Sunday, July 06, 2008

Another Opportunity For Wishful Thinking

Over at Debunking Christianity, one of the self-debunkers writes the following about the Gabriel Revelation tablet:

I think it's compelling evidence that the "Jesus" of history is a manufactured cult that grew out of the failure of the Jews to win independence from the Romans. It then seems that the Jesus of faith is an accretion of multiple strands of pagan and Jewish thought redacted into a soteriology of blood sacrifice already extant in significant numbers of pagan mystery cults and ancient near eastern sacrificial motifs.


A highly speculative reconstruction of such a fragmentary text allegedly referring to such an undefined concept of resurrection is "compelling evidence"? How did Christianity get "manufactured" and "grow" with "accretions", followed by "redactions", in the manner Evan describes in such a short period of time, with contemporaries and eyewitnesses of Jesus still alive and in prominent places (the Roman government, church leadership, etc.)?

Evan does end his post with:

But that's just my opinion.

The key word is "just".

10 comments:

  1. "I think it's compelling evidence that the "Jesus" of history is a manufactured cult that grew out of the failure of the Jews to win independence from the Romans."

    I don't get it. Does this "debunker" think that the "Jesus of history" never even existed as a real person? That is, the "Jesus of history" _is_ "a manufactured cult" (language of identity)? Since that "cult" is, I'm assuming, properly referred to as "Christianity," then it appears that this debunker thinks that "the Jesus of history" just is "Christianity"?

    How in the world this debunker gets from the tablet to the complete non-existence of an historical person who was identical to "Jesus" is far beyond me.

    I would love to see the steps in that chain of logic indeed!

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  2. I, Thanks for the invitation. For the purposes of discussion I'll be calling the "Jesus" of history Jesus of Nazareth and the Jesus of faith Jesus Christ:

    Step 1: There is no contemporaneous account of Jesus of Nazareth by any author of any sort during his lifetime. Giving the most aggressive shading of the evidence, the earliest gospel may have predated the Jewish wars by a year or 5, but this is hardly proven. Certainly it was written circa the Jewish wars.

    Step 2: The first accounts we have of a Jesus Christ do not mention any of the now widely-believed facts about Jesus of Nazareth and focus almost entirely on his actions in the realm of the spirit world.

    Step 3: There is no significant mention of Jesus of Nazareth in orthodox Christianity (orthodox in the broad sense of pre-Nicene creed Roman orthodoxy in contradistinction to Ebionite, Gnostic, Marcionite, or Valentinian Christianity) in the majority of first century apologetics even by the proto-orthodox. Even in the late first century Minucius Felix says that Christians are called such because they are anointed (the meaning of the word Christ) and does not mention that they are followers of a man named Jesus of Nazareth at all.

    Step 4: The texts of Josephus on which Christians hang so much historical veracity are acknowledged by most Christian scholars to be later interpolations, but even if accepted at face value, they are again merely late first century statements that could easily be validating a pre-existing myth or legend.

    Step 5: There's no archeological evidence to suggest that Nazareth had a living population of Jews in the first half of the first century CE.

    Step 6: Christianity as a movement is acknowledged as a separate religion after the Jewish wars and not before in non-Christian texts.

    Step 7: The idea of a dying and rising God-man who stayed in the earth 3 days before being resurrected predates Christianity.

    Step 8: The idea of a blood sacrifice washing away sin predates Christianity.

    Step 9: The idea of Gods having children by women predates Christianity.

    Step 10: The idea of a trinity of Gods predates Christianity.

    Step 11: The idea of drinking blood and eating flesh both literally and symbolically to purify yourself predates Christianity.

    So what then is unique about Christianity except the Jesus of Nazareth? His story shows up in the midst of all these pre-existing beliefs of both Jews and pagans and begins to win over poor people, slaves and women, but not until at least 40 years after his purported death which at the time would have left almost no eyewitnesses to the events alive, and almost certainly NONE in Asia Minor, Italy and Egypt where the cult began to flourish.

    So there you have it. Until the Jewish wars, there was no evidence of a Jesus of Nazareth at all, and scarcely any evidence of Christianity as a separate religion, certainly not one centered on an itinerant preacher in Nazareth.

    After the Jewish wars, we start getting fights between Christians and Jews. Please, if you have something to show me other than the Gospels or Acts of the Apostles that is a compelling reference to Jesus of Nazareth that is verifiably documented as being before the Jewish wars I'm eager to see it.

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  3. Good luck trying to reason with these hyenas, Evan. I've tried with no success. But there was a Christian who used to listen in and comment not too awful long ago who recently told me he/she is now an atheist, in part because of exapologist and me. So maybe it's worth the effort here after all.

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  4. Evan,

    I reject your stated presupposition that I cannot use the Gospels, acts, or the letters of Paul as veridical historical sources. I saw no argument to the effect that they couldn't be marshaled as evidence.

    I also reject your unstated presupposition that accounts based off eyewitness testimony contemporaneous with Jesus' lifetime don't count as viable, reliable evidence.

    I also reject your unstated premise that there was no such thing as an oral tradition pre-dating the penning of the Gospels as well as your ignoring the memorizing culture of the times. Collective memory, at that.

    I furthermore reject your assertions to the effect that Christianity borrowed from pagan religions regarding such ideas as the resurrection or communion. Indeed, that is the very issue up for debate! It is the very thing Jason Engwer was critiquing. You don't just get to assert what is in dispute.

    I also am struggling to understand your claim that the "Christian" idea of "blood sacrifice" is something that "predates" "Christianity." It is unclear what you mean here. If you consider Judaism as "predating" Christianity, well then all Christians would agree! If you think that the uniquely Christian (I use that term to refer to the teachings found in both testaments) idea of atonement was borrowed from other religions, then, of course, I likewise reject that claim in lieu of supporting argument and also a petitio principii.

    I reject your claim that the specifically Christian doctrine of "the Trinity" predates "Christianity" if by that you mean "is taken from another religion altogether."

    I also reject your logic as incomplete since I pointed out that the wording of your claim made "Jesus of history" identical to "the movement" (note your use of "is). I then queried as to whether you thought this meant the Jesus of history never existed and just is " the movement." If you indeed take it that the "Jesus of history" never existed, then I do not see that conclusion as validly drawn from your premises.

    It is apparent that you’re simply dusting off old and refuted arguments from long ago and it seems painfully clear that you’re unfamiliar with some of the basic moves in the argument as you don’t even anticipate the basic rebuttals to your claims.

    I therefore reject your entire post as a mere list of unargued and unsubstantiated assertions which ignore some rather elementary points that need to be taken into consideration in this debate.

    I'm sure, though, that Jason or some of the others here will give you a more thorough answer. As for me, I am content to leave it where it is since you didn't provide anything like an "argument" but simply threw out a load of assertions and rested on unargued bias. That's not honest argumentation, that's dogmatism and argument by hand-waving.

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  5. Just as I suspected, you have a lot of assertions made without evidence.

    As to my suggesting that Christianity borrowed things from other religions, it appears you freely admit that it borrowed from Judaism, but can't imagine it would have done the same from pagan sources. Odd, that.

    Anyway, when you have evidence let us all know. Until then enjoy your "Jesus" of Nazareth and your Jesus Christ.

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  6. Evan,

    You said:
    "Just as I suspected, you have a lot of assertions made without evidence."

    I don't need any "extra" evidence to point out that you offered unargued assumptions and made baseless and undemonstrated claims. My "evidence" was your very claims themselves. I made no other claims that needed "evidence" to support them.

    You said:
    "As to my suggesting that Christianity borrowed things from other religions, it appears you freely admit that it borrowed from Judaism,"

    But since neither I, nor most Christians, consider the revelation in the Old Testament to be that of a different religion, your point simply substantiates my hunch that you're simply uninformed about some basic Christian theology. Simply put, you can't "borrow" from yourself. The sacrifices done on the Old Testament day of atonement just is a picture of Jesus' death on the cross, as "the Lamb who takes away the sins of the world." You may not agree, but begging the question against Christian theology is hardly a way to gain a hearing. Unless, of course, you're not hear to represent your opponent correctly?

    You said:
    "but can't imagine it would have done the same from pagan sources. Odd, that."

    First, see above. Second, it's not odd given that I can make the argument from the text of Scripture showing the connections. My problem with your post, remember, was that you didn't make those connections for me. Surely you don't think that just asserting that we borrowed doctrines like the Trinity from pagan religions without any evidence whatsoever to back up your claim is something I, or any other Christian for that matter, should take seriously, do you? Why that would be like me asserting that the doctrine of evolution "borrowed" from some ancient Greek philosophy and their teaching that one became many without any evidence whatsoever.

    You said:
    "Anyway, when you have evidence let us all know."

    I'm confused. You made a claim. I asked you to demonstrate that claim. You respond with baseless and question begging assertions. I pointed out that you did so. You then tell me that I need to provide evidence? For what, exactly? I simply asked you to demonstrate a claim you made. To me this sounds like the Christian who asserts that God exists and when asked to demonstrate it he responds, "because he does....now provide evidence that he doesn't."!

    If that method of argumentation sits well with you, then I suspect we had better part ways at this point.

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  7. Your method of argumentation is to create strawmen to refute and then refute them.

    As I am aware you have read my post, you can see clearly that I don't make the explicit claim that Christianity took any one idea from paganism or Judaism. I simply say that those ideas predate Christianity, which is to say they are not unique to the story of Jesus of Nazareth. In fact there's not a detail of the life of Jesus of Nazareth that doesn't have mythical echoes in some other document from antiquity.

    That's the argument I'm making and of course you know that you can't refute that argument so you make it into one that you can try to.

    But remember what Augustine (was he a Christian?) said:

    "Whatever has been rightly said by the pagans, we must appropriate to our uses"

    How about what Celsus said, he was a Christian:

    "Let's assume for a minute that he foretold his resurrection. Are you ignorant of the multitudes who have invented similar tales to lead simple minded hearers astray? It is said that Zamolxis, Pythagoras' servant, convinced the Scythians that he had risen from the dead... and what about Pythagoras himself in Italy! -or Rhampssinitus in Egypt. The last of these, by the way, is said to have played dice with Demeter in Hades and to have received a golden napkin as a present from her. Now then, who else: What about Orpheus among the Odrysians, Protesiaus in Thessaly and above all Heracles and Theseus."

    And how about what Tertullian said:

    "The devil, whose business is to pervert the truth, mimics the exact circumstances of the Divine Sacraments. He baptises his believers and promises forgiveness of sins from the Sacred Fount, and thereby initiates them into the religion of Mithras. Thus he celebrates the oblation of bread, and brings in the symbol of the resurrection. Let us therefore acknowledge the craftiness of the devil, who copies certain things of those that be Divine."

    These are Christian writers who say these things. They lived a lot closer to the origin of Christianity than you do. Yet you are right and they and I are wrong.

    Nice job misleading people ... how do you like it?

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  8. Notice that Evan posts a series of unargued and often false claims, then John Loftus writes:

    "Good luck trying to reason with these hyenas, Evan. I've tried with no success."

    Evan is part of the Debunking Christianity staff. And here are some of his unargued assertions:

    "Giving the most aggressive shading of the evidence, the earliest gospel may have predated the Jewish wars by a year or 5, but this is hardly proven. Certainly it was written circa the Jewish wars."

    Many scholars have dated one or more of the gospels more than five years before the Jewish war. See the archives of this blog for discussions of an earlier dating of Luke, for example, such as:

    http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2007/10/historicity-of-acts.html

    Evan gives us no reason to accept his dating. As he used the term "compelling evidence" without good reason with regard to the Gabriel Revelation tablet, he uses the term "certainly" here.

    He writes:

    "The first accounts we have of a Jesus Christ do not mention any of the now widely-believed facts about Jesus of Nazareth and focus almost entirely on his actions in the realm of the spirit world."

    Evan's reference to "the first accounts" assumes his unargued assertions about the dating of the relevant documents. But if he has the writings of Paul in mind, I've written about references to Jesus' life on earth in the Pauline literature:

    http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2007/09/early-agreement-about-historical-jesus.html

    That post, linked above, also discusses some other issues relevant to the historicity of Jesus.

    Evan goes on:

    "There is no significant mention of Jesus of Nazareth in orthodox Christianity (orthodox in the broad sense of pre-Nicene creed Roman orthodoxy in contradistinction to Ebionite, Gnostic, Marcionite, or Valentinian Christianity) in the majority of first century apologetics even by the proto-orthodox. Even in the late first century Minucius Felix says that Christians are called such because they are anointed (the meaning of the word Christ) and does not mention that they are followers of a man named Jesus of Nazareth at all."

    There's too much error in that paragraph to address all of it in this context, but notice his gross misdating of Minucius Felix. Notice that major lines of relevant evidence don't even seem to enter his mind, such as the fact that the patristic apologists and their contemporary Christians accepted the gospels and other documents that refer to Jesus as a historical figure explicitly and at length. Notice that he refers to the "significant" mentioning of Jesus without giving much of an indication of how such a term is to be defined. Notice that he limits his comments to "the majority of first century apologetics", not defining "apologetics" for us.

    Evan writes:

    "The texts of Josephus on which Christians hang so much historical veracity are acknowledged by most Christian scholars to be later interpolations, but even if accepted at face value, they are again merely late first century statements that could easily be validating a pre-existing myth or legend."

    No, most of the relevant scholars, including non-Christians, accept an authentic core of Jesus material in Josephus. See, for example:

    http://www.bede.org.uk/Josephus.htm

    http://www.tektonics.org/jesusexist/josephus.html

    And Josephus was a non-Christian who was chronologically, geographically, and culturally close to early Christianity, so he wouldn't be likely to be "validating a pre-existing myth or legend". Human beings have a faculty of memory. The ancient Jews and other early enemies of Christianity were humans. If Jesus didn't exist or was radically different than the gospels and other early Christian sources suggest, such a major contrast between reality and the claims of the early Christians would have been easily noticeable and of high concern to Jews and some other non-Christians of Josephus' day.

    And if you want to try to undermine the reliability of human memory in general or in the early sources relevant to Christianity in particular, we've written on that subject as well. For example:

    http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2007/09/remembering-jesus.html

    As I've argued elsewhere, we have good evidence that some people who knew Jesus lived as late as the closing decade of the first century:

    http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2007/08/apostle-johns-long-lifespan.html

    You write:

    "Christianity as a movement is acknowledged as a separate religion after the Jewish wars and not before in non-Christian texts."

    Why limit ourselves to non-Christian texts, and how many non-Christian texts discuss Christianity prior to the Jewish war? Did later sources (Josephus, Tacitus, etc.) get it wrong, even though they were writing on such recent events, had access to so many relevant sources, had an interest in resisting any Christian tendencies toward distortion, etc.?

    You write:

    "The idea of a dying and rising God-man who stayed in the earth 3 days before being resurrected predates Christianity."

    Even if it does, so what? We frequently accept accounts of events as historical, even if there are earlier fictional accounts of similar events.

    But the appeal to alleged parallels in ancient paganism, if that's what you're referring to, has been rejected by most scholars. The sort of detailed parallel you're suggesting often depends on a loose definition of terms, some dubious dating of pagan sources, and other suspicious maneuvers. But you don't tell us what you're basing your conclusions on.

    See the archives of this blog, as well as the relevant sections of Steve Hays' e-book This Joyful Eastertide, for a large amount of material on alleged pagan parallels.

    You write:

    "The idea of Gods having children by women predates Christianity."

    So does the idea of women having children. So what?

    There are some significant differences between pagan accounts of impregnation by the gods and the Christian concept. This fact is acknowledged even by liberal scholars, such as Raymond Brown. See, for example:

    http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2006/12/why-did-early-christians-claim-virgin.html

    There are problems with Evan's other claims as well, but the examples I've discussed above are sufficient to make the point that Evan, like other posters at Debunking Christianity, is significantly uninformed and misinformed.

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  9. Evan wrote:

    "These are Christian writers who say these things. They lived a lot closer to the origin of Christianity than you do."

    You give no citations, so that people can look up the context of your quotes.

    But I've read a lot of Tertullian. I've read Origen's treatise Against Celsus. I have dozens of pages of notes on these documents and others that are relevant. In addition to noting some similarities between Christianity and other religions, they note some differences. See, for example, what Gene Bridges and I have written about pagan parallels in Justin Martyr in Excursus III of This Joyful Eastertide:

    http://www.reformed.plus.com/triablogue/ebooks.html

    The alleged parallels have to be judged case-by-case. The sort of vague, undocumented, unargued approach you're taking isn't enough. And the differences between the religions have to be addressed along with the similarities.

    As for living "a lot closer to the origin of Christianity than you do", that's true. And the sources you've cited are far closer to our position than yours. You referred to the non-Christian writer Celsus, for example. He not only acknowledged the historicity of Jesus, but also acknowledged some facts about Him that modern critics often want to deny, such as His performance of apparent miracles and the earliness of particular beliefs about Him, such as the virgin birth. See the archives of this blog for documentation of some of the corroborations of traditional Christianity in Celsus.

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  10. Evan,

    I am now convinced that you are simply here to push an unlearned bias and have no desire to present an honest, consistent case. For example, you seem to not even care if what you write contradicts what you say from one moment to the next. For instance, you just said:

    Evan: "you can see clearly that I don't make the explicit claim that Christianity took any one idea from paganism or Judaism."

    But above you said:

    Evan: "As to my suggesting that Christianity borrowed things from other religions, it appears you freely admit that it borrowed from Judaism," (emphasis mine).

    So which is it, Evan?

    You wrote:
    "I simply say that those ideas predate Christianity, which is to say they are not unique to the story of Jesus of Nazareth."

    As we saw above you did not just "simply say" that the "ideas predate Christianity." And, furthermore, I deny your claim that the uniquely Christian concepts up for discussion "predate" Christianity. I see no idea anywhere about the Christian idea of atonement. To point to some vague example of a "sacrifice" is like saying that since travel by donkey happened thousands of years ago, the concept of the car "predates" the model-T since both are designed for "travel."

    You wrote:
    "In fact there's not a detail of the life of Jesus of Nazareth that doesn't have mythical echoes in some other document from antiquity."

    And of course that is another unargued assertion. It is also lacking in explanatory value. I see no reason why first century Jews would accept pagan ideas and still think that they are the continued line of orthodox Judaism. I see no explanation for how they could have "got away with it" given that eyewitnesses were still living. And, "mythical echoes" is simply vague and unworthy of serious consideration until some meat is applied to the bones.

    You wrote:
    "That's the argument I'm making and of course you know that you can't refute that argument so you make it into one that you can try to."

    But what you seem to not understand is that what you're doing isn't "making an argument". You are simply asserting that Christianity borrowed from other religions (which I proved above that you claim rather than your latest shifting of the goal posts maneuver).

    You wrote:
    "But remember what Augustine (was he a Christian?) said:

    "Whatever has been rightly said by the pagans, we must appropriate to our uses"

    That is simply ignorant. First, Augustine was 5th century and you are trying to make a case that first century people took from pagan religions. Second, you contradict yourself since you are claiming that we "borrowed" from other religions not that their teachings "simply predate" ours. Third, the Gospels existed before Augustine so he clearly could not be referring to how Jesus "life" was manufactured. Fourth, you are committing the fallacy of accent by taking his quote to imply something other than what he meant by it. Give context and cite sources. That is what responsible critics do.

    You wrote:
    "How about what Celsus said, he was a Christian:"

    Um, Celsus was a non-Christian. He also verified the existence of Jesus (which you deny). He also though that Jesus divinity meant we weren't "monotheists," which is what I suspect you mean when you say we "borrowed" the "Trinity" from pagan religions. He furthermore thought that God changed into a man rather than adding a human nature. So, your source couldn't even understand the religion he was attacking. Not only that, Celsus postdates Christianity.

    You wrote:
    "And how about what Tertullian said:"

    Again, and putting aside your failure to exegete Tertullian, you are using someone who postdates Christianity, and speaks of groups around after the first century, to make a case for us borrowing concepts that predate us!

    "These are Christian writers who say these things. They lived a lot closer to the origin of Christianity than you do. Yet you are right and they and I are wrong."

    Hopefully you have been shown the error of your ways? The honest thing to do is to issue a public retraction.

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