Was Jesus Real or a Myth?

[ambushed]

@Measure_for_Measure

@ambushed

Hello again, Christian apologist Sage Rat. You may not remember me, but I’m one of the many who have debated this topic with you here at the Dope in the past. (see: here, for example).

I’d like to re-present myself as an increasingly cautious & forensically restrained advocate of the ahistoricist/mythicist position; one who utterly rejects all the sloppy and poorly-evidenced bulldada (not a synonym of “bullshit”) of the crackpot mythicists…

And this is from ambushed in 2009:

@ambushed

I understand, Sage Rat, that the ahistoricist position seems quite preposterous and needlessly extreme to you, as it does to nearly everyone else. You, like most, probably see it as some kind of zealously rabid atheism or perhaps just an argument taken to fanatical extremes.

That’s healthy skepticism, and far from denigrating it, I praise such understandable reluctance quite highly. The initial reaction should be considerable skepticism! And the truth about myself is that I utterly condemn and despise extremism among atheists as well as among anyone else, including myself (and have taken a lot of heat my from my fellow atheists for my harsh criticism of atheist extremism, which they claim is an attempt to silence atheists).

Okay, then: Just to be sure, although your main point relates to whether or not Doherty should be trusted as a trustworthy and extremely careful researcher or not, the first point you feel needs to be brought up is that my views have revised (actually become far more cautious, sophisticated and nuanced) – and hence demonstrates that I’m fickle or something like that (at least in relation to trusting Doherty) – in the last SIX years? Is that your argument?

Well, then: Guilty as charged! Oh, yes! Mea Culpa! indeed!

Since you’ve quoted it yourself, allow me to repeat my own 2015 words to Sage Rat back to you and the general readership: I’d like to re-present myself as an increasingly cautious & forensically restrained advocate of the ahistoricist/mythicist position…

Yes, my 2009 views were not nearly as sophisticated as my 2015 views. Is this supposed to be a dubious thing? Something to make my current views look contrived or otherwise suspicious?

And turning back to Doherty, permit me to shamelessly quote my 2015 self a bit more:

@ambushed

By far, the most compelling evidence in the issue is presented in astonishingly clear format by Canadian researcher Earl Doherty in his magnum opus: Jesus: Neither God nor Man. Although not completely without flaws, it is particularly difficult to find any genuine faults in Doherty’s reasoning and evidence once you’ve read him thoroughly and carefully enough to understand all his arguments!

…

The above is fairly similar to my own and Doherty’s view expounded in Jesus: Neither God nor Man, but with one HUGE exception: neither of us gives much credence at all to the incredibly doubtful notion espoused by crank mythicists such as “Acharya S” and others relating to the whole “dying/rising gods” and/or “mystery religion” mythology being a major foundation of the Jesus myth! We both agree that Ehrman’s attacks on that notion are quite sound – even though Doherty’s earlier book, The Jesus Puzzle, gave a bit more credence to that view (which his new book repudiates). (emphasis added)

So when you opine:

@Measure_for_Measure

We’ve discussed Doherty’s hypothesis before. Can we all agree that it is, at best, a minority opinion?

Again, in my defense I need to quote my 2015 self again:

@ambushed

Re The historicist vs mythicist positions: If after all your reading you come to the conclusion that the “evidence overwhelming supports the idea that Jesus at most was a simple completely human man…”, then you haven’t read ***nearly ***enough yet!

Instead, it seems to me that most of what you’ve read comes from the overwhelmingly large school of pro-historicist writers (Christian and non-Christian alike), but definitely **not **from the relatively small school of overwhelming ***evidence ***of non-historicity.

The difference between the two are enormous. By far, the most compelling evidence in the issue is presented in astonishingly clear format by Canadian researcher Earl Doherty in his magnum opus: Jesus: Neither God nor Man.

So, yes, we definitely agree that Doherty’s and people such as Carrier and Wells, et., al. represent a minority opinion. That’s not debatable. But the thing is (and we appear to agree about this aspect as well), they’ve got far stronger arguments and evidence on their ‘side’! Or as you quite ably put it:

@Measure_for_Measure

That’s not to dismiss it. Indeed, I’ve come to concede that the Christian mythicist hypothesis is not crackpottery and it is not grounded in ignorance about historical methods and ancient sourcing. Or at least Doherty’s version isn’t.

But I must also add this extremely important addition to the list of very highly respected current ahistoricists: The justly renowned Christian writer and former historicist Burton Mack!

Now, again, the overwhelming majority of people are quite certain – including the not-as-bright-as-they-think Wikipedia authors, and utterly without any current justification – that Mack always leaned much more towards the historicist (but just a man) ‘side’ of this debate. But not for decades now! Somewhat like myself, his views grew ever more sophisticated over the years until, in the dawn of the 21’st century (publishing date 2001), he had emphatically placed himself in the mythicist camp! (Tomndeb and other extremely knowledgeable historicisits, I hereby challenge you to refute any of this or it’s crucial importance!]

But the fact is, in his final book (so far, anyway, and I’m sure he’s long retired), entitled The Christian Myth: Origins, Logic, and Legacy, he fully revered himself! For just the barest evidence, look at the title!

To the best of my admittedly obsolete knowledge, the Dope’s commercial owners (and acting on their behalf my kind and gracious friend TubaDiva) are reluctant indeed to embrace the occasionally tricky legal concept of ‘Fair Use’, I am not allowed to quote Mack at anywhere near even the modest length needed to establish that Mack has become a mythicist (hence my sig, which when shown reads: Brevity may be the soul of wit, but it is ineluctably the chewy chocolate center of all bullshit (including this, of course).), I must be brief in quoting Mack. Here that is:

[quote=Burton Mack: The Christian Myth: Origins, Logic, and Legacy

At the End of the Quest

I want now to offer four criticisms of the quest for the historical Jesus, especially as it has been pursued in recent American scholarship, and then suggest a better approach to the examination of Christian beginnings.

(1) A first criticism is that the quest has not produced any agreement about a textual data base from which to work. The textual units used for this or that profile change from scholar to scholar without any agreed-upon theoretical framework to adjudicate the differences among them. This is a serious indictment of the guild of New Testament scholarship…

(2) A second criticism is that none of the profiles proposed for the historical Jesus can account for all of the movements, ideologies, and mythic figures of Jesus that dot the early Christian social-scape. We now have the Jesuses of Q1 (a Cynic-like sage), Q2 (a prophet of apocalyptic judgment), Thomas (a gnostic spirit), the parables (a spinner of tales), the pre-Markan sets of pronouncement stories (a lawyer for the defense), the pre-Markan miracles stories (an exorcist and healer), Paul (a martyred messiah and cosmic lord), Mark (the son of God who appeared as messiah, was crucified, and will return as the son of man), John (the reflection of God in creation and history), Matthew (a legislator of divine law), Hebrews (a cosmic high priest presiding over his own death as a sacrifice for sins), Luke (a perfect example of the righteous man), and many more. Not only are these ways of imagining Jesus incompatible with one another, they cannot be accounted for as the embellishments of the memories of a single historical person no matter how influential. Thus the link is missing between the historical Jesus as reconstructed by scholars and the many figures of Jesus imagined and produced by early Christians. Since the quest for the historical Jesus has been pursued in the interest of explaining Christian origins, this missing link is a very serious consideration.

[color=red]
It means, in fact, that the quest has failed.

…

(3) A third criticism is that the link between the teachings of Jesus on the one hand and the story of his crucifixion on the other is missing. None of the scholars that start with the sayings of Jesus has ever been able to account for the crucifixion of Jesus on the basis of those teachings. This means that something is wrong. The teachings and the crucifixion should make sense when put together, but they do not. This is a very serious criticism of the quest…

(4) A fourth criticism is that the publication of books about the historical Jesus as well as the public discussion of them has assumed a purpose for the quest that is unreasonable and ill-conceived. That purpose has been to rectify and rejuvenate Christian faith and self-understanding. Christians approach the question of Jesus and Christian origins as a seriously definitive enterprise. That is because Christian mentality, especially in its Protestant variety, locates the message, authority, events, and power upon which the Christian churches draw precisely at the moment of origin, and that moment has always been defined by the appearance of Jesus “in human history.” The conventional view is that, by recall and ritual, Christians can strike once more the magic flint that ignited and can reignite the Christian vision and faith. The problem for the historian and for the quester of the historical Jesus is that the Jesus of importance for the Christian faith is the Jesus as portrayed in the gospel story…

Changing the Focus

This means that we need to start over with the quest for Christian origins. And the place to start is with the observation that the New Testament texts are not only inadequate for a Jesus quest, they are data for an entirely different phenomenon. They are not the mistaken and embellished memories of the historical person, but the myths of origin imagined by early Christians seriously engaged in their social experiments. They are data for early Christian mythmaking.
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(emphasis added).

What do you say, wise Measure for Measure?