities, because homosexual rituals are only an embarrassment for Jewish followers of Jesus, and this is why the evidence is so oblique. But this also establishes the historicity of Jesus, too! Now why haven’t I heard that one used to trounce “mythicism” before!? đ
I wonder what sort of emails the professor gets as a consequence of his publishing the speculations concerning Christ’s homoerotic tendencies, as well as his megalomaniacal and psychotic ones. Western Michigan University is situated just south of the Grand Rapids area, which seems to be a center for a variety of fundamentalist organizations like RBC Ministries (Googling Ministries Grand Rapids produces a fairly lengthy list of organizations).
It might prove an interesting exercise to take the time to go through that essay and see how much of the argument follows the same methodology as is used by the mainstream guild of historical Jesus scholars.
M. W. Nordbakke identified the Ken Olson’s April Fools’ article “proving”, I recall, the very early date of the Protevangelium of James (http://vridar.wordpress.com/2011/02/23/how-late-can-a-gospel-be/#comment-15170).
It is posts like these that should be the real worry to those biblical scholars who apparently fail to see and acknowledge the circularity of their methods, and how they are really so unlike the (generally unspoken foundations of) normative historical processes. “Mythicist” arguments are merely a signal of an alternative that could be developed if they adhered consistently to logically coherent assumptions throughout.
It is surely the fear of where such logically valid processes could lead that keeps them into dismay over “mythicism” but allows them to accommodate demonstrations that their methods can lead just about anywhere into fantasy lands.
I don’t have a comment on your renegade post, but will just break the silence by posting an interesting (at least to me) link that I happened to run into today in which the author (a retired professor of English) has a rather different reason for arguing in favor of an historical Jesus.