Reply #95: Well, well . . .. [View All]

[okasha]

Humphreys: David was a mythical king.

At least two inscriptions say otherwise.


Which inscriptions?

The Tel Dan stele and the Mesha stele. Some scholars dispute the readings, but if barenaked minimalists like Finkelstein and Silverman accept them and can reach agreement with a united-kingdom guy like Dever, I'll take their word for it.

Humphreys: Nazareth didn't exist at the time of Jesus.

Lots of broken pots and some 1st. century tombs say otherwise. There's also, apparently, a Roman bathhouse from the 1st. century beneath a later one. Excavation will bear this out or not.


Pots, tombs, even a bathhouse may be evidence of former settlements under what is now called Nazareth, but they in themselves do not mean the settlements were "Nazareth."

See? I always knowed Jesus was borned in Muleshoe, Texas!
So what do you think the town was called in 25 CE if it was called "Nazareth" sixty years later? Any linguist can tell you that place-names are extraordinarily stable, surviving even foreign invasion and drastic changes in the local language. Archaeology shows the site occupied continually from the Seleucid period to present. If it underwent a name change in that time, it's up to you to demonstrate it.

Patent nonsense. Pauline theology depends absolutely upon the physical life and death of Jesus. "If Christ is not raised, then the dead are not raised." In order to be "raised," from the dead, Jesus had to be dead--physically, unequivocally, flat-line dead. And in order to be physically dead, he had to be--wait for it--previously physically alive. Later, genuine Gnostics (eg., Marcion) rejected Pauline theology for exactly that reason.


Says you and who else? And just because you assert it's nonsense, it doesn't mean it actually is nonsense. As for the piece of epistle you quote, I don't know about the logical soundness of it, but I'll have to agree with it totally.

But you're wrong about Humprhies' reading of Paul. He actually argues that the Pauline epistles show signs of being Marcionite fabrications that the Roman church later redacted to bring more in line with "orthodoxy." And Humphries isn't the first to think that.

Says me and a couple thousand years of Christian theologians. Also says Paul. Look, all you have to do is read his Epistles to realize how completely his theology relies on the physical existence of Jesus. The formula of institution in I Corinthians relies on it: "'This is my body...This cup is the new covenant in my blood'. . .For as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes." (11:23-25) Paul's teaching about the resurrection of the dead depends utterly on a physically present Jesus: if Jesus did not physically die, and if he was not physically raised, then no one else can be/will be. That's about as far away from the Gnostic purely spiritual Christ as it's possible to get.

As for Humphreys' notion that Marcion or his followers produced Paul's writings--I agree that having two contradictory assertions on his site is a problem. But it's Humphreys' problem, not mine.

You're getting into a really complicated nested conspiracy theory here. Paul concocted Jesus. Marcion concocted Paul. (And maybe Tertullian concocted Marcion. None of Marcion's own writings survive--how do we know he wasn't made up? Why does Humphreys have faith in his existence? Why do you believe in him? ;)) Seriously, at some point you fall into insurmountable difficulties with all the back-dating that kind of Chinese-box fantasizing entails, and that point comes fairly early in
the game.

And Humphries isn't the first to think that.

"Appeal to the populace (sic)" is only bad when someone else does it? You disappoint me.

Humphreys: The supernatural nativity stories and heroic archetypes prove that Jesus was fictional.

No. What they actually prove is that the writers of Luke and Matthew--but interestingly enough, not the writers of Mark and John--chose a familiar narrative form for their gospels. I used to teach Raglan's heroic archetype in literature classes, where, just for fun, we ran some actual historical figures through. Would you care to argue that Richard III, for example, is a fiction because he fits the archetypes? Go for it.


Care to argue that Hamlet--or Superman--are real historic figures based on that logic? Care to argue that Richard III actually spoke the words, "A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!"?

Please don't strike a match around that straw man. My point, which for some reason you insist on reversing, is that conformity with the heroic archetype does not prove that the person so conforming is fictional. Your response relies on the fallacy of the undistributed middle and is, of course, rather pointless.

Humphreys: His whole iconographic section. This one's actually funny. His logic goes like this: if Mithras is depicted as the Good Shepherd, carrying a lamb on his shoulders, then the depiction of Jesus, carrying a lamb on his shoudlers as the Good Shepherd, proves that Jesus is derived from Mithras.

What it actually proves, of course, is that Christian artists adopted an existing iconographic convention.


And why would they do that--not just in that instance, but in every instance in which he is depicted--if Jesus had an actual individual biography based on a real life lived?

Because they didn't have a photograph? I wonder what else you would expect artists to do when they didn't have an actual likeness in front of them. We don't have contemporary portraits of any religious Jews from the time in question because Jewish law forbade "graven images." Ergo,artists in different times and places depicted Jesus according to their own contemporary and local conventions, usually with a large measure of idealization. By your logic, one would have to assume that David was a fictional character because Michelangelo's statue looks a whole lot like a Greek Apollo. (Davy's even uncircumcised. That clinches it! The whole Hebrew monarchy "history" was a solar myth!)

Incidentally, Humphreys' misidentifies some of the pieces on his art-history page. The "Good Shepherd Apollo," for example, is actually a kouros votive figure from the Temple of Athena known as the Calf Bearer. Maybe he doesn't know any better, or maybe he's just hoping his readers don't.

Humphreys, in short, is a huckster. He peddles his merchandise as well as his ideas to the ignorant, the credulous and the already convinced. Kind of like Jerry Falwell, actually, just at the other end of the spectrum.


That's funny. I've never heard Falwell breathe word one about High Criticism or the Tübingen School.

Let me make myself a little more explicit, then. The similarity is not in whether one or both are familiar with Higher Criticism--though I suspect they're about equally ignorant--but about the fact that they're both con men preying on the gullible. They both lie, and they both want your money.

Here's a suggestion: if you want to know what real scholarship in historical Jesus studies looks like, read Crossan's The Historical Jesus and The Birth of Christianity. Regardless of whether they change your mind on the central issue, they will at least give you an idea of the kind of methodology and documentation that goes into addressing the question on a credible level. They're not easy reads, but they are the gold standard in the field.