Neil Godfrey

2014-04-02

The One-Liner Jesus

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by Neil Godfrey

Richard Horsley has produced a couple of books I have found far more enlightening than his earlier work on bandits and prophets in first-century Judea. One of these is Scribes, Visionaries and the Politics of Second Temple Judea from 2007; the other, The Prophet Jesus and the Renewal of Israel, 2012. One of several points that has hit me already from these two works is a deeper appreciation of the literary way the Gospels convey the sayings of Jesus.

Take the Sermon on the Mount. I think we all know that Jesus could not really have stood up and pronounced a long list of aphorisms the way Matthew depicts. So we hear the more learned ones explaining to us that Matthew was recording a summary of the sorts of things Jesus often said.

But stop and think for a minute. Aren’t the evangelists (authors of the gospels) supposed to be writing something akin to a history or biography? And weren’t ancient historians known for the way they would construct speeches they believed were “true to life” or “appropriate” or “realistic” in the mouth of certain historical characters? But that’s not what we read in the gospels when it comes to the speeches of Jesus. Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount and Luke’s Sermon on the Plain are anything but reconstructed “speeches”.

Rather, they read like a chapter or so from the Book of Proverbs. Not like speeches. Jesus is not “preaching” about forgiveness and an appropriate speech is not constructed for any such message. Jesus simply delivers a proverb or saying or edict, brief enough to be remembered and recorded in a list of one-liners. It’s not unlike the way he is portrayed as speaking in the Gospel of Thomas when he drops line after line of mystery saying.

The evangelists — at least the Synoptic ones (Matthew, Mark and Luke) — are not even trying to reconstruct speeches of Jesus.

They are writing a set of one-liner sayings.

Okay, but what is the problem with this? Horsley puts his finger on it exactly:

Continue reading “The One-Liner Jesus”

2014-03-28

Astrotheology, A Religious Belief System (as per D.M. Murdock/Acharya S)

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by Neil Godfrey

The more I have read of the works of Acharya S (aka D.M. Murdock) and the more engagement I have had with those who fervently advocate her views the more I have suspected that some form of cult-like belief system lies beneath their surface appearances. Part of the reason for my suspicions has been the vitriolic reactions on their part against any attempt to honestly critique their views and engage them in argument that consistently follows the norms of scholarly or “scientific” reasoning. I have been portrayed in some very colorful terms by both Acharya and those I believe it is fair to say are her followers. In effect I have been lumped together with others as deliberately closed-minded, bigoted and out to lyingly slander them. My record of defending Acharya against some of the worst insults I have read on the web counts for nothing.

Finally one of Acharya’s fairly prominent online supporters, Robert Tulip, has “come out” and made it very clear that my suspicions were right all along. Astrotheology — the view they propagate — is a form of religious belief. They believe as strongly as any fundamentalist that they are right and anyone who does not agree with them after they explain it all is perverse or willfully blind. Expressions of disagreement are interpreted as expressions of hostility or even persecution.

And like religious cults, they curry good relations with prominent or respectable names that they believe will give their cause a benign public face. Anyone with public standing among those they seek to influence and who has had a positive word to say about Acharya’s books is promoted as a witness that they really are a genuinely scholarly (even scientific) group of truth-seekers. I have finally come to believe they are as scientific as Scientology; their efforts to claim to follow the scientific method are a falsehood. I doubt that people like Earl Doherty really do understand exactly what it is their names are being used to support when they insist that such people have made supportive comments about their publications.

My full awareness of all of this did not come quickly. I have hoped my suspicions were not true often enough. If I can be shown to be mistaken I would greatly welcome it and apologize for this post and withdraw it.

What finally led me to give up any remaining doubts I had about their religious or cult status was a series of posts on the EarlyWritings Forum. The most recent of these posts, under the title Loaves and Fishes, were prompted by pressure from a few of us for Robert to demonstrate the scientific or scholarly basis for his rejection of normal (“midrashic”/literary-critical) explanations for the miracle of the loaves and fishes in the Gospels and his belief that this narrative was written as a code of some sort for “astrotheology” beliefs. The result is the epitome of parallelomania (as I have explained this through Sandmel’s definitions a couple of times recently); but the worst part comes at the end when it is made very clear that Robert himself takes his interpretation as a personal belief system along with the fundamentalist-like view that anyone who fails to share his enlightenment is willfully perverse.

Here is Robert Tulip’s explication of the Gospels’ Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes. After reading this I finally realized I have been wasting my time taking many of his remarks testifying to an interest in the hypothetico-deductive method at face value. He — and I can only presume the same applies to Acharya S herself — are evidently not interested in scholarly approaches to Christian origins and really are about peddling a quasi-religious type of belief-system.

I have bolded the text that I consider to be the evidence that “astrotheology” as advocated here is indeed a genuine personal belief-system that shuts down any possibility of genuinely scholarly engagement and criticism.

At the end of the post I add a couple of scholarly reviews of David Ulansey’s argument that it was the ancient discovery of the precession of the equinoxes that prompted the rise of Mithraism and possibly even Christianity.

Continue reading “Astrotheology, A Religious Belief System (as per D.M. Murdock/Acharya S)”

2014-03-27

James McGrath the Parallelomaniac

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by Neil Godfrey

Professor James McGrath is a parallelomaniac. Every time he sees an argument for a parallel that he does not like or from which the author draws an uncomfortable conclusion he claims that the parallel is actually a parallel to Samuel Sandmel’s notion of “parallelomania”.

Samuel Sandmel introduced the term “parallelomania” into English-speaking New Testament studies and explained it as that “extravagance” where one took excerpts out of context from some source and applied them willy-nilly to a text under study. It could also include one making much ado about real parallels if they were also quite meaningless (e.g. We would not be surprised if two different Jewish texts spoke about God and Moses, so we cannot assume one is copying from the other in such a case.)

I spelled all this out in my recent post explaining the difference between legitimate parallels and parallelomania. The same post links to the original 1962 article by Samuel Sandmel.

How do we know a parallel is potentially legitimate and not “parallelomania”? Sandmel was very clear. Detailed study is the most essential criterion of a genuinely plausible parallel; the actual words used, the syntactical structures, the contexts, the larger argument structure, the literary culture in which the act of copying is alleged to have occurred, etc. Sandmel even wrote that he encouraged such studies that helped us identify genuine cases of literary borrowing.

What he warned against was taking excerpts (words and phrases) out of their contexts and fortuitously applying them to the target text. I have been showing (in some comments here but especially in discussions on the EarlyWritings forum) that this is the flawed methodology that in many cases makes D.M. Murdock’s (astrotheology’s) arguments invalid.

Here is a classic example of how parallelomania works. It comes from James McGrath: Continue reading “James McGrath the Parallelomaniac”

2014-03-25

What The Hell Do People Believe In If They Don’t Believe In God?

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by Neil Godfrey

Stephen Fry explains what the meaning of life is to him as a nonreligious person. In three minutes.

[youtube:https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Tvz0mmF6NW4]

ht/Upworthy

2014-03-24

Maurice Casey’s Mind “Boggles” Reading Thomas L. Thompson’s Messiah Myth

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by Neil Godfrey

Maurice Casey (Jesus: Evidence and Argument Or Mythicist Myths?) critiques Thomas L. Thompson’s The Messiah Myth without giving his readers any idea of its stated purpose or overall argument. I suspect Casey himself did not know what it was about and could not explain its argument if he tried since he had made up his mind before reading it that it was an attempt to prove there was no historical Jesus.

Casey is already on record as being quite perplexed when he encounters new perspectives on old problems and he remains true to form when confronted with Thomas L. Thompson’s work.

I will explain what Thompson’s was attempting to achieve with the book in a moment but notice that Casey from the start faults it for not being about what he thought it should be about:

A supposedly scholarly attempt to cast doubt on the historicity of the teaching of Jesus is an extraordinary book by the Old Testament ‘scholar’ Thomas L. Thompson, The Messiah Myth, published in 2005. It demonstrates lack of knowledge of first-century Judaism and of New Testament scholarship, and has remarkably little to say about Jesus. (Jesus: Evidence and Argument, p. 221)

Casey cannot even bring himself to fully acknowledge Thompson’s credentials as an Old Testament scholar of high international standing. What Casey means by The Messiah Myth‘s “demonstration of lack of knowledge of first-century Judaism and NT scholarship” and its paucity of information about Jesus is that the book is not about Casey’s assumptions of what first-century Judaism looked like, nor is it about NT scholarship or Jesus as these are traditionally addressed in studies on the historical Jesus. Casey might as well have added that the work “demonstrates a lack of knowledge of” knitting and abseiling.

Thompson’s book is about the messiah myth as it is found throughout ancient Middle Eastern literature. It is an attempt to offer a new perspective for how scholars might approach the Bible as historians. Too rarely biblical scholars have stopped to ask if the authors of the historical books of the Bible had the same sense of past history as we do. The first task of historians should be to fully grasp the literary and theological nature of the works they are studying. Full justice to that enquiry can only be accomplished if the historian first and foremost has a thorough grasp of comparable literary and theological sources throughout that region’s cultural history. Before we assume that the narratives in the biblical works are windows to historical events it is better first to acquaint oneself with other literature of that cultural region and what it often meant to convey when speaking of the past.

The assumption that the narratives of the Bible are accounts of the past asserts a function for our texts that needs to be demonstrated as it competes with other more apparent functions.

. . . . Are archaeologists and historians dealing with the same kind of past as the Bible does? This, I think, is the central question of the current debate about history and the Bible, rather than the questions that have dominated. Can biblical stories be used to write a modern history of the ancient past — whether of the individuals or of the events in which they participate? . . . The Bible uses . . . historical information for other purposes, in the way that literature has always used what was known of the past. (The Messiah Myth, p. x)

At this point I think I can justly point to some recent posts I have written about the nature of ancient historiography. Ancient historians were quite capable of fabricating stories about the past when it suited their ideological or pedagogical purposes. Those fabrications could well be considered “true” if they were written “true to life”, that is, realistically. Continue reading “Maurice Casey’s Mind “Boggles” Reading Thomas L. Thompson’s Messiah Myth“

2014-03-23

“Maurice Casey, Meet Thomas L. Thompson”

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by Neil Godfrey

I am sure Maurice Casey will appreciate notification of a few oversights in his most recent book, Jesus: Evidence and Argument or Mythicist Myths. This post will alert him to a couple of minor errors in his treatment of Thomas L. Thompson’s background and scholarly standing. A future post will look at Casey’s criticisms of some of Thompson’s publications, although we have already seen how Casey wrongly classified Thompson’s recent publications as attempts to argue that there was no historical Jesus.

Thomas L. Thompson first came to notoriety with The Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives arguing that the biblical patriarchs (Abraham, Isaac, Jacob) were not historical persons. This was first published by de Gruyter in Berlin in 1974. It was written in Tuebingen where Thompson was a student of Herbert Haag (Catholic) and Kurt Galling (Protestant). Controversial at the time this view is now probably mainstream. Even more controversial was his 1992 publication, The Early History of the Israelite People, which found no room for the united monarchy nor even Kings David and Solomon. The main work by Thompson that Casey addresses is The Messiah Myth, a work that Casey misinterprets as an attempt to argue there was no historical Jesus.

This post shows where Maurice Casey is seriously misguided in what he writes about Thompson the person.

Casey introduces Professor Thomas L. Thompson as one who “claims to be a ‘scholar'” but whose competence and qualifications Casey considers “questionable” (p. 10).

Yes, Casey puts the word scholar in scare quotes. Further, Casey will grant nothing more than that Thompson “claims” to be a ‘scholar’. In fact Thompson is a scholar of international repute who has made groundbreaking contributions to the study of the Old Testament as indicated above. His qualifications and professional associations can be found on his Wikipedia article.

An American or European scholar?

Here is the biographical description Casey offers:

Thomas L. Thompson was an American Catholic born in 1939 in Detroit. He was awarded a B.A. at Duquesne University, a Catholic university in Pittsburgh, USA, in 1962, and a Ph.D. at Temple University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1976. After several appointments, mostly in the USA, including the post of associate professor at Marquette University, a Jesuit, Roman Catholic university in Milwaukee, Wisconsin (1989-93), he was Professor of Theology at the University of Copenhagen from 1993-2009.

Casey focuses his readers’ attention on Thompson’s Roman Catholic, Jesuit and American associations. There is only one hint of Thompson’s status as a European scholar — a significant oversight given Casey’s patent loathing for most things American. Casey quotes his PhD student Stephanie Fisher’s comparison of “decent European scholars” with “second-rate semi-learned American ‘scholars’ (sic)” with approval – p.43.

The fact that Thompson is also a Dane and has lived and worked in Denmark since 1993 where as Professor of Old Testament he was the only Catholic in the Theology faculty is overlooked entirely. Thompson in fact spent eight months at Temple University in Philadelphia and has done his graduate studies in Europe: in Oxford and Tuebingen from 1962-1971 and as a research scholar in Tuebingen from 1969-1977.

Continue reading ““Maurice Casey, Meet Thomas L. Thompson””

2014-03-22

Why is Peter’s Brother, Andrew, Overlooked So Much in the Gospel Narrative?

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by Neil Godfrey

Why does the Gospel of Mark, generally agreed to be our earliest gospel, introduce Andrew as an equal to Simon Peter at the time Jesus calls them both but then drop him from the lime-light for most of the subsequent narrative?

I have always felt a bit sorry for Andrew. He seems to have been elbowed out by the other three, Peter, James and John, whenever Jesus wanted to share something special with his inner-circle. James and John could always be included as brothers, so why was Peter’s brother left out at special events like

the raising of the daughter of Jairus (Mark 5:37);
the Transfiguration (Mark 9:2);
the time Jesus wanted his closest companions with him in the Garden of Gethsemane (Mark 14:33).

Even when Jesus ordained his special band of Twelve he gave James and John a collective title, “Sons of Thunder”, but dropped Andrew to fourth place as if he was no longer kin to Peter.

And Simon he surnamed Peter; And James the son of Zebedee, and John the brother of James; and he surnamed them Boanerges, which is, The sons of thunder: And Andrew, and Philip, and Bartholomew, and Matthew, and Thomas, and James the son of Alphaeus, and Thaddaeus, and Simon the Canaanite . . . (Mark 3:16-18)

So if Andrew was not to play any meaningful role, even as a hanger-on, with Jesus in the Gospel what was the point of him starring in the scene of the very first call?

Now as [Jesus] walked by the sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and Andrew his brother casting a net into the sea: for they were fishers. And Jesus said unto them, Come ye after me, and I will make you to become fishers of men. And straightway they forsook their nets, and followed him. (Mark 1:16-18)

Andrew’s response to Jesus’ call was no less admirable than was Peter’s.

There is one exception after this call where the Gospel does give Andrew a place beside Peter, James and John. For the first time since the opening scenes of the Gospel when Jesus called these four do we see them all performing together:

And as [Jesus] sat upon the mount of Olives over against the temple, Peter and James and John and Andrew asked him privately, Tell us, when shall these things be? and what shall be the sign when all these things shall be fulfilled? (Mark 13:3-4)

I have finally come across an explanation that just might make sense of this and give some well-deserved consolation to Andrew. (Regular readers know I’m currently reading Karel Hanhart’s The Open Tomb and will suspect this is my source. They will be correct.)

Continue reading “Why is Peter’s Brother, Andrew, Overlooked So Much in the Gospel Narrative?”

2014-03-20

Parallels or Parallelomania: How to Tell the Difference

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by Neil Godfrey

Some scholars, notably Dennis MacDonald, have argued that the Gospels of Mark and Luke as well as Acts contain passages that have “parallels” in the Homeric epics. The presence of these parallels is said to be evidence that the Christian authors were deliberately imitating and even attempting to outdo certain well-known features of the iconic Greek literature.

Some critics say MacDonald is just a parallelomaniac and his parallels are “not real”.

Thomas Brodie has argued that all Gospels and some of Paul’s letters have been deliberately based on various books in the Jewish Scriptures. Michael Goulder and his student John Shelby Spong have argued that the Gospels were written to parallel the sequences of liturgical readings of the Jewish Scriptures throughout the year.

Since Brodie has “come out” as a mythicist some scholars have scoffed that he is also a parallelomaniac.

D.M. Murdock (Acharya S) and a good number of earlier Christ Myth theorists right back to Dupuis in the eighteenth century have argued that the Gospel narrative is based on an ancient understanding of the astrological/astronomical phenomena.

A common criticism is that Murdock’s work is meaningless parallelomania.

Dale Allison has argued that many passages in the Gospel of Matthew are parallel to the career of Moses; John Dominic Crossan has found Gospel parallels in Joshua, the poet Virgil and the funeral monument of Augustus; Rikki Watts has found detailed parallels between the Gospel of Mark and the second half of the Book of Isaiah.

These scholars are well embedded within the conventional wisdom of scholarly views. Their parallels are more likely to be taken seriously, at least considered valid topics for serious discussion.

And on it goes. Probably everyone agrees that there are real parallels between the Passion scene of Christ and the Psalms, Isaiah, Daniel, Amos, Zechariah and others.

So what is the difference between legitimate parallels and parallelomania?

Continue reading “Parallels or Parallelomania: How to Tell the Difference”

2014-03-18

Who Needs God to be Good?

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by Neil Godfrey

Pew Research Center surveyed 40,000 people across 40 countries between 2011 and 2013 to find what proportions of populations believe it is necessary to believe in God to be moral. The results (and explanation of how they conducted the survey) are online here.

As probably expected, the more highly one is educated the less likely one is to believe that belief in God is necessary for morality.

Also depressingly as expected, the USA is the exception among affluent nations, being the only such country where a majority of the population believes one can only be a moral person if one believes in God. Atheists be damned.

Tables follow: Continue reading “Who Needs God to be Good?”

Blind Bartimaeus in the Gospel of Mark: Interpreted by the Gospel of John?

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by Neil Godfrey

Here beginneth the lesson. The Gospel of Mark, chapter 10, verses 46 to 52, in the original King James English:

And as [Jesus] went out of Jericho with his disciples and a great number of people, blind Bartimaeus, the son of Timaeus, sat by the highway side begging.

And when he heard that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to cry out, and say, Jesus, thou Son of David, have mercy on me.

And many charged him that he should hold his peace: but he cried the more a great deal, Thou Son of David, have mercy on me.

And Jesus stood still, and commanded him to be called.

And they call the blind man, saying unto him, Be of good comfort, rise; he calleth thee.

And he, casting away his garment, rose, and came to Jesus.

And Jesus answered and said unto him, What wilt thou that I should do unto thee? The blind man said unto him, Lord, that I might receive my sight. And Jesus said unto him, Go thy way; thy faith hath made thee whole. And immediately he received his sight, and followed Jesus in the way.

The author of this passage appears to have inserted a couple of clues to alert the observant readers that they will miss the point entirely if they interpret this story literally. It is not about a real blind man who was literally healed by Jesus. But I’ll save those clues for the end of this post. (As Paul would say, “Does God take care for oxen and blind beggars? Or saith he it altogether for our sakes? For our sakes, no doubt, this is written.”)

There are many commentaries on this passage and I have posted about Bartimaeus a few times now. But this time I’ve just read something completely different so here’s another one. (Well at least the bit about why Jesus stood still will be different, yes?)

Seeing

Mark uses different words for “sight” and “seeing”. Of the word used in “receive my sight” and “received his sight” is anablepo — “look up” — which Karel Hanhart says, the the Gospel of Mark (6:41; 7:34; 8:24; 16:4), “means to look at life with new eyes opened by faith”.

Many scholars agree that this usage is related to the two “blind receiving sight” stories (8:22-26; 10:46-52) which offset the central section of the Gospel and highlight the need of conversion if one is to understand Jesus’ “way to the cross” (cf. 8:34). (p. 124, The Open Tomb)

Hanhart, like a few other scholars who also identify Mark’s theme of the Way or Second Exodus in Isaiah, believes Mark is evoking passages such as Isaiah 42:16 Continue reading “Blind Bartimaeus in the Gospel of Mark: Interpreted by the Gospel of John?”

2014-03-16

Historical Method and the Question of Christian Origins

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by Neil Godfrey

Let me recap my take on “historical method” in the context of historical Jesus studies and the Christ Myth theory. A question about this was raised at an online video session today with Phil Robinson, Richard Carrier, Dave Fitzgerald, Raphael Lataster and me. It was in response to Maurice Casey’s chapter that he titled Historical Method in his recent book. “Regrettably”, Casey manages to avoid telling readers anything at all about historical method but he does tell you a bit about the private lives and shocking political leanings of some dead historians.

So here’s my take on it.

A historian needs to establish some fundamental facts about the sources at hand before he or she starts pulling out data from them to make a historical narrative or argument. Let’s take the gospels as one set of sources to be used in investigating the question of Christian origins. What does any historian need to establish about these — or any — sources?

We need to know when they were written.
We need to know by whom and why. (“By whom” means more than the name of the person: it refers to where the person is from, to what social or political entity he or she belongs — “Who is this person?” — that is more important than a mere name.)
We need to know what they are, what sorts of documents they are. Their genre, if you like. This will include knowledge of how they compare with other literature of their day.
We need to know something about their reception at the time they were written and soon after.
We need to know something about the world in which they were written — both the political and social history of that world and the wider literary and philosophical cultural world to which they belonged.
We need to know a little how the documents came into our possession. Through what authorities or channels were they preserved and what sort of manuscript trail did they leave.

That’s the first step. We can very broadly classify all of this knowledge as the provenance of the documents.

If we draw blanks on any of these questions then we need always to keep those blanks in the foremost of our minds whenever we read and interpret the gospels. Those blanks will help remind us of the provisional nature of anything we draw from the gospels.

So for the first point above, the date of the gospels, we can do no better than accept a range of year in which they were written. A combination of internal evidence and the evidence that they were known by others leads us (well, me at least) to a period between 70 CE and the mid second century (possibly known to Justin, certainly to Irenaeus).

Those who argue for a date prior to 70 CE fail to take into account the apocalyptic character of the gospels. Apocalyptic literature (e.g. Daniel) is known to be about events in the recent memory of the readers. The pre-70 date also fails to take account of the internal evidence for an audience facing persecution, including persecution from Jews. There is no confirmable evidence for such persecutions of Christians until post 70 CE. If some dispute this and argue for a much earlier date then I’m happy to address those arguments, too; I would be willing to change my view if they proved to be plausible and if the scare Caligula gave with his threat to install a statue in the Temple was the best explanation for other features in the Synoptics.

The question of who wrote the documents is of primary importance. Just saying the author was a Christian is way too broad and tells us nothing except the obvious. It’s no more useful than saying a work of history was written by a Greek historian. So what? We need to know what sort of Christian, where, when and why — whom was he writing for? why? Since we know none of these things — speculations and educated guesses change with the tides of fashion — we are at an enormous disadvantage in knowing how to interpret or understand the gospels.

Is what we read a composite document composed over several editorial hands? That, too, is a most important question to answer. Again we are at a real disadvantage here.

The above gaps in our knowledge of the gospels ought to pull up every historian short and make them wonder if it is worth even continuing to work with these documents. Certainly any historian worth his or her salt will always be tentative about any conclusions and data taken from them.

The second step. Continue reading “Historical Method and the Question of Christian Origins”

2014-03-15

Was the Empty Tomb Story Originally Meant to be Understood Literally?

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by Neil Godfrey

This post is about the miracles in what is generally considered the earliest written surviving gospel, the Gospel of Mark.

Dutch pastor and biblical scholar Karel Hanhart in The Open Tomb: A New Approach, Mark’s Passover Haggadah (± 72 C.E.) argues that Mark’s empty tomb story has been sewn together with semantic threads mostly from Isaiah in order to symbolize the fall of Jerusalem and its Temple in 70 CE and the emergence of Christianity as a new force among the gentiles. That is, the story of the burial and resurrection of Jesus was not understood as a literal miracle about a person being buried in a tomb and rising again. The first readers, with memories of the national calamity and Jewish Scriptures fresh in their minds, would have recognized instantly the many allusions in Mark’s closing scene of the empty tomb to the Temple’s fall, the end of the old order as predicted by the Prophets, and the promise of the body of Christ surviving and thriving throughout the nations post 70 CE.

A later or more geographically distant generation for whom the fall of Jerusalem had little personal significance would easily have lost sight of the original meaning of the burial and resurrection miracle and read literally the narrative of Joseph taking Jesus’ corpse from Pilate and placing it in the tomb, his rolling the stone to block the entrance, the women coming to anoint the body, their seeing the young man inside and running off in fear when he tells them to tell Peter where to find Jesus.

I will not in this post engage with Karel Hanhart’s specific arguments identifying the “Old Testament” and historical sources of Mark’s closing scenes. That’s for another time. Here I take a step back and look at the reasons we should read Mark’s miracle stories symbolically rather than literally. Be warned, though. I do not always make it clear where Hanhart’s arguments end and my additions begin. Just take the post as-is. If it’s important to know the difference then just ask.

Form critics long ago categorized the miracle stories into different types: healings, exorcisms, nature miracles. Classification like this has allowed scholars to say some types are historical and others not. We can imagine dramatic healing or exorcism that is largely performed through powerful psychosomatic suggestion. But nature miracles? Walking on water? Nah.

The trouble with this division, as Hanhart points out, is that the Gospel of Mark makes no such distinctions in the way any of the miracles are narrated. The narrative audience response is always the same: fear and astonishment. So let’s ask the question: What was “Mark” doing? Was he expecting his readers to take the miracles — all of them — literally or symbolically?

And if we answer, “Symbolically”, then surely we should include the final miracle — the empty tomb story — in that answer, too.

None of the Synoptic evangelists made such a distinction [healing miracles, nature miracles, . . .]. And Mark placed the open tomb story on the same literal or symbolic plateau, or both, as the stilling of the storm and the transfiguration. The audience response was the same in each case, one of awe and fear (4:41; 16:8). (p. 5)

And if we answer symbolically, we need to explain what message Mark was trying to convey.

Hanhart points to the following reasons Mark gives readers to enable them to understand that he is not writing a literal history. Continue reading “Was the Empty Tomb Story Originally Meant to be Understood Literally?”

2014-03-10

Casey’s Instruments of Demonization

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by Neil Godfrey

Having seen the ratio of ex-fundamentalists to mythicists with liberal church backgrounds it is amusing to review Maurice Casey’s mythic theme. Watch how the old Red Scare themes are echoed here. One poor scholar, Owen, who dared to criticize the work that was built on Casey’s thesis is compared with a mythicist at every point of his dispute and Casey even raises his “unhappy childhood”! But a pummeling also lies in store for that spawn of all evil, the “American” (spit the word) Jesus Seminar!

The first chapter: From fundamentalism to mythicism. (p. 1)

[Mythicism] has three major features. One is rebellion against traditional Christianity, especially in the form of American fundamentalism . . . The majority of people who write books claiming Jesus did not exist, and who give their past history, are effectively former American fundamentalists. . . (p. 2)

Rebellion! Is that not as bad as the sin of witchcraft? You rebellious mythicists, you!

That’s interesting, actually, given that elsewhere Casey laments the “uncontrolled” and “unregulated” nature of mythicism and mythicists (see below). Rebellious, out of control . . . One wonders what he would really like to do about it all if he had the power.

Here he gets stuck into that poor scholar who had the audacity to disagree and argue against Casey’s thesis:

As a fundamentalist Christian . . . Owen already has the most important faults of mythicists (p. 8)

And what are these “mythicist-like” faults? Casey lists them:

First, he has misrepresented me, accusing me of omitting scholarship which I discussed elsewhere . . .

Second, he has preferred scholarship which is out of date . . .

Third, he has done so because scholarship which is out of date supports the tradition to which he has intellectually arbitrary adherence.

Fourth, he is just one short step away from accusing me of ‘suppressing’ old scholarship that I did not see fit to reproduce. . . .

All these points are central to the mythicist case. Owen had a very difficult childhood. . . .

There are two reasons why this is of real importance . . . Firstly, Owen . . . already has the most important faults of mythicists. (pp. 5-8)

(Actually I thought Owen’s initial review was a very polite and gentlemanly expression of disagreement. Perhaps his logic and evidence did not need any invective to drive his points home.)

It’s quite amusing to read on and find so much of Casey’s book is devoted to attempts to rebut comments from Steven Carr, Tim Widowfield and myself pointing out the logical fallacies of his Aramaic arguments. Mythicists are bad and ignorant because they don’t agree with Casey’s arguments and argue so many points just like mainstream scholars who are also ignorant because they don’t read the language Jesus spoke!

We can now put Doherty’s comments on scholars into their cultural context of American fundamentalism. (p. 9)

[N.T. Wrong], also a proper scholar of a decent cricketing nation, said of another atheist, ‘Once a fundie always a fundie. He’s just batting for the other side now.’ (p. 13)

Mythicists . . . are by and large former fundamentalist Christians. (p. 59)

It is at such points that this mythicist, once a very conservative American Catholic, argues like a fundamentalist. (p. 112)

LOOK OUT WESTAR INSTITUTE — that AMERICAN JESUS SEMINAR:

In a profound sense, the Westar Jesus seminar [yes, the lower case ‘s’ is original] was the predecessor of mythicists. Its most important members were to a large extent former American fundamentalists, or at least very conservative American Christians, as were most of the mythicists. (p. 118)

Mythicists . . . are just like the fundamentalists they used to be. (p. 170)

[Mythicists’] ideas of what is supposed to have happened during Jesus’ life are based on their previous lives as fundamentalists. (p. 203)

These regrettable mistakes appear to have two basic causes. One is the fundamentalism from which mythicists have emerged. . . . They do not believe in evidence and argument any more now than they did when they had fundamentalist Christian convictions. (p. 220)

The most important result of this book is that the whole idea that Jesus of Nazareth did not exist as a historical figure . . . belongs in the fantasy lives of people who used to be fundamentalist Christians. (p. 243)

I therefore conclude that the mythicist arguments . . . have been mainly put forward by . . . former fundamentalist Christians who were not properly aware of critical scholarship then, and after conversion to atheism, are not properly aware of critical scholarship now. They frequently confuse any New Testament scholarship with Christian fundamentalism. (p. 245)

So what follows will not surprise you. In a future post I’ll demonstrate how narrow Casey’s coverage of mythicist arguments really is. He is too preoccupied with propagating his own Aramaic thesis and he gets hung up on pedantic quibbles and confusing humour for serious points of argument to keep readers with him. I can’t imagine a single reader being convinced Jesus existed by this work. His vitriol is too unabashedly puerile for any intelligent reader to take seriously. Though Jim West, James McGrath, Larry Hurtado and Rabbi Joe Hoffmann all love it. But that’s no surprise, is it. They praised it before they even read it.

Now I’ll list here a set of words and phrases that will give you a pretty good idea of the tone of the book. These stand out as some of Casey’s favourite descriptors.

Mythicists never have a single honest argument. Every point of view they express or argue falls under one of these categories below, according to Casey.

The following list is meant to highlight the tone of the book. Thus Casey might not say all mythicists are filled with outpourings of scorn, but such phrases are used of mythicists to contrast them with the purity of decent scholars. This list demonstrates the way Casey demonizes mythicists personally (and by implication mythicism, I suppose.)

Totally unable, incapable, unwilling

Mythicists are invariably “unable”, “incapable” or “unwilling” to learn or understand, do not read major works of secondary literature. Very often the word “unable” is complemented with “totally”:

See pages 6, 24, 27, 30, 33, 34, 52, 54, 118, 127, 135, 140, 147, 153, 178, 179, 200, 209, 244, 248, 257. (Sometimes more than once on the same page.)

Or they are uncomprehending: pages 144, 164.

Unlearned and anti-scholarly

Mythicists are “unlearned” and “anti-scholarly”.

See pp. 2, 4, 10, 15, 22, 29, 31, 32, 33, 35, 41, 59, 64, 76, 105, 127, 128, 169, 176, 182, 201, 204, 206, 208, 221-226 (Thomas L. Thompson is a ‘scholar’ — yes, in scare quotes), 236, 237, 241, 243, 244, 248, 259.

Confusing and confused

Mythicists arguments are confusing. My favourite is one that Casey has pulled at least twice now. When he encounters an argument he has never heard of before then it is wrong by definition. It is confusing. Mythicists are confused because they don’t agree with mainstream views.

See pages 14, 28, 91 (x2), 125, 144, 171, 175, 241, 245 (x2)

They really have “no clue” at all! 31, 211

Ignorant and do not understand

Mythicists never disagree with argument or a different perspective on the evidence. They are always ignorant or simply do not understand. See the Preface and pages 27, 29, 30, 33, 44, 51, 52, 53 (“appallingly ignorant”), 59, 127, 134, 140, 144, 172, 197, 201, 238, 243.

This is fortunate. It saves Casey the trouble of having to rebut them and allows him time to concentrate on peddling his own Aramaic thesis.

Hopelessly inaccurate

Mythicists are wholly or hopelessly inaccurate, or else just inaccurate all the time. See pages 3, 13, 18, 19, 22, 33, 44, 45, 127, (even something by a mythicist that is not inaccurate is said to be “not very inaccurate”!) 147, 159, 209, 215, 220, 236.

(Keep in mind he’s including here several highly respected scholars.)

Mythicists mislead you! Continue reading “Casey’s Instruments of Demonization”

2014-03-09

Who’s Who Among Mythicists and Mythicist Sympathizers/Agnostics

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Neil Godfrey

This is a followup to my previous post, Casey’s Mythicist Myth Busted, where I set out Casey’s list of

the most influential mythicists who claim to be ‘scholars’ today (p. 10)

Casey’s list counted seventeen names. Of those seventeen we saw that six were not mythicists at all (e.g. Bart Ehrman) and one was deceased some years before Casey even began to write his draft for his book.

For easy reference I set out here in two tables the names of

genuine contemporary mythicists along with their religious backgrounds,
others who raise the question of mythicism or examine Christian origins without reference to assumptions of a historical Jesus.

Three possible conclusions to be drawn from these tables (updated 10th March):

Liberal religious backgrounds are twice as likely as American Fundamentalism to breed future mythicist or mythicist sympathizers (15 to 7);
Ex-fundamentalists who are mythicists are more as likely to be favourably disposed towards Christianity as disinterested in or opposed to it;
Pending further investigation, it appears that American Fundamentalists are the least likely to gravitate towards mythicism or mythicist sympathies than those with liberal or no religious backgrounds.

I’m tongue-in-cheek, of course. But the tables do demonstrate that claims that mythicism is a symptom of psychological derangement among ex-fundamentalists is as ignorant and bigoted as stereotyping Jews with hook-noses and greedy.

Since Casey proposes what he calls the “striking fact” that . . .

the majority of people who write books claiming that Jesus did not exist, and who give their past history, are effectively former American fundamentalists, though not all are ethnically American (p. 2)

. . . I list the names according to their past religious affiliations using Casey’s own accounts as my primary source. (Casey’s point about “claiming to be ‘scholars'” is a bit of puerile churlishness that I ignore. Earl Doherty does not claim to be a professional scholar and other names are well known to have recognized academic credentials in related or other fields.)

I have added seven names to Casey’s list. Two of those have not published arguments that Jesus did not exist but they are of interest in this context because they have written (in print and/or online) radical hypotheses on the identity of Paul. The names of those whose methods of argument are controversial among mythicists and/or who appear to be promoting a belief system that approximates to a contemporary version of gnosticism (Freke and Gandy) or pantheism (Murdock) are in italics.

Let me know if I have overlooked any significant names. (HJ = Historical Jesus)

Mythicists

Fundamentalist Background	Roman Catholic Background (Note N. American/Australian Catholicism is a notoriously liberal form of Catholicism)	Liberal or No Church Background	Unknown
Tom Harpur (very positive towards Christianity)	Earl Doherty	Richard Carrier [“Freethinking Methodist”]	George Albert Wells
Robert M. Price (very positive towards Christianity)	Thomas Brodie (Irish Catholic. Very positive towards Christianity)	Roger Viklund (Den Jesus som aldrig funnits = The Jesus Who Never Was) [Source: comment]	Peter Gandy
Frank R. Zindler	Roger Parvus (Paul)	Derek Murphy (Jesus Potter Harry Christ) [Episcopalian]	Jay Raskin (The Evolution of Christs and Christianities)
David Fitzgerald (Nailed)	Joe Atwill (Source: Caesar’s Messiah)	Dorothy Murdock [liberal Congregationalist]	Stephan Huller
Raphael Lataster*	René Salm (now Buddhist and atheist)	Timothy Freke [Source: ch.3 Mystery Experience]
	Francesco Carotta (very positive towards Christianity)	Herman Detering (Paul — also denies HJ) (very positive towards Christianity)
	Raphael Lataster*	Sid Martin (Secret of the Savior: source online email)
		Ken Humphreys (jesusneverexisted.com) [no church background]
		Raphael Lataster*
		R. G. Price [See comment below]

Raphael Lataster, author of There Was No Jesus, There Is No God, had has quite a spiritual journey. Unfortunately Casey does not have a category for ambiguity. Continue reading “Who’s Who Among Mythicists and Mythicist Sympathizers/Agnostics”

https://earlywritings.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=145080#p145080
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Neil Godfrey on That Second Question Frank Zindler Wanted to Ask Bart Ehrman: “Thanks for the update. I would like to know the name of the publisher Carrier is speaking about. But we…” Sep 7, 19:44
ABuddhist on That Second Question Frank Zindler Wanted to Ask Bart Ehrman: “He claims that his book, entittled, “The Obsolete Paradigm of a Historical Jesus”, was submitted for peer review and after…” Sep 7, 11:59
Neil Godfrey on Do the Dead Sea Scrolls Invalidate a Hellenistic Origin of the Hebrew Books of the Bible?: “Stefan Schorch also made an interesting observation that implies something akin to the “committee” model of authorship, though again he…” Sep 7, 08:11
Neil Godfrey on Do the Dead Sea Scrolls Invalidate a Hellenistic Origin of the Hebrew Books of the Bible?: “Here’s one proposal taken from the conclusion of chapter 1 in John J. Collins, The Invention of Judaism: Torah and…” Sep 7, 08:03
Neil Godfrey on Defending Russell Gmirkin’s Hellenistic Dating of the Old Testament – Part 6: “A starting point — check out the citations in the articles, too: Amzallag, Nissim. “The Identity of the Emissary of…” Sep 7, 01:20
Neil Godfrey on Do the Dead Sea Scrolls Invalidate a Hellenistic Origin of the Hebrew Books of the Bible?: “The notion of multiple sources going back to the biblical kingdoms of Judah and Israel, and others going back to…” Sep 7, 00:57
Neil Godfrey on That Second Question Frank Zindler Wanted to Ask Bart Ehrman: “Has he submitted his evidence to any relevant journal for publication yet? Or do we have to pay to eventually…” Sep 7, 00:45
Neil Godfrey on Defending Russell Gmirkin’s Hellenistic Dating of the Old Testament – Part 7: “I wish I could recall where I saw someone explain that had the Elephantine papyri been discovered earlier and the…” Sep 7, 00:43
Neil Godfrey on Defending Russell Gmirkin’s Hellenistic Dating of the Old Testament – Part 3: “In ancient times we have the “age of myth invention” in the Hellenistic era by Tanya Scheer — I posted…” Sep 7, 00:39

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An American or European scholar?

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Seeing

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Totally unable, incapable, unwilling

Unlearned and anti-scholarly

Confusing and confused

Ignorant and do not understand

Hopelessly inaccurate

Mythicists mislead you! Continue reading “Casey’s Instruments of Demonization”

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Mythicists

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