You are not paying attention. Lots of people here are way ahead of you. They are trying to figure out who exactly came up whith what bullshit and when.
Sorry for the long delay, but ***I’ve finally managed to buy some web host space and put up the extended fair-use quotations from Burton Mack. *** It can be found here at: ambushed-pub.com
I’ll definitely return to this debate soon, but I can’t promise when…
All of that is to indicate that the information we have does not reliably tell us anything about what Jesus actually did. None of it is to indicate that Jesus didn’t actually exist.
Oh, the painful Price of ignorance! Not that ludicrously desperate collection of regurgitated drivel again! :smack:
Come now, please. This is in no way hard to explain or understand!
Let me try it this way: I and most other critical thinkers who contend that the astonishingly overwhelming preponderance of the evidence shows that Josephus wrote not a single syllable of the so-called “testonium” can very, very easily see that since Josephus is such a universally respected authority from near the time of the alleged (but non-existent) Jesus the alleged “Christ”, it would quite undeniable and easily grasped to be desperately valuable to find some ostensible “proof” of Jesus historical existence and wonder-working within Josephus!
Do you doubt that? Is it not a fact that Jospehus’ disputed passages have been forced down skeptic’s throats since at least the time of Eusebius? Yet this blatantly obvious fact is truly hard for you to grasp? This Champion doth protest too much, methinks!
That being the undeniable fact, and given the shocking “interpolations” (i.e., forgeries) in the books handed down from what is alleged to have been created during the first several centuries – but that have been demonstrated to all critical thinkers (see Ehrman, again!) to be plainly apocryphal – are you actually going to tell us that it is utterly inconceivable to you just WHY some forger would froth at the mouth to fabricate the entire alleged “testonium” from whole cloth?
Really?
REALLY??
And if you at least grant this premise as plausible, would you not further grant that when over the later centuries even quite devout Christian scholars demonstrated that a Roman Jew like Josephus – who hated ALL “messiahs” with a passion – could not possibly have written such infantile, gushing praise for yet ANOTHER “messiah”, such that in order to save whatever they could of their reputations damaged by their gullibility while protecting a key basis for their faith decided to reluctantly “admit” that the gushing was not original with ol’ Joe but the non-gushing blather was authentic they would not stoop to lick the floor with such pandering nonsense??
Or to put it in simpler words:
(1): Eusubius (or whomever) understood perfectly well that he desperately wanted more butts in the Christian pews (so to speak)
(2): There was intense resistance to the Christian teachings (i.e., fables), particularly from the Jews, who knew far better than anyone else that Jesus never existed
(3): Eusubius (or whomever) also knew that if they could force Jesus-worship into Josephus, it would be far easier to put those butts in the pews
(4): So Eusubius (or whomever) simply got a hold of as many of the very small and priceless copies of the relevant works of Josephus, AND FORCED HIS FABRICATED NONSENSE RIGHT INTO THE BOOKS, and BURNED the rest of the copies he could get his hands on!
(5): Problem with butts not in pews (or Jews not joining his “church”): SOLVED
(6): Later, when the “testonium” was shown to be impossible for it to have been written by Joe, out comes the scissors and Presto! Only the plainer stuff is Joe’s and thus the “testonium” is salvaged as “partially reliable” or some such bullshit
(7): Tada!
Let me know if you need more spoon feeding of the very, very obvious…
:sigh:
You’re being extremely disingenuous, my friend. Did you really expect Mack to talk down to his audience of expert scholars and write like an 8 year old would: “Jesus was a myth! Jesus was a myth!”
Sheesh!
If you took the time to read Ehrman’s most recent book disingenuously defending a historical Jesus, you would discover endless page after endless page lambasting anyone in the Jesus “guild” who did not mindlessly conform to the historicist dogma. Did you imagine that after such an extraordinary career, Burton Mack of all people would be so desperate to demonstrate his total reversal on this issue as to write like an 8 year old and be laughed out of the guild of “serious” scholars?
Really?
REALLY?
No! He would use the gifts that made him such a respected master in the first place: Extreme subtlety and wit!
He would not write like an 8 year old, he would present an entire BOOK’s worth of subtle, refined arguments establishing that since there is ZERO evidence that Jesus existed where there manifestly MUST be evidence that Jesus existed as a historical person, only ONE option is left to the honest person: Jesus never existed!
Surely I don’t need to lecture you like I just did to Champion, do I?
It was Isis His sister wife that re-assembled Osiris, then conceived Horus, as I remember it. she flew over the pieces and that is what caused his Resurrection. except I believe there was apart missing?
IRRELEVANT and MISLEADING!!
How dare you obfuscate thusly!
No one disputes that lots of writers referenced Josephus’ works from the first century onward. BUT what’s at issue is whether or not anyone reference the fabricated lies (such as the “testimonium”) that were forced into Antiquities by Eusubius (or whomever) prior to Eusubius. And Doherty and many others have demonstated that NO - They did not!
See, for example: Chrysostom and Photius [and others who are falsely claimed to have referenced the so-called “testimonium” but who actually did NOT]
Please try to be more careful and less disingenuous.
His penis. In the Isis/Osyris myth, Set kills Osiris and dismembers him. So Isis and Nephthys search all over Egypt, and put together the body, except for the penis, which has been eaten by a fish. So she creates him a new penis, and then has sex with his corpse, conceiving Horus. The sex brings him back to life. Then Osiris has to leave the earth and become the ruler of the dead, and Horus becomes the new king.
So, as you can see, the parallel to the story in the gospel is just uncanny.
I’m still not sold on the idea that Christ did not exist. However there is still the strong possibility IMHO that what we remember now of Jesus is not exactly what he was. Maybe it was that back then he was seen more as a magician than a founder of a new religion.
Cue the classic bit of Rowan Atkinson about Jesus the magician. 
(starts at 40 seconds)
No, no: FTR, you referenced your earlier thread, so I threw in a quote from you back then. That was all. Seriously. And we’re on the same page with regards to minority positions.
Interesting. Let me quote from your webpage. [INDENT]To read these texts only in the interest of the quest to know the historical Jesus has been to misread them, to misuse them. They simply do not contain the secrets of the historical Jesus for which scholars have been searching… [/INDENT] I’m not sure what to make of the first sentence. But personally I suspect that the historical Jesus ultimately can’t be recovered from the source documents. I still find the quest interesting though.
Q: Is your position that Burton Mack is an implicit mythicist? Upthread you characterized him as an ahistoricist. Could you define that or tell me what you mean?
There was a nice discussion with the former poster Diogenes the Cynic a few years back. He was midway between historicist and mythicist, while I lean heavily towards the historicist camp (my upthread caveats emphasized). Alas, he’s no longer posting at this board.
If he’s a mythicist (or ahistorist) why doesn’t he come out and say it? I’m guessing that he’s in the “Mug’s game” camp.
Frankly though, my knowledge of this area is pretty sketchy. So if a big gun signs on to the mythicist position, I find it interesting.
I’m undecided. The idea of Jesus being a fabrication would be one of the biggest hoaxes in history, but at the same time the evidence he did walk the Earth is extremely scant. I put him in the same category as King Arthur.
My hunch would be he’s very very loosely based on a real person in the same way John Frum is, but the real Jesus was almost nothing like the person in the Gospels.
Do you understand that “disingenuous” means dishonest? Or did you not mean to call me dishonest?
As to the rest of your post, it is not appropriate to read between the lines with scholarly writing and on that basis make strong claims about what a scholar “really believes.” In scholarship, what is “real” is what is on the page. Even if what you’ve given us were good evidence that Mack is a secret mythicist (it’s not) this would not justify claims, outright, that “Mack is a mythicist.” To say “Mack is a mythicist” is to imply that in his scholarly work he states straightforwardly that Jesus did not exist.
What about Saint Peter the Apostle, allegedly crucified in Rome circa 64 A.D.? Do those who doubt Jesus was real also doubt Peter was real? I assume Paul of Tarsus, roughly contemporaneous with Jesus and Peter, is considered real, no?
The comparison of Arthur with Jesus seems apt, except for one big difference:
AFAICT, there are zero known contemporary, or nearly contemporary, references to Arthur. Saint Gildas the Wise, born about when Arthur died, never mentions Arthur, referring instead to Ambrosius Aurelianus as victor at Badon Hill, right?
Contrast this with Paul, Luke and Peter(?) who spoke of a Nazarene at a time when living Nazarenes could have rebutted with “Hey, Nazareth was a very small town and the only carpenter Joseph I remember was that drunkard who never married … what gives with this Jesus story?”
According to Wikipedia, the earliest known mention of Arthur may be this poem: (Gododdin is near present-day Edinburgh)
[QUOTE=translation of Y Gododdin]
He fed black ravens on the rampart of a fortress
Though he was no Arthur
Among the powerful ones in battle
In the front rank, Gwawrddur was a palisade
[/QUOTE]
Maybe I’m gullible, but one construction that seems plausible to me is that Arthur was son of Aidan, an historic(?) 6th-century King of Dál Riata. Placing Arthur in the north, rather than the southwest as in Monmouthian legend, solves several problems.
Interesting find!
A couple of odd things about the write-up, though. First, how would the find “provide evidence that Christianity and paganism at times intertwined in the ancient world”? As if Christianity was necessarily “non-magical,” and “magic” was necessarily “pagan”!
Also, Christ as “the primary exponent of white magic,” based on a fragment using a term derived from góes? That term often had negative connotations, or was used neutrally, as a perfectly non-judgmental job description.
Now, my knowledge as an amateur doesn’t go much deeper than that. Googling around, I find people claiming that “chrstou” might simply be chrestou, i.e. kind(ness), helpful(ness), like so:
If we have a bona fide expert on board, I’d love to hear from ya.
I’m pretty much in agreement with this post, but I take a slight issue with “fabrication…biggest hoaxes…”.
We have no evidence that one person (or even one coordinated group) sat down and worked out all of the details in the story, starting from scratch. Most likely, a germ of an idea was repeated, augmented, embellished over time, like 200 years, by many scribes, tale-tellers, pious redactors and perhaps a few weirdos and mentally strange types. cf. Revelation.
At that time in history there was nothing like today’s science or skeptical movement to call into question anything about the story. About the only parts that were discarded when the church gathered many works to make a single volume were the farthest-out-there elements such as the Infant Gospel.
The books remaining, while having considerable inconsistencies, had enough in common that they were kept and the inconsistencies explained away. It’s not surprising that many parts were in common, as they are now thought to have been largely derived from each other.
It doesn’t require a leap of faith nor a concerted effort to hoax for all this to happen.
How likely do you think it would be
-
for a Nazerene to be walking around in Rome or Korinth, some 30-50 years later, and go like “oh my God, they’re talking about our Yeshua!!”
-
That the religious’ reaction on hearing this would have been: “Oh I guess we’ll toss all this into the bin then.”
-
For this other Nazarene’s account to survive 2000 years of copyist activities.
funny:
250+ posts and still no proof for Jesus
So your response to Christopher Price’s article is to insult it, but not to provide any reasons to doubt the facts and logical arguments presented in it.
Yup, I sure do. Do you have any evidence that “most critical thinkers” agree with you on this matter? Have the majority of the world’s critical thinkers appointed you as their spokesman? Christopher Price actually looked at every scholarly citation regarding the Testimonium in the past few years, and found a majority in favor of partial authenticity. He’s got data on his side when making statements about what scholars believe, while you obviously have got nothing.
As for your claim that it would “be desperately valuable to find some ostensible proof of Jesus [sic] historical existence and wonder working within Josephus”, that’s just a restatement of your claim, not an explanation. We have no evidence from the ancient world that anyone in the ancient world ever questioned the existence of Jesus. As far as we know, there was total agreement that Jesus existed. If that’s the case, then what value would there be in a statement from Josephus saying that Jesus existed? It would only confirm what everyone already knew.
I’m not aware that any passage from Josephus has ever been forced down anybody’s throat, so I’d say that’'s not a fact. I’d say it’s more like a fiction on your part.
I don’t suppose you’d care to explain what you’re talking about here.
This would seem to be a further demonstration that you like insults and don’t have much in the way of facts and logic on your side.
I note without surprise that you didn’t provide any evidence for any of your seven points.
(1) Cite, please?
(2) You say that the Jews “knew that Jesus never existed”. You said this before. I and other posters have responded by asking you for a cite. You haven’t provided a cite. I hereby renew that request for a cite.
(3) Cite, please?
(4) Cite, please? Do you have any evidence that Eusebius ever burned a single copy of Josephus?
Another insult. At risk of giving stating the obvious to you, I know far more about both the Testimonium and the topic of historical Jesus studies than you do. That’s why I’ve already corrected several glaring errors on your part.
So, you offer more insults and still no logical arguments. What did I say that was misleading? Why was it misleading?
Doherty argues that there were many early Christian writers who quoted from the works of Josephus, but never mentioned the Testimonium. This is true, and was known to scholars long before Doherty was born. It adds nothing to the debate about the authenticity of the Testimonium. Here’s what I wrote in my last post:
Typically those Christian writers brought [Josephus] up in disputes about Jewish law or Jewish history from Old Testament times. Since they were discussing issues far removed from the life of Jesus, there’s no reason to expect that they would have mentioned the TF. Roger Pearse makes this argument thoroughly by listing every early Christian reference to Josephus.
Needless to say, you didn’t respond to what I said, nor did you respond to the point Roger Pearse made. Instead you scissored out the first line of my post, and completely failed to address or even acknowledge the main point of my post. And then you accused me of being “misleading”, “obfuscating”, and being “disingenuous”.
As we’ve already had the discussion of defining “proof” in this thread, there’s surely no need to repeat it. We have established that when historians write, they typically don’t classify any ancient event as “proven” or “disproven”. You yourself posted a definition of the word “proof” that makes it obviously a matter of preference whether a historical statement is proven or not. Plainly the evidence in favor of Jesus existing is ample to qualify as proof for the enormous majority of scholars in relevant fields, even if not for you.
What’s the point of continuing to say “proof”?