My understanding of Mr. Doherty’s thinking is that he believes that Paul’s Christology derives from, and can only be understood in the context of, Platonism.
From what little I know of his work, Doherty does not present Paul’s Christ as being “borrowed from a dozen other deities,” and in no way does he trace Paul’s Christology back to any of the gods, demigods, or mythical heroes you mention: “Osirus/Horus, Mithras, Dionysius, Romulus, Hercules, Krishna and a dozen others.”
If I’m wrong - which is certainly possible - please prove me wrong by providing exact quotes from Doherty’s own writings. Thanks in advance.
Surely there must be some door somewhere you can nail this to.
If I were going to contrive something like this, I certainly wouldn’t contrive something like the Jesus found in the gospels, who was so critical of the religious authorities of his day who imposed religious burdens on people and sought to profit from religion.
Now, what you’ve written sounds similar to Martin Luther’s criticism of the Catholic Church of his day; but he found his answer by going back to the Bible, and especially the writings of Paul.
Dear Seeker (isn’t there a seeker born every minute? ;))
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. 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!
Leading in the other category, of non-traditional yet simultaneously traditionally pro-historist writers is surely Bart Ehrman’s latest book on the subject: Did Jesus Exist?, in which he launches into an extremely derivative, repetitive, and sloppy attack on the ahistoricist arguments (few of which apply to Doherty), followed by an extremely derivative, repetitive, and sloppy defense of traditional Christian historicism.
Now, I promise you I am quite an admirer of Ehrman’s other works, such as his Forged: Writing in the Name of God— Why the Bible’s Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are and Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why. But Did Jesus Exist? is a tragic failure and a betrayal and reversal of most of everything else he’s ever written!
Anyway, continuing on with your OP, you write:
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).
This is closer to my own view, again except for the whole mystery religion & dying/rising god nonsense. To be more explicit, my view is that the official Jewish death penalty against a rebellious rabbi/teacher with a name like “Jeremias” (IIRC) of approx 100 BCE was the far more likely foundation of the Jesus myth (see, for example: The First Messiah: Investigating the Savior Before Christ by Michael O. Wise).
I will go on at a later date, but for now I must depart…
Which hasn’t prevented protestant ‘priests’ to claim special status in society and became even better at making people feel worthless and ashamed about anything.
You ain’t seen nothing yet. Read the Talmud–what it says about rabbis vis-a-vis the laity, and then compare that with what Jesus said about the rabbis. Somethin’, huh?
Doesn’t mean Luther wasn’t right ;). Most of those Protestant ministers, of course, don’t identify as Lutheran either. They just like him because he allowed them to not be Catholic ;).
Yes, but if it is historically true that Saul persecuted christians, why would “Saul” turn into Paul and makeup stories about religion under the “figurehead” of Jesus? Simple self promotion???
Let me put it this way: appeasement is appeasement, no matter how you dress it up. There are degrees of appeasement, of course; church authorities kowtowing to evolutionists and scuttling the Bible is not, I know, to a magnitude comparable with the acts of the lily-livered 1938 British government but I consider both to be inexcusable and reprehensible. :mad:
I see the URL for a particularly odious organization in the composing box (where one composes a reply to a thread on the SDMB)…
Americans in general were not hostile to the Nazi regime before, say, 1937. Nobody raised a fuss about Nazi salutes given at the Berlin Olympics in 1936.
Besides, the Witnesses are not hostile to governments per se, following the counsel in the 13th chapter of Romans. And Joseph Rutherford has not impressed me as a particularly tolerant person. (FWIW, he died in 1942.)
In an Esperanto book I have is the adage, “Al Dio plachu, sed sur diablon ne krachu.” (“Please God, but don’t spit on the Devil.”)
Years ago I was up braided for a quotation by Brigham Young, condemning him. A Dopers who was a Mormon commented, "Brigham Young was not a prophet. "
Well, I don’t consider Joseph Rutherford to be a prophet either.
