What am I if I think Jesus was the best moral teacher ever but am indifferent re his divinity?
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Anonymous
And yet... Dickson makes some pretty good points. |
Anonymous
Such as....and yes, I did read the article. |
Anonymous
Fixing the formatting
I posted the op-ed about Kristoff and the evangelist. I'm still waiting for answers to the questions above. You atheists aren't exactly blowing us away with the caliber of your thought. Insulting other posters and Dickson is boring. Giving us your thoughts on what you think someone was thinking 2000 years ago is boring unless you're willing to back it up with even a modicum of logic. Insulting me and calling me "sensitive" is boring and misses the fundamental point that I don't care what you call me but I'd like to participate in an actual discussion with actual substance instead of ad hominems. Refusing to read Dickson's 1000 words is not only boring but childish. If you had read Dickson, you would not be able to deny that he has done excellent, specific, targeted rebuttals to Lataster. Clearly you two atheists have no interest in actual substance. Boring. |
Anonymous
A cut and paste for you: "First, Lataster has offered an academic contrivance, as he seeks to give respectability to what is known as "mythicism" - the view that Jesus started out as a purely celestial figure revealed in dreams and visions to prophetic figures like the apostle Paul and only later written into history-sounding texts like the Gospels. There is a potential model for this theory, of course. Romulus and Remus, the mythical founders of Rome, were somewhat historicised over the course of about 300 years. But somehow this is meant to have happened to Jesus in the space of 10-20 years: from celestial deity to crucified Palestinian peasant in half a generation! "Mythicists" are the historical equivalent of the anti-vaccination crowd in medical science. They are controversial enough to get media attention. They have just enough doctors, or doctors in training, among them to establish a kind of "plausible deniability." But anyone who dips into the thousands of secular monographs and journal articles on the historical Jesus will quickly discover that mythicists are regarded by 99.9% of the scholarly community as complete "outliers," the fringe of the fringe. And when mainstream scholars attempt to call their bluff, the mythicists, just like the anti-vaccinationists, cry "Conspiracy!" This is precisely what Raphael does when with a wave of his hand he dismisses the apparently "atrocious methods" of historians of Jesus. It is as if he thinks he wins the game by declaring all its rules stupid and inventing his own path. No, that is how you get yourself disqualified. Secondly, no student - let alone an aspiring scholar - could get away with suggesting that Christians "ought not to get involved" in the study of the historical Jesus. This is intellectual bigotry and has no place in academia, or journalism. I would likewise fail any Christian student who suggested that atheists should not research Jesus because they have an agenda. Nobody in the vast field of historical Jesus scholarship operates with such an us-and-them mentality. This is why the methods of history are so important. They are how we assess each other's work. We don't fret about other scholars' private beliefs and doubts. We judge their handling of the acknowledged evidence according to the rules of historical inquiry. Anything else would be zealotry. Thirdly, Raphael's claim that the letters of Paul "overwhelmingly support the 'celestial Jesus' theory" is an indefensible exaggeration. It would have been valid to point out that a case for a mythical Jesus in Paul's letters has recently been offered by atheist apologist and historian Richard Carrier. But one cannot talk of "overwhelming support" for this idea. It would be akin to some Christian declaring that biological studies "overwhelmingly support Intelligent Design," when all that is really meant is that some guy with a PhD recently published something to that effect. No marker could pass such nonsense. Lataster surely knows what every historical Jesus course makes plain: Paul's evidence for the historical figure of Jesus is widely regarded as particularly early and significant. His letters weren't written to defend a historical personage, and yet Paul refers in passing to Jesus as "born of a woman," being a descendant of King David "according to the flesh," having Twelve apostles, eating a final meal, being betrayed, and being crucified and buried. There is a mountain of data standing in the way of any claim of "overwhelming support" for the celestial Jesus theory. Fourthly, there are numerous idiosyncratic statements throughout Lataster's article which he passes off as accepted insights of historical study. For example, the claim that the Gospels are all "anonymous" is no more accurate than insisting that a modern biography is anonymous on the grounds that the biographer's name appears only on the front and back cover of the book not in the body of the work. Of course, the Gospel writers did not begin by writing, "I, Mark, now want to write about Jesus of Nazareth ..." But wherever we have a surviving front or back page of a Gospel manuscript, we find a superscript indicating the biographer's name, and there is absolute uniformity of that name: euaggelion kata Markon, euaggelion kata Lukan and so on. Equally eccentric is the claim that Paul in Galatians 1:12 "rules out human sources" for his knowledge of Jesus, thereby indicating that his Jesus is a celestial being not an historical one. Leaving aside the obvious non sequitur (why on earth should a divine revelation, such as Paul claims for himself in Galatians, not concern an historical person?), Raphael's idea is shipwrecked on the rock of 1 Corinthians 15:1-5, the earliest datable statement of Christian belief, in which Paul unmistakably rules in his dependence upon human sources for his knowledge of an obviously historical Jesus. This is such an obvious and widely commented upon issue that I am at a loss to explain Lataster's claim. Finally, Raphael Lataster reveals that his real interest is in sceptical apologetics rather than ancient history when he opines, "There are no existing eyewitness or contemporary accounts of Jesus. All we have are later descriptions of Jesus' life events by non-eyewitnesses." Leaving aside the question of whether there are eyewitness accounts in the New Testament - many think there are - such a statement overlooks the fact that virtually everything we know from ancient history comes to us from sources that are neither "contemporary" with events, nor written by eyewitnesses. What we know of Emperor Tiberius, for instance, comes mainly from the Roman chronicler Tacitus, who writes some 80 years after the emperor's death. This is typical of ancient history, and it poses no dilemma to the contemporary scholar because it is clear that authors such as Tacitus, like the Gospel writers, employed earlier sources within their works. It is also worth noting that a little chronological distance from a subject - 80 years in the case of Tacitus, 20-60 years in the case of the New Testament - can actually enhance historical portraits, allowing a chronicler, like a modern biographer, to integrate into the account a diversity of sources and judgments about a subject of the recent past. In any case, to suggest that the Gospels are somehow dodgy because they are not contemporaneous accounts of Jesus indicates a basic unfamiliarity with the discipline of history. And it underlines the impropriety of a student in religious philosophy, whatever his faith perspective, assuming the mantle of academic historian. Anyone may express an opinion, of course, but opinion should not be offered under the guise of expertise." PP, we now await your response. No ad hominens, please. |
Anonymous
| Crickets |
Anonymous
| Did you notice it's a beautiful day? You should get outside. And.....for when you get back....you copy & pasted the whole article. What were these specific "great points" you mentioned? Somewhere between the bullying and personal attacks on Lataster? |
Anonymous
Sounds like Lataster wants to have a debate with Dickson, but Dickson won't engage. Wonder why... |
Anonymous
Is Dickson considered an Evangelical? Or was he back when he was in a religious rock band? |
Anonymous
I think it's against the rules to copy a whole article |
Anonymous
Ask Jeff to delete that post. |
Anonymous
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Jesus exists as an historical being. He is most definitely a part of our social consciousness. We all know of him. He is as real to humanity as the Vikings or Henry the VIII. Fighting about proof is silly. Pure silly. Are we capable of having a conversation that centers on OP's question? It's an interesting one, worthy of examination. If you don't believe in his divinity, what do you make of his (alleged, sigh) moral teachings? Atheists, your voices are probably most interesting here if you choose to focus on the question. Do you respond in any way to those stories, alter them, accept them while ignoring the source? Do you find conflict within yourselves because they make sense to you when the rest of it you refute? DCUM is a community of highly-educated folks. Does it take a Bobcat to bring us together? This could be such a cool conversation about moral guidance outside of dogma. Instead, it's just more hubris and bullshit citation whining. WHY? Is it so threatening to respond as a Christian or non-Christian about your thoughts or how you locate your morality? |
Anonymous
Now that it's pasted here, anybody can see that you're ignoring Dickson's points about Paul relying on people not just voices in his head, the problems of working with ancient texts that affect others like Tacitus, how much mythicism is a fringe idea, and so much more. Anybody else would be embarrassed. Not you, apparently. |
Anonymous
What the what? Dickson is engaging with Lataster,not the other way around. |
Anonymous
Good thing it's only 1/2 the article, then. Something you would know if you had gone to the link and read it. And what the actual F. Seriously, "ask Jeff to delete the post"? We really are in Nazi Germany I guess. |
Anonymous
Agree 100%. I posted the Kristoff interview with the evangelist on this very question. Then two atheists derailed with "Jesus never existed, Nyah Nyah, and also you're stupid" and we never got back on track. Let's get back to OP's question. |