BruceGrubb (talk | contribs) |
|||
(One intermediate revision by the same user not shown) | |||
Line 77: | Line 77: | ||
{{discussiontop}} |
{{discussiontop}} |
||
:'''As discussion seems to have petered out, I'm going to close this. I see 14 supports, 10 opposes, and a few general comments. I'll ask an uninvolved admin to reach a decision.''' <font color="blue">[[User:SlimVirgin|SlimVirgin]]</font> <small><sup><font color="red">[[User_talk:SlimVirgin|talk|]]</font><font color="green">[[Special:Contributions/SlimVirgin|contribs]]</font></sup></small> 17:43, 27 August 2010 (UTC) |
:'''As discussion seems to have petered out, I'm going to close this. I see 14 supports, 10 opposes, and a few general comments. I'll ask an uninvolved admin to reach a decision.''' <font color="blue">[[User:SlimVirgin|SlimVirgin]]</font> <small><sup><font color="red">[[User_talk:SlimVirgin|talk|]]</font><font color="green">[[Special:Contributions/SlimVirgin|contribs]]</font></sup></small> 17:43, 27 August 2010 (UTC) |
||
::SlimVirgin asked for a third party close [[Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard/Incidents#Uninvolved_admin_needed_to_close_an_RfC|here]] and as no one stepped up I have offered to do so, I hope that is kosher. Ok, from reading through the debate the argument is fairly simple; as I read it there are two main counter arguments (barring Google hits, for which there seems to be arguments either way) one is that the historical/scholarly use of the term should take precedent, the other is that the term Christ is honorific and that, in a historical context, Jesus is more appropriate. Taking those as the main arguments the discussion seems to come down just about on the side of '''move to Jesus myth theory''' based on the fact that the support arguments appear to be stronger, in greater quantity and have, in some instances, "won over" oppose !votes. --'''[[user:tmorton166|Errant]]'''{{small| [tmorton166] {{sup|([[User_talk:tmorton166|chat!]])}}}} 21:52, 27 August 2010 (UTC) |
|||
{{rfctag|hist|reli}} |
{{rfctag|hist|reli}} |
||
This article is about the theory that Jesus did not exist as an historical being. Should it be moved from [[Christ myth theory]] to [[Jesus myth theory]]? <font color="blue">[[User:SlimVirgin|SlimVirgin]]</font> <small><sup><font color="red">[[User_talk:SlimVirgin|talk|]]</font><font color="green">[[Special:Contributions/SlimVirgin|contribs]]</font></sup></small> 05:13, 5 August 2010 (UTC) |
This article is about the theory that Jesus did not exist as an historical being. Should it be moved from [[Christ myth theory]] to [[Jesus myth theory]]? <font color="blue">[[User:SlimVirgin|SlimVirgin]]</font> <small><sup><font color="red">[[User_talk:SlimVirgin|talk|]]</font><font color="green">[[Special:Contributions/SlimVirgin|contribs]]</font></sup></small> 05:13, 5 August 2010 (UTC) |
Revision as of 21:53, 27 August 2010
Christ myth theory was one of the Philosophy and religion good articles, but it has been removed from the list. There are suggestions below for improving the article to meet the good article criteria. Once these issues have been addressed, the article can be renominated. Editors may also seek a reassessment of the decision if they believe there was a mistake. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Christianity: Jesus B‑class Low‑importance | |||||||||||||
|
Index
|
Definition, FAQ discussions, POV tag, Pseudohistory, Sources |
This page has archives. Sections older than 7 days may be automatically archived by Lowercase sigmabot III when more than 5 sections are present. |
Things to do
- Go through each section and make the sources' views as clear as possible (succinctly), so that readers aren't forced to read other pages to understand what we're saying, as far as possible.
- Make sure the sources' views are explained correctly.
- Make sure the writing is as tight as possible to keep the length under control.
- Provide another view of Allegro's work, as that section may currently be unfair.
- Fix the Bauer, Marx, Engels, Drews issue.
- Look into the extent to which other Enlightenment philosophers addressed this.
- Brief summary-style section on penalties over the centuries for dissent, if one can be written without SYN violations.
- Strengthen the counter-arguments section.
RfC to move Christ myth theory to Jesus myth theory
- The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section.
- As discussion seems to have petered out, I'm going to close this. I see 14 supports, 10 opposes, and a few general comments. I'll ask an uninvolved admin to reach a decision. SlimVirgin talk|contribs 17:43, 27 August 2010 (UTC)
- SlimVirgin asked for a third party close here and as no one stepped up I have offered to do so, I hope that is kosher. Ok, from reading through the debate the argument is fairly simple; as I read it there are two main counter arguments (barring Google hits, for which there seems to be arguments either way) one is that the historical/scholarly use of the term should take precedent, the other is that the term Christ is honorific and that, in a historical context, Jesus is more appropriate. Taking those as the main arguments the discussion seems to come down just about on the side of move to Jesus myth theory based on the fact that the support arguments appear to be stronger, in greater quantity and have, in some instances, "won over" oppose !votes. --Errant [tmorton166] (chat!) 21:52, 27 August 2010 (UTC)
This article is about the theory that Jesus did not exist as an historical being. Should it be moved from Christ myth theory to Jesus myth theory? SlimVirgin talk|contribs 05:13, 5 August 2010 (UTC)
Comments
- Support move. The article was called Jesus myth hypothesis until February 2009 when Akhilleus moved it to Christ myth theory without much discussion; see here. The current title is a little misleading, because it doesn't make immediately clear that we're discussing the historiography of the person, unrelated to the Christian belief in his divinity. Calling it "Jesus myth theory" would make the title more consistent with the rest in the series of articles about the historiography of Jesus: Historical Jesus, Historicity of Jesus, and so on. Both titles are well-represented on Google.
- The hits for each are:
- "Christ myth": Google (38,900), Google Books (7,730), Google Scholar (651)
- "Christ myth theory": Google (25,200), Google Books (247), Google Scholar (46)
- "Christ myth hypothesis": Google (59), Google Books (12), Google Scholar (1)
- "Jesus myth": Google (48,000), Google Books (2,990), Google Scholar (242)
- "Jesus myth theory": Google (56,900), Google Books (16), Google Scholar (1)
- "Jesus myth hypothesis": Google (63,400), Google Books (2), Google Scholar (3)
- SlimVirgin talk|contribs 05:14, 5 August 2010 (UTC)
- Support'
Oppose', preferring instead Jesus hoax as most scientifically accurate. Noloop (talk) 05:22, 5 August 2010 (UTC)
- Just kidding. I'm neutral. Noloop (talk) 16:55, 5 August 2010 (UTC)
- Changed my mind again, preferring leadership in accuracy over popular misinformation. Noloop (talk) 17:01, 5 August 2010 (UTC)
- Comment. Is there a general policy on how to handle it, when the most common name is widely regarded as a misnomer? I think even GA Wells chafed at the term. Ellegard's theory is that there was a historical figure who is the basis for the NT figure. The name is clearly misleading, yet common. The situation doesn't seem like it would be rare on Wikipedia, so I wonder if there's precedent. Noloop (talk) 16:59, 5 August 2010 (UTC)
- Changed my mind again, preferring leadership in accuracy over popular misinformation. Noloop (talk) 17:01, 5 August 2010 (UTC)
- Oppose for now. In Google scholar "Jesus-myth theory" gets 1 hit, compared to 46 for the current title. In Google books we have another ratio favoring the current title - 24 v. 263. It was also my impression that early works espousing the theory that are notable used this term.Griswaldo (talk) 05:28, 5 August 2010 (UTC)
- Strongly Oppose move If you go back through the archives you will see that I could find only one reference to Jesus myth hypothesis (Talk:Christ_myth_theory/Archive_20) and that was to "Jesus myth" hypothesis (Turner, J.E. (1931) Revelation of Deity Macmillan company (Original from the University of California, originally from University of Liverpool) and as I pointed out back then what he is arguing is confusing as all get out. "Christ Myth Theory" seems to have the largest number of reference and most of the time is in reference to Drews books with in English is titled "Christ Myth" So "Christ Myth Theory" more accurately means "Christ Myth by Drews Theory". THis is all ignoring the fact the first book Wells admits to there be a historical Jesus behind Q is called Jesus myth as well as Jesus myth being the title of a 1971 "Jesus is historical" book by Andrew M. Greeley Furthermore, the phrase "Jesus myth" is like "Christ Myth" use in reference to the myth that grew up around a historical Jesus as well as Jesus never existed as a human being. IIRC, Burton Mack uses "Jesus myth" in this manner. IMHO you're just moving the punching bag and making things worse.--BruceGrubb (talk) 06:11, 5 August 2010 (UTC)
- Comment Please, in the name of sanity do not get read of "theory". The article is enough of a train wreck with "I see Christ Myth used this way" or "I see Jesus Myth used this way" coming up from time to time without opening the freaking flood gates. On the merging issue I think that Quest for the historical Jesus would be the more logical choice.--BruceGrubb (talk) 07:35, 5 August 2010 (UTC)
- (EC) CMT doesn't describe what this article is about, since Christ means "anointed one" or whatever (basically supernatural). But, COMMON may mandate it, since JMT doesn't seem to be how people refer to it. There may be no good name. It really should be merged into "Historicity of Jesus", but I don't think that's going to happen. Barring that, we should name it as a spin out of that article. What name, I don't know. - Peregrine Fisher (talk) 06:09, 5 August 2010 (UTC)
- I was asked to take a second look after SV added those stats above. If "Jesus myth hypothesis" really is the COMMON name, then go with that (other than merging). One has to be careful with interpreting google searches, of course. - Peregrine Fisher (talk) 06:28, 5 August 2010 (UTC)
- Oppose. Actually, it's complicated. I think Google Books is probably the best of the various searches, and it recommends "Christ myth". So, that's my final vote until I change my mind. "Jesus myth" is my second choice. It's much more accurate, but much less COMMON, and I think COMMON is more important that accuracy. - Peregrine Fisher (talk) 06:34, 5 August 2010 (UTC)
- Get rid of "theory". It's not helpful. - Peregrine Fisher (talk) 06:36, 5 August 2010 (UTC)
- I was asked to take a second look after SV added those stats above. If "Jesus myth hypothesis" really is the COMMON name, then go with that (other than merging). One has to be careful with interpreting google searches, of course. - Peregrine Fisher (talk) 06:28, 5 August 2010 (UTC)
- Support Because Jesus is being discussed as a historical person, not as "Christ" which is more related to belief rather than history.Civilizededucation (talk) 07:20, 5 August 2010 (UTC)
- Oppose Both titles are acceptable, no compelling reason for change. Google results suggest "Christ myth" being more commonly used in academic literature, no doubt because of the wording of one of the foundational books proposing the theory. The apparently contrary results on Google web may well be due to the effect of Wikipedia's own (former) choice being mirrored in many places. Retain "theory" as part of the title. Fut.Perf. ☼ 08:39, 5 August 2010 (UTC)`
- Weak Oppose I changed my "oppose" to "weak" given the comments, although in this case I still think Google Books hits are more diagnostic than plain Google hits. Also, it seems to me that this theory calls attention to the crucifiction and resurrection and other (e.g. virgin birth) unnatural elements that are precisely what make Jesus "christ" and not just plain Jesus. Also, speaking personally, while I understand that many have used this theory to argue against the existence of any historical Jesus, it is my sense (and I admit I may be mistaken) that some (including many historians) have used this theory to argue that while a man named Jesus may have preached love and was believed to be a charismatic healer in the Galilee, what is myth is the claim that he was a god born of a virgin who was killed and resurrected, and that this myth was built of out of parts of other Hellenistic/ANE myths (e.g. Mithra), so the theory really is about the "christ" part more than the "Jesus" part. regardless of the number of opposes and supports, the key thing I think is that the article clearly and accurately explain the diverse views.Slrubenstein | Talk 09:28, 5 August 2010 (UTC)
NeutralI moved the article to its current title and I think that its the best choice based on the use of "Christ myth theory" in scholarly sources, but "Jesus myth theory" is also used in scholarly sources and pretty widely on the web. Honestly, I don't think it makes much difference either way. Arguments based on a distinction in meaning between "Christ" and "Jesus" don't strike me as compelling, because while these words mean different things to some people, you can find plenty of folks who use the two interchangeably. --Akhilleus (talk) 13:11, 5 August 2010 (UTC) Changed my "vote", see below. --Akhilleus (talk) 02:08, 8 August 2010 (UTC)
- Oppose Ok, I'm changing to oppose, because of the arguments I'm seeing about why "Christ" is used in the title. It's not used as an honorific; it's used because "Christ myth theory" has been the most common way to refer to the theory that there was no historical Jesus. This is probably because of the popularity of Die Christusmythe (The Christ-Myth), a 1912 book by Arthur Drews, which argued that there was no historical Jesus. This is a basic application of WP:NAME. And yes, I can see that "Jesus myth theory" gets more hits on a plain google search, but like Slrubenstein below, I consider the Google Books/Scholar results more important. --Akhilleus (talk) 02:13, 8 August 2010 (UTC)
- Support Actually I would prefer Jesus Christ Legend Myth Hypothesis Theory, since that would get the most Google hits as long as you don't use quotes. (Sorry, just trying to inject some levity into a very serious debate.) PeaceLoveHarmony (talk) 18:13, 5 August 2010 (UTC)
- Comment Will it merge back into Historicity of Jesus. Because there is only a tiny part of this about the idea that Christ (the anointed one) is a myth (spiritual, heroic or legendary story not intended to have a historical basis). Elen of the Roads (talk) 21:54, 5 August 2010 (UTC)
- Support move to Jesus myth hypothesis. The use of the word "Christ" probably unintentionally emphasizes the Christological aspects, rather than the historical aspects. Personally, I think the article could be perhaps split into two articles, one about the theories that Jesus is completely mythical, the other that he was either "real" or that there is a "real" person buried in the depth of all the material later added, which also implies that something can be known about the original "base" person, but that is another matter. John Carter (talk) 15:36, 6 August 2010 (UTC)
- Comment. The article is vitiated by Recentism, and appears to exist to showcase particular modern books by various hands, most with no independent knowledge of the subject, pitched to a broader public readership. Compare how the unoriginal views by a Swedish student of English literature, Alvar Ellegård, developed in his retirement, are given major explication while the distinguished biblical scholar Thomas L. Thompson's work gets a bare mention. Idem for Earl Doherty, who's not noteworthy. As with the Shakespeare Authorship Question's earlier drafts, one gets a strong focus on authors in the last 20 years,(must take up almost half the article by the looks of it) whose books, on examination, prove to merely recycle in a popular presentation the theories and their details written a century ago. The frequency of the 'Christ myth' term may reflect this bias towards recent usage. In the good old days, in Protestant theological colleges, it didn't really matter if Jesus/Christ existed. From Martin Kähler through to the disciples of Rudolf Bultmann, this was considered not really material to being a Christian, any more than, for a Freudian, it mattered whether Oedipus or Moses were historically real (the myth was existentially, phenomenologically or psychologically real). What mattered, in hermeneutics, was the meaning of the myths we live by, an approach which suspended the rather simplistic idea that something was believable if empirically verifiable.
- Support, as per Slim, and John Carter, if only because the word 'Jesus' is an historical name, whereas the epithet 'Christos' refers intrinsically to a theology or myth, (unless it was, as it must have been, maliciously misheard by Greek ears attuned to a more uncomfortable meaning (daft). 'Christ' is already instinct with mytho-theological significance, whereas Yeshua/Jesus isn't. Call it my POV prejudice that I hear 'the Christ myth' as meaning, whatever usage, scholarly or popular is, that Jesus was not the messiah. I don't hear it as meaning an historical Jesus is to be discounted as a myth. Nishidani (talk) 16:29, 6 August 2010 (UTC)
- Support move to Jesus myth theory. Fine with Christ myth theory as well, but I don't like Jesus myth hypothesis. —Preceding unsigned comment added by ^^James^^ (talk • contribs) 20:26, 6 August 2010 (UTC)
- Oppose change per BG and Future Perfect. Bill the Cat 7 (talk) 22:00, 7 August 2010 (UTC)
- Strong support. Sorry, we're not all Christians here, and sad little attempts at slipping in honorifics like "Christ" instead of the figure's name, "Jesus", are about as acceptable as slipping in honorifics on Wikipedia articles every time we mention Allah, Vishnu or any other deity of a living religion. There is no other justification possible for a move from "Jesus" to "Christ". Take it somewhere else. :bloodofox: (talk) 23:32, 7 August 2010 (UTC)
- Support In my view this article is a POV fork of Historicity of Jesus, and therefore should be merged into it. But while it is separate, the title should be free of religious terminology or adjectives, just like we don't add "the merciful" to mentions of Allah, despite the fact that it's extremely common among the followers of Islam. This article is supposed to focus on a scientific/historical issue, not a religious one, and therefore should use the alleged given name of the person whose historicity is being questioned. Crum375 (talk) 00:50, 8 August 2010 (UTC)
- Comment: It's hard to believe that academics have been so sloppy in their terminology not to recognize that Christ-myth and Jesus-myth are two completely different questions: plenty of people accept the historicity of Jesus without accepting his identity as Christ--this is what "Christ-myth" really implies. Still, scholarly preference is an acceptable basis for choosing the title. I'd think as long as there's a redirect in place for the term that doesn't get chosen, it's probably 6 of one.... Aristophanes68 (talk) 03:03, 8 August 2010 (UTC)
- Not sure it matters: Although I understand and appreciate the reason for wanting to move (as I pointed out above, the "Christ myth" theory has very little to do with the historicity of Jesus), there's already a redirect in place from "Jesus myth" and "Jesus myth theory"; so anyone searching for those terms will be led here anyway. Having both names in the lede is fine for the time being, and the current title seems to follow the course of current scholarship.... Aristophanes68 (talk) 17:18, 8 August 2010 (UTC)
- Support move to Jesus myth theory. şṗøʀĸşṗøʀĸ: τᴀʟĸ 06:55, 8 August 2010 (UTC)
- Oppose Even if it's a misnomer, we don't use our opinions on that to decide an article title. WP:NAME gives us the guidelines we should follow and when we don't we too often get into arguments like this with the accompanying mud-slinging. Dougweller (talk) 07:29, 8 August 2010 (UTC)
- Comment The word Myth is confusing. It has different meanings in academia as opposed to common use. The same is true of Theory. I thought the article would be about how the stories about Jesus changed and grew, and what might be known to be embellishments. A clearer title for the article, given its contents, might be Disbelief in a Historical Jesus. Or something along those lines. Dingo1729 (talk) 20:15, 10 August 2010 (UTC)
- Support. Per Slim Virgin, "Jesus..." would be clearer. --FormerIP (talk) 20:41, 10 August 2010 (UTC)
- Weak oppose I'm not sure there is any particular name that is clearly more common. Just doing some poking around Google it seems that authors tend to more commonly use the word Christ instead of Jesus when assigning a name to this hypothesis. Granted I think Jesus is slightly more accurate, but accuracy of a title is a secondary criteria for Wikipedia. --Mcorazao (talk) 20:57, 11 August 2010 (UTC)
- Support. As per arguments made above. Student7 (talk) 23:25, 13 August 2010 (UTC)
- RfC response "Jesus" has the edge, according to google, so I support that. Possible compromise: Jesus Christ myth theory. Figureofnine (talk) 15:40, 15 August 2010 (UTC)
- Support. Jesus makes it clear that what is involved is doubt that the human being existed rather than whether that human being was "the Christ".Dejvid (talk) 18:12, 20 August 2010 (UTC)
- Strong oppose. The most meaningful evaluation is the Google Scholar one for "[Christ|Jesus] myth theory." A simple "Christ myth" or "Jesus myth" brings too many irrelevant hits, as you will see if you actually click on the results. In the GS results "Christ myth theory" gets 46 hits and "Jesus myth theory" gets only one. That's overwhelming. Even if we lump the "hypothesis" hits in with the "theory" ones, it's 47 to 4. While some editors have attempted to differentiate "Christ myth theory" from "Jesus myth theory" such a distinction goes against the reliable sources found on Google Scholar, which indeed use "Christ myth theory" to refer to arguments about the historicity of Jesus the person (e.g., [1][2]). See also WP:NOTNEO. Short Brigade Harvester Boris (talk) 18:05, 27 August 2010 (UTC)
Threaded discussion
(first comment copied from above)
- Weak Oppose I changed my "oppose" to "weak" given the comments, although in this case I still think Google Books hits are more diagnostic than plain Google hits. Also, it seems to me that this theory calls attention to the crucifiction and resurrection and other (e.g. virgin birth) unnatural elements that are precisely what make Jesus "christ" and not just plain Jesus. Also, speaking personally, while I understand that many have used this theory to argue against the existence of any historical Jesus, it is my sense (and I admit I may be mistaken) that some (including many historians) have used this theory to argue that while a man named Jesus may have preached love and was believed to be a charismatic healer in the Galilee, what is myth is the claim that he was a god born of a virgin who was killed and resurrected, and that this myth was built of out of parts of other Hellenistic/ANE myths (e.g. Mithra), so the theory really is about the "christ" part more than the "Jesus" part. regardless of the number of opposes and supports, the key thing I think is that the article clearly and accurately explain the diverse views.Slrubenstein | Talk 09:28, 5 August 2010 (UTC)
- Actually Slrubenstein, what you are running into is the phrase "Christ Myth" being used in a different manner. Remsburg used "Christ Myth" the way you are described in The Christ (1909) saying while there was a 1st century teacher named Jesus the Gospels give us little if any insight to this man. Also Mead and Ellegard with their c100 BC historical Jesuses throw a monkey wrench in the "Jesus didn't exist as a historical person" definitions of Christ Myth Theory as they have been called mythists.--BruceGrubb (talk) 09:55, 5 August 2010 (UTC)
- SLR, this is a good example of why Christ myth theory is a misleading title. The theory is not about the supernatural aspects being myth (everyone agrees with that, except the fundamentalist category). The theory is that Jesus did not exist as an historical figure. SlimVirgin talk|contribs 10:15, 5 August 2010 (UTC)
- Actually that is one definition largely based on Drews work, there are are others:
- Jesus of Nazareth didn't exist as an historical figure (to allow Mead and Ellegard with their historical c100 BC Jesuses to fall under the Christ Myth banner. Used by Price)
- Jesus began as at a Myth (Walsh)
- The Gospels are to mythologized that all trace of a historical person, if there was ever one was to begin with, has been lost. (Jesus agnosticism-used by Boyd-Eddy)
- The Gospel Jesus never existed (Doherty's and Holding's definitions)
- As you can see from this just what the Christ myth theory is is somewhat of a mess.--BruceGrubb (talk) 10:52, 5 August 2010 (UTC)
- In my comment I am thinking of Price and people like him. Slrubenstein | Talk 11:30, 5 August 2010 (UTC)
- Except your definition covers what Boyd-Eddy called the "legendary-Jesus thesis" which covers far more than most of what most of the material that actually bothers to define "Christ Myth theory" does.--BruceGrubb (talk) 20:38, 5 August 2010 (UTC)
- Actually that is one definition largely based on Drews work, there are are others:
- I've been very slowly trying to read about this topic for the last few months so I can edit this article—and it has been slow because essentially I have little interest in the issue, but somehow got attached to it only after it ended up twice at FAC with some very strong language in it, and so my reading has been ponderous—but what is becoming every day clearer is twofold: (a) this article is a POV fork of Historicity of Jesus; and (b) that the Christ myth theory is that we're not in a position to say that Jesus existed, and we ought to stop being so certain about it. That's it.
You can build onto that basic plank that he was really a mythical trace of the Teacher of Righteousness, or that he was really a metaphor for the dying of winter and the coming of spring, or that he was really a dream of Paul's about people who were about to arrive in spaceships. You can also build onto it various conspiracy theories about the greatest lie ever told and how church fathers have deliberately hidden this or hidden that. This article used to focus on the wilder aspects, and still does more than it should, in order to discredit the theory and call it crazy fringe. But the fact remains that the essence of the article is who throughout the ages has argued—and sometimes argued quite sensibly—that there isn't enough evidence to indicate that Jesus existed. That should be in Historicity of Jesus, but if it has to be here it makes more sense to call it the Jesus myth theory, or just the Jesus myth, so that we cut out the religious aspect entirely. There is enough use of all these terms, so we can freely choose which one to use ourselves. SlimVirgin talk|contribs 21:20, 5 August 2010 (UTC)
- I've been very slowly trying to read about this topic for the last few months so I can edit this article—and it has been slow because essentially I have little interest in the issue, but somehow got attached to it only after it ended up twice at FAC with some very strong language in it, and so my reading has been ponderous—but what is becoming every day clearer is twofold: (a) this article is a POV fork of Historicity of Jesus; and (b) that the Christ myth theory is that we're not in a position to say that Jesus existed, and we ought to stop being so certain about it. That's it.
- If you got that just from reading the article the talk pages on this article are even worse. Talk:Christ_myth_theory/Archive_8 (back in 2007) showed a concern about this being a POV fork by Jim62sch. Talk:Christ_myth_theory/Archive_9 have even more concerns with ThAtSo flat out calling this article a WP:CFORK. In Talk:Christ_myth_theory/Archive_21 User:Dbachmann again raised this issue (2009) and I agreed with him in Feb of that year asking "why does so much of the material on BOTH sides of this issue have problems? As I said elsewhere Creationism and New Chronology get better treatment than this and they are even more off the wall." By Talk:Christ_myth_theory/Archive_22 User:Dbachmann seems to be to the point where nuking the article from orbit seemed to be a good idea. Hans Adler in Talk:Christ_myth_theory/Archive_24 brought up the WP:CFORK issue again, in Talk:Christ_myth_theory/Archive_28 Ttiotsw brought up WP:COATRACK concerns, and then you came on board in Talk:Christ_myth_theory/Archive_30 with your WP:CFORK concerns. The article has improved much since then but as I pointed out in Talk:Christ_myth_theory/Archive_21 many of the problems with this article is in the literature itself. When people bother to actually define it you get conflicting definitions that keep turning this into the monkey house of the week.--BruceGrubb (talk) 00:46, 6 August 2010 (UTC)
- Price is the only person mentioned in the introduction who has a PhD. that is relevant, and his "Christ myth theory" is just as I described it, the theory that Christ si a literary figure based on mythic elements circulating at the time of his composition. I think this is a fringe theory among historians, but it is not a "crank" theory meant to discredit any skeptics. If, as Slim Virgin claims, the CMT is basically, "we're not in a position to say that Jesus existed, and we ought to stop being so certain about it. That's it," then I would suggest that ALL of the major historians who argue for a historical Jesus would agree with this. The fact is, we cannot be certain that Alexander the Great existed. I am not saying this to discredit skeptics; my point is that ANY sensible historian will be clear that most of what we know about the past is a reconstruction. Frankly, what is more dangerous is when we are dealing with people we can be confident existed (say, Henry the VIII) and with little skepticism reconstruct his biography based on the sources available. In the case of Jesus, I think all historians, including Christian ones, will say that there is no historical proof Jesus existed, but that of people we believe existed two thousand years ago, they think it is likely he was real. Most historians of Jesus are not arguing that Jesus existed. They are arguing that if Jesus existed, "x yz" is a muchmore realistic portrait of his life and acts, to the extent we can say anything at all about them, than what most people think.
- In this discussion as well as the AN/I discussion it is increasingly clear to me that two very different debates are getting mixed up at these articles. One is a debate largely between Christians and former Christians over whether Jesus existed. Since both groups seem to think Jesus was a God, to say he existed = to say God exists and to say he did not exist = to say God does not exist. This is a debate that is very important to lots of people but that Jews and other non-Christians can at best find amusing and more likely perplexing. But it is an important debate and it includes theologians and their critics.
- The other is a debate among historians that is really about analyzing the Gospels the same way historians analyze many ancient texts that are clearly compounds of multiple views written at different times by people who did not make the same distinctions we do to today. Whit parts of the Gospel fit with what we know of the first half of the first century? Which parts fit with a period when Pharisees and Christians were competing for leadership of the Jews? Which parts really make sense if they were written after Christianity broke with judaism? These are the questions real historians debate, they are all questins over how to analyze old texts. Then they can write a book that basically begins, "If Jesus existed, then this is a more realistic portrait of him than what you think, and this is how things he may have said and may have done mean things you didn't think of, because you are not a first century jew like Jesus was" That is almost all historians writing about Jesus (including Christian ones).
- I think NPOV means putting views in their context and a debate between people of faith and people who are anti-religion is a different ball-game than debates among historians; these are different contexts, and views get distorted when you try to take view that is forwarded in one context and put into the other context. Hitchens and Dawkins are not having the same conversation that Crossan and Ehrman are having. BBC or PPS or CBC could even put them in the same studio and try to get them to talk to one another and they will spend most of their time talking past one another because two of them are intent on answering one set of questions and two are intent on answering a different set of questions. This is the kind of situation in Wikipedia that really requires a fork if we are to explain things properly to our readers. Slrubenstein | Talk 15:05, 6 August 2010 (UTC)
- Wholehearted agreement with Slrubenstein above. I would only add that the main reason "Christians" give for the lack of earlier historical documentation of Jesus is that the early Christian movement honestly believed that the world would end any day now, and, like later millenarist movements, there wasn't a lot of reason to start on something that would take several months to complete when the possible writer didn't believe that there was any good reason to think that the world would still exist in several months. Other later millenarist movements have learned from the mistake of the early Christians, and published earlier, but even they have often told members to not enroll in college, for instance, because the world may well have ended before they get their degrees. John Carter (talk) 15:54, 6 August 2010 (UTC)
- I'm not really sure what Slrubenstein is saying. First, I've argued elsewhere that in the interests of NPOV the debate needs to be opened up to all academics, not the hothouse (and usually the Christian hothouse) of biblical scholarship. Secondly, the sources are questioning whether Jesus existed. There aren't lots of ways to do this. They are saying: "We think a good case can be made for Jesus's non-existence; we don't think a good case can be made that he did exist." No one says this about Alexander the Great. Arguments about "oh, but it has to be placed in context," and "they're not really saying what they seem to be saying" are, in WP's terms, OR, and in other terms look like an attempt to undermine their point. SlimVirgin talk|contribs 16:30, 6 August 2010 (UTC)
- "in the interests of NPOV the debate needs to be opened up to all academics" - Why? Where does NPOV require this? Do you really mean "all academics?" An electrical engineer? A molecular chemist? A geologist? Would you include the views of a Bible scholar ... or an English professor ... or a French medieval historian ... in an article on Physics or Astronomy if they have published there own views on the big bang or quantum mechanics? Would you include the views on evolution, held by an expert on the history of English syntax, in the article on Evolution? I bet none of the editors active at those articles would let you unless you have real compelling evidence that these authors had independently established their scholarly credibility in physics, astronomy, or biology. I think you are fetishizing "academia." Just because someone has a PhD - even say in French medieval history (and I just narrowed it down to history) - does not mean someone that person's opinion about 1st century Roman occupied Judea is any more reliable than that of my plumber or electrician, or the taxi driver I used earlier today. A PhD is proof that one can do doctoral elevel research on a specific subject, not that one is suddenly an oracle on everything.
- "Arguments about "they're not really saying what they seem to be saying" are, in WP's terms, OR." Yes, I agree, which is why I never said that. "Arguments about "oh, but it has to be placed in context,"" is not OR, in fact, it is essential to represnting a view accurately and is part of our policies. I honestly do not see how you could oppose this criteria. It seems inconsistent. Aren't you appealing to this criteria when you characterize Bible scholars as residing in a "Christian hothouse?" Many of these bible scholars are not Christian. Some are Christian and actually argue that Jesus never existed (like Price). Some ar Christian and argue determinedly against Christian dogma and orthodoxy. Some happen to be Christian and also happen just to be good, serious historians. They view themselves as historians, and they view their views as those of historians, and other historians view them as historians too.
- Look, you can say it simply does not matter whether one is an academic; a non-academic has as much expertise as an academic. In some cases (especially several journalists) I would agree with you, but in most cases I would not. Or you could say that someone with academic training in a particular field is a reliable source in that field, an approach that actually sometimes turns out to be wrong but in general I endorse. But to say that an academic who has a PhD on a subject is not an expert on that subject, and an academic who does not have a PhD on a subject is an expert on that subject, is really byond me. Slrubenstein | Talk 17:25, 6 August 2010 (UTC)
- Yes, I would bring a wide range of intellectualls into articles about physics if physicists were doing something that affected the rest of the world, where the issues were too dangerous to be left to a handful of academics speaking in tongues. You and I have had this discussion before, about the importance of the public intellectual. Have you read anything about the history of dissent in this area, and I mean the recent history: people ridiculed, unable to get their PhD theses accepted, unable to find teaching posts? And we saw it here in earlier versions: compared by biblical scholars to Holocaust deniers.
- Jesus is a multi-trillion-dollar industry, and we can't allow special-interest groups to frame these articles. We include them, yes, and we make clear what the majority view is, but we don't let them take over. Other academics have spoken out about the the lack of scholarly rigor, rightly or wrongly, and because we're not an academic journal and we have a neutral policy, we include their views. I'm not arguing in favour of vox pop, but I want to include what educated people with no dog in the fight are saying.
- I asked you elsewhere whether you'd support an article about Scientology being framed by historians who were committed Scientologists. You said no, but I didn't entirely understand your reasoning. That they're not open? Well, nor is anything really. To educate yourself in biblical scholarship, to the level we keep being told is required (knowledge of Greek, Aramaic, for example), is expensive, as is proceeding through Scientology levels. But take another example, a church that is very open about its history: Mormonism. Do you support WP articles about Joseph Smith being framed entirely by Mormon scholars? SlimVirgin talk|contribs 18:26, 6 August 2010 (UTC)
- No, I would not support WP articles about Joseph Smith framed entirely by scholars who are working for the mormon Church. I would laso hope for work by hisotirans and sociologists, but I would expect them to be historians of religion and sociologists of religion. If some of these happened to be Mormons I would ask whether their work is motivated by theological questions or historical questions? I would exclude (or narrowly use0 the former, and would include the latter without prejudice. Slrubenstein | Talk 20:42, 6 August 2010 (UTC)
- Sorry, one additional point: I'm not of course arguing that people with a PhD in one area are ipso facto experts in others. I'm arguing that doing a humanities PhD teaches you how to read and interpret texts, and when you then devote many years of study to an area, it's a little galling to be told no, sorry, your PhD from many decades ago was completed in the wrong faculty. G.A. Wells has been writing books about Jesus since 1975, but it's still apparently not good enough, because he originally specialized in German literature. SlimVirgin talk|contribs 18:49, 6 August 2010 (UTC)
- The criterion for whether somebody is an expert in a field is whether his peers accept him as an expert in the field. The relevant field here, if we want to set theology apart, is History. It doesn't matter whether somebody formally has a degree in history – they may well have become reputable experts over time through other channels. But it also doesn't matter whether somebody has "devoted many years of study" to an area and written books about it. Anybody can do that, and still remain a crackpot. The only reliable criterion for us to decide whether somebody is an expert worth taking seriously in a field is whether their academic environment treats them as such. And this is where peer review and all the related processes of quality control come in. Do the authors you speak about publish in peer-reviewed historians' journals? Do they get invited to historians' conferences? Do they get invited to write chapters for historians' encyclopedias? Fut.Perf. ☼ 21:23, 6 August 2010 (UTC)
- There are literary critics who have written on the Bible - Harold Bloom for example. I consider his works to be potentially reliable, but I would still want to know how they were received by other scholars. My sense is that other scholars found them insightful although addressing a limited range of issues or having limited value. I would hold the same stnadards to any other scholar Slrubenstein | Talk 20:42, 6 August 2010 (UTC)
- I asked you elsewhere whether you'd support an article about Scientology being framed by historians who were committed Scientologists. You said no, but I didn't entirely understand your reasoning. That they're not open? Well, nor is anything really. To educate yourself in biblical scholarship, to the level we keep being told is required (knowledge of Greek, Aramaic, for example), is expensive, as is proceeding through Scientology levels. But take another example, a church that is very open about its history: Mormonism. Do you support WP articles about Joseph Smith being framed entirely by Mormon scholars? SlimVirgin talk|contribs 18:26, 6 August 2010 (UTC)
- The issue where religious scholars (scholars of religion with religious beliefs) differ from the rest of academia is the strong ideological component. Physicists aren't born into families who adore E=mc2. They're not sent to E=mc2 schools where E=mc2 becomes the centre of their lives. They don't seek E=mc2-adoring spouses and raise their children as E=mc2 worshippers. They don't believe that the adoration of E=mc2 will give them eternal life.
- If physicists were raised in this way, might it not be the case that they would not be the most reliable sources on special relativity? SlimVirgin talk|contribs 21:34, 6 August 2010 (UTC)
Do you concede the possibility that biblical scholars with religious beliefs may not be the best group to ask when examining whether Jesus existed?
- No. I concede the possibility that any scholar may not be a good source; we need to see what standing the scholars' work has amng other experts in the field. This is a major headache wt the continual stream of ArbCom and AN/I and mediation efforts involving Race and intelligence. Some people say Rushton, a PhD in psychology teaching at an accredited university, is an authority on race and intelligence. Others say that the specific views he expresses are fringe and not considered respectable by other scientists. As for making any judgments about groups of scholars, I refuse to discriminate against any scholar based on race, creed, color or national origin. I think NPOV requires us to distinguish between mainstream, majority, minority and fringe views; I think we need to do this relative to something else (relative to the general public or relative to other experts) and beyond this I think w have to identify the view by looking at the text (the book or article) first and look at the "contextual" information about the author only after we have determined what view is expressed by the words of the text. Slrubenstein | Talk 02:49, 7 August 2010 (UTC)
- You're quite right on that. But a policy wonk will always win out if she or he wishes to stop a G.A. Wells from being considered R.S., since the rules can be read that way. Somewhere in the humongous backpages of WP:RS, I tried, precisely, to make the same point by compiling a major list of, from memory, 16 frontranking scholars in various fields over the 20th century who, though qualified technically in one discipline, make groundbreaking studies in another for which they lacked the appropriate formal credentials. It ran from Joseph Needham(biochemistry), one of the greatest sinologists of all time, and Claude Lévi-Strauss(law and philosophy) to Michael Ventris (architecture), etc. The argument had no impact, and the rule of relevant qualification still impedes outside Phds and their work from being cited on many topics. Someone should raise this at the appropriate policy forum.Nishidani (talk) 19:00, 6 August 2010 (UTC)
- One of the things that concerns me about this is that there is nothing in policy anywhere that implies this level of specialization is required. People have somehow assumed it. The sourcing policy has been kept fairly broad; see WP:SOURCES, which is the policy. The guidelines are supposed to be consistent with it. SlimVirgin talk|contribs 19:43, 6 August 2010 (UTC)
- The men you mentioned have all been recognized as making major contributions to their fields. If Wells' work had had the same impact in New Testament studies, there would be every reason to cite him in the same way that we cite any New Testament scholar. But Wells' work, when it is noticed at all by New Testament scholars, is treated as a curiosity. --Akhilleus (talk) 19:15, 6 August 2010 (UTC)
- But we don't have to follow suit. SlimVirgin talk|contribs 19:43, 6 August 2010 (UTC)
- Well, this of course depends on what you mean by "follow suit." This article needs to give a full and fair exposition of Wells' views. But it also needs to note that Wells' views, especially the ones he put forward in his earlier work, are not mainstream. In an article like historical Jesus or similar, Wells' views, again, should not be treated as mainstream, and should receive far less weight than those of recognized experts in the field. --Akhilleus (talk) 19:49, 6 August 2010 (UTC)
- Those three all worked in fields that were in an inchoate state of conceptual and material development. Try to do that in a field that has a centuries' old history of consolidated thinking, in a field where, underneath the austere sobriety of analysis, deep emotional and fideistic commitments exist, forming something of a systemic bias on certain topics, and one will realize that conditions are different. Mind you, I haven't read G.A. Wells, so I am not thinking of him, but of the principle SV enunciated. Suffice a retrospective glance at the subject to appreciate the difference. It took centuries for the obvious to emerge, i.e., that Jesus was born, and died, a Jew, and why that obvious fact could not be faced was that a systemic bias, if not anti-Semitic (which it often was), then certainly highly defensive of Christianity's break existed, in great scholars consciously prepossessed by a sense there was a heuristic need to ride close shotgun on the boundaries with the contiguous faith in order to reaffirm the ostensible or vaunted uniqueness (and soi-disant superiority) of their own Christianity, which happened to be the doctrinal underpinning of the societies in which they lived and worked and had their beans.It has its reflex in the uneasiness some Jewish people have in classifying Jesus as a Jew. He should be ranked as such on the relevant wiki page (Jews), but he never will be. Perhaps they have a point, since his existence cannot be proved beyond doubt any more than Moses' or Abraham's (aside from our much admired and very present administrator by that name) can.Nishidani (talk) 19:25, 6 August 2010 (UTC)
- The bottom line is, NPOV requires that we include all significant views. I am sure we all agree that in some areas, what is significant is relative to what larger audience or community the paerson is a part of. Wells can be significant to a popular audience and should be included on those groungs; Meier is significant to a scholarly audience and should be included in those grounds. I am not really concerned with a litmust test for who we include as a source or not. My concern is with th disingenuous way that a host of reliable academic sources are being mislabeled as forwarding Christian points of view. I think we start down a slippery slope when we try to label a person rather than a particular book or article, as we cannot read minds but we can read books and articles. I think Nishidani has not been following this discussion - I have made it plain that someon can become a very well-respected historian of Jesus without having a PhD in history. Nishidani mentions Levi-Strauss and puts law and philosophy as his qualifications, but this misconstrues the history of anthropology; anthropology became established as an academic disipline rather late and the founding fathers in anthropology all had PhDs in other fields. Levi Strauss established himslef as an anthropologist by taking it upon himself to master all the skills and knowledge other emerging anthropologists considered essential, and by demonstrating this to other anthropologists. This is more analogous to Ehrman or Meier, who have doctorates in theology but who are not theologians and who do not publish on theology but who have additionally trained in history, publish history, and are acknowledged by other historians to be historians. This is not however analogous to Wells who is not acknowledged as a historian of 1st century Roman occupied Judea by other historians.
- The issue here is not whom we include but how we identify their POV. Normally, we identify a POV because the text itself makes the POV plain. otherwise, we look for reliable secondary sources that say that x isrepresenting a particular POV. If notable historians took Wells seriously as a historian of the time and place he writes about, I would have no problem characterizing his POV as that of a historian of the time and place, regardless of his degree. So far I have not seen any reliabl secondary sources saying that Meier's work as a historian is biased by his Christianity, or that Ehrman's earlier work (before he left Christianty furthers a Christian POV. On the contrary, his earlier work is granted the same respect and significance as his later work.
- I have been calling attention to degrees only because Noloop and others were misusing information about people's degrees in order to assign POV. They were misusing it because they are ignorant of how higher education is organized, or because knowing how HE is organized they are bigoted. In any event I wanted to make sure people understand how HE is organized. I do think having a PhD in a particular area does signify a certain level of expertise; gaining employment teaching that material is further evidence. It does not mean tht someone cannot also achieve expertise in a different field, but we would need evidence thatwhat they have written is accepteed (in this case) as expressing a historian's POV and is a significant view among historians of that time and place. Slrubenstein | Talk 11:57, 8 August 2010 (UTC)
- Comment While it is part of the Historicity of Jesus spectrum there is enough to show that it is regarded a quasi separate category--the problem keep being that there is not a uniform clean constancy about just what the bounties between it and the minimalist position are. This mess sort of reminds me of the chaotic mess old AD&D alignments were--you had clear descriptions of the extremes there too but where the exact boundaries between any two were was anyone's guess.--BruceGrubb (talk) 23:21, 5 August 2010 (UTC)
- There is no clean boundary between the Christ myth position and other minimalist positions, because they amount to the same thing depending on which words you stress. The search for a clean boundary is fruitless. SlimVirgin talk|contribs 23:27, 5 August 2010 (UTC)
- You are saying what I have been saying for years on these talk pages (see talk:Christ_myth_theory/Archive_12#removed_sentence_from_lead regarding the range of the definition)--BruceGrubb (talk) 01:49, 6 August 2010 (UTC)
(first comment copied from above)
- Oppose Ok, I'm changing to oppose, because of the arguments I'm seeing about why "Christ" is used in the title. It's not used as an honorific; it's used because "Christ myth theory" has been the most common way to refer to the theory that there was no historical Jesus. This is probably because of the popularity of Die Christusmythe (The Christ-Myth), a 1912 book by Arthur Drews, which argued that there was no historical Jesus. This is a basic application of WP:NAME. And yes, I can see that "Jesus myth theory" gets more hits on a plain google search, but like Slrubenstein below, I consider the Google Books/Scholar results more important. --Akhilleus (talk) 02:13, 8 August 2010 (UTC)
- Note that Akhilleus is the user who moved the article from the original "Jesus myth theory" to "Christ myth theory". Obviously, Christ is an honorific, whether you want to dance around it or not, and the fact that "you're changing to oppose, because of the arguments I'm seeing about why "Christ" is used in the title" says it all. :bloodofox: (talk) 03:22, 8 August 2010 (UTC)
- Yes, it says that I don't like the poor arguments that other users are making. Such as the assumption that "Christ" is an honorific—I doubt Arthur Drews intended it that way, somehow. Neither, I think, does Robert M. Price (although, to be fair, he is a practicing Christian). --Akhilleus (talk) 03:38, 8 August 2010 (UTC)
- And for the record, the move was from the original Jesus myth hypothesis to the current title of Christ myth theory, as SlimVirgin correctly noted above. And, as I've said all along, I moved it to this title because this is the name this theory is given most often in scholarship (that is, when it's actually given a name at all). --Akhilleus (talk) 03:49, 8 August 2010 (UTC)
- If the crux of your response is my failure to point out that you swapped "hypothesis" for "theory", well, you've certainly got me there, Mr. Akhilleus! As for the actual topic, we're discussing your move, not the usage of Drews or Price, who I couldn't give two figs about for the purpose of the article title. Let's be clear; your odd preference for "Christ" over "Jesus" in this context welcomes votes such as mine and Crum375's, and your spite-vote in response hardly cools the flames. :bloodofox: (talk) 04:28, 8 August 2010 (UTC)
- My "odd preference" is for "Christ myth theory" vs. "Jesus myth theory", not "Christ" vs. "Jesus". This preference is based precisely on the usage of Drews, Price, and the secondary scholarship that uses "Christ myth theory" more often than any other name, including "Jesus myth theory", for the idea that Jesus didn't exist. If Drews had named his book Die Jesusmythe, this article would probably be called Jesus myth theory right now. But the fact that he didn't suggests that the firm distinction you see between the meaning of "Jesus" and "Christ" is not one that's always observed. Again, this is a straightforward application of WP:NAME—what is the topic of the article usually called by other sources? --Akhilleus (talk) 04:45, 8 August 2010 (UTC)
- Therein lies the problem, Akhilleus. Despite the vast amount of literature out there, and despite that SlimVirgin's yield of hits have shown exactly how solidly founded and, for that matter, despite how obviously the usage the potentially mythical "Jesus" over the completely mythical "Christ" is here, you're still fighting for the honorific, hiding behind the smokescreen of your chosen book titles. :bloodofox: (talk) 04:59, 8 August 2010 (UTC)
- As often as we don't see eye to eye to on a lot of things Akhilleus and I agree on the title of this should be "Christ Myth theory" as the work that really got the topic noticed was Drews' book which in English was titled Christ Myth. I too argued that Christ Myth was a bad choice Talk:Christ_myth_theory/Archive_22#lists for much the same reason but the reality is when most people talk about this they are talking of Drews. Much like Darwin is incorrectly called "The theory of evolution" when in reality it should be "Regarding a mechanism for Evolution"--BruceGrubb (talk) 09:01, 8 August 2010 (UTC)
- Therein lies the problem, Akhilleus. Despite the vast amount of literature out there, and despite that SlimVirgin's yield of hits have shown exactly how solidly founded and, for that matter, despite how obviously the usage the potentially mythical "Jesus" over the completely mythical "Christ" is here, you're still fighting for the honorific, hiding behind the smokescreen of your chosen book titles. :bloodofox: (talk) 04:59, 8 August 2010 (UTC)
- My "odd preference" is for "Christ myth theory" vs. "Jesus myth theory", not "Christ" vs. "Jesus". This preference is based precisely on the usage of Drews, Price, and the secondary scholarship that uses "Christ myth theory" more often than any other name, including "Jesus myth theory", for the idea that Jesus didn't exist. If Drews had named his book Die Jesusmythe, this article would probably be called Jesus myth theory right now. But the fact that he didn't suggests that the firm distinction you see between the meaning of "Jesus" and "Christ" is not one that's always observed. Again, this is a straightforward application of WP:NAME—what is the topic of the article usually called by other sources? --Akhilleus (talk) 04:45, 8 August 2010 (UTC)
- If the crux of your response is my failure to point out that you swapped "hypothesis" for "theory", well, you've certainly got me there, Mr. Akhilleus! As for the actual topic, we're discussing your move, not the usage of Drews or Price, who I couldn't give two figs about for the purpose of the article title. Let's be clear; your odd preference for "Christ" over "Jesus" in this context welcomes votes such as mine and Crum375's, and your spite-vote in response hardly cools the flames. :bloodofox: (talk) 04:28, 8 August 2010 (UTC)
(first comment copied from above)
- Oppose Even if it's a misnomer, we don't use our opinions on that to decide an article title. WP:NAME gives us the guidelines we should follow and when we don't we too often get into arguments like this with the accompanying mud-slinging. Dougweller (talk) 07:29, 8 August 2010 (UTC)
- The issue here is that WP:NAME offers no guidance for this case. Both names are used. Jesus myth theory gets over twice as many Google hits, and that's despite WP having spread Christ myth theory. But the latter gets significantly more Google Books hits, so it depends which you want to place more emphasis on. In a situation where both names are well represented, we can decide for ourselves which makes more sense.SlimVirgin talk|contribs 07:41, 8 August 2010 (UTC)
- Be very leery of Google hits especially the web search. You are getting blog, old versions of this pages, etc that mess up the numbers.--BruceGrubb (talk) 09:01, 8 August 2010 (UTC)
- The page was called Jesus myth hypothesis before it was moved in 2009, and has never been called Jesus myth theory that I can see, so WP isn't messing up Google hits with that title. SlimVirgin talk|contribs 23:12, 8 August 2010 (UTC)
- Ah but Google doesn't took for tittles but that text appearing anywhere in the page. Here is the first sentence of this page exactly as it appeared in December 31, 2008:
- "The Jesus myth hypothesis (also referred to as the Jesus myth theory, the Jesus myth, or the Christ myth) covers a broad range of ideas all of which question the historical existence of Jesus."
- Since "Jesus myth theory" as well as "Jesus myth hypothesis" appears in the above Google presents any page with that text as a hit. In fact, searching for "Jesus myth theory" brings up the current version of this page: The Christ myth theory (also known as the Jesus myth theory and the nonexistence hypothesis) is the idea that Jesus of Nazareth was not a historical person, ..." As I said be very leery of Google hits especially the web search.--BruceGrubb (talk) 04:57, 9 August 2010 (UTC)
- But that applies to Christ myth theory too, so it evens itself out. SlimVirgin talk|contribs 06:05, 9 August 2010 (UTC)
- Actually, since "Christ myth theory" was not part of the Jesus myth hypothesis definition it doesn't even itself out.--BruceGrubb (talk) 06:28, 12 August 2010 (UTC)
- But that applies to Christ myth theory too, so it evens itself out. SlimVirgin talk|contribs 06:05, 9 August 2010 (UTC)
Paul Veyne
I thought editors here might be interested in the following quote from Paul Veyne,Did the Greeks believe in their myths? (Chicago, 1988, trans. Paula Wissing), p. 106 [3]: "He was close, as a matter of fact, to a type of crank that historians who study the past two centuries sometimes encounter: anticlericals who deny the historicity of Christ (which irritates me, atheist that I am) and addled brains who deny the existence of Socrates, Joan of Arc, Shakespeare, or Molière, get excited about Atlantis, or discover monuments erected by extraterrestrials on Easter Island." Veyne, as he says, is an atheist; he is also a classicst, and though he specializes in ancient Rome, the book I've quoted from is one that's influential in the study of Greek mythology. --Akhilleus (talk) 00:30, 16 August 2010 (UTC)
- Akhilleus, I've asked this many times before, but can I ask again that you stop all the ad hominem arguments against sources, whether coming from you or other sources? It is getting to be extremely tiresome, and if you think it's persuasive, it's really having the opposite effect. SlimVirgin talk|contribs 00:46, 16 August 2010 (UTC)
- Akhilleus has made no ad hominem argument. Akhilleus is quoting from a source. The fact that this disdain exists for Christ Mythers amongst those who deal professionally with ancient history is not Akhilleus' fault. As Veyne's quote suggests the same disdain exists for those who doubt that the Stratford man wrote Shakespeare's plays, or that Socrates existed. Such disdain is, like it or not, rather telling of the acceptance these theories have in mainstream academics. I'm unsure of the basis for your argument against accurately reflecting this aspect of the issue.Griswaldo (talk) 00:59, 16 August 2010 (UTC)
- (edit conflict) I'm sorry, I don't really understand why you're saying this. Veyne is an eminent classicist; he is a source from outside the world of biblical scholarship, and a book published (in translation) by the University of Chicago Press is one that should be considered a high quality source. So, this is an indication of how classicists view the idea that there was no historical Jesus. You've already found one indication of this, by Graeme Clarke (though he's no longer quoted in the lead, I guess); Veyne is another. --Akhilleus (talk) 01:00, 16 August 2010 (UTC)
- No matter what I post nowadays, you tell me you don't understand what I'm saying, but I think it's pretty clear. Sources that educate us would be great. Sources telling us that, in that person's opinion, other people are Holocaust deniers, flat-earthers, cranks, insane, addled, gosh, wow, and sad really, aren't helpful. SlimVirgin talk|contribs 01:06, 16 August 2010 (UTC)
- Well, I disagree with you on this. Veyne says in the plainest fashion possible that people who deny Christ's historicity are cranks. He's not just some bozo: he's an eminent classicist, and one whose work on mythology is influential. What you seem to be saying, and I hope I've misunderstood, is that you don't think his opinion is useful because it's not polite enough. But why should that be a requirement? The value of Veyne's opinion (which, by the way, I encountered because Robert M. Price refers to it in Deconstructing Jesus) is that it shows an eminent classicist rejecting the CMT out of hand as a fringe theory. --Akhilleus (talk) 01:23, 16 August 2010 (UTC)
- That's a preposterous source. It's a personal essay, with a passing reference to Jesus that doesn't even get a whole sentence to itself. It's a clause, parenthetically expressing a contemptuous opinion, and that's it. To suggest that as a source for a factual statement in this encyclopedia is absurd. Noloop (talk) 01:39, 16 August 2010 (UTC)
- I agree it's a passing mention, but it's not in a "personal essay." (Perhaps you are being misled by the word "essay" in the subittle?) This is a widely cited and influential book on Greek myth; it's sometimes used in university level courses on mythology. And, sorry to say, I'm not that surprised that when I provided a classicist who not only thinks that there was a historical Jesus, but treats it as a basic fact, that you would find a way to deny the value of the source. --Akhilleus (talk) 01:53, 16 August 2010 (UTC)
- A quick search of Wilson Web shows this book reviewed in, History and Theory, Journal of the History of Ideas, Man, Partisan Review, International Philosophical Quarterly, Canadian Journal of History, and Arts Magazine. I'm sure there are many other reviews as well. Hardly a personal essay.Griswaldo (talk) 02:06, 16 August 2010 (UTC)
- We were told during my very first philosophy lecture as an undergraduate that it's always easy to pick holes in people's work and insult them, but that the important and difficult thing is to find value in it and move forward with that. Perhaps we could bear that in mind here? SlimVirgin talk|contribs 01:59, 16 August 2010 (UTC)
- I agree with SlimVirgin in that the quote by Veyne is ad hominem and will also add that it is Non sequitur (logic) as well as a clear Straw man. Comparing "anticlericals who deny the historicity of Christ" to "addle brains who deny the existence of Socrates, Joan of Arc, Shakespeare, or Moliere pure Non sequitur (logic); those people all have good truly contemporary evidence for their exist while Jesus doesn't. The "get excited about Atlantis" quip make even less sense as until the final acceptance of Plate Tectonics by the scientific community...some three centuries after it had been first suggested was considered possible; The wave that destroyed Atlantis By Harvey Lilley BBC Timewatch April 20, 2007 shows that not all ideas regarding Atlantis are off in the ozone.--BruceGrubb (talk) 05:08, 17 August 2010 (UTC)
- I could provide you with a large list of articles in the area I once edited, where I tried to apply precisely that principle, only to be consistently overruled by authoritative editors and administrators who insisted on pasting in sections cluttered with dismissive quotes from outside scholars (with nowhere Veyne's standing) or second-rate diatribe merchants, because the RS rules allowed it. An example, which is a disgrace, is Israel Shahak. And the muck stuck. Wiki is full of systemic bias, very much like the world, and the in-house rules provide no way to cope with it.Nishidani (talk) 08:24, 16 August 2010 (UTC)
- If you're looking for substantive criticism of the CMT, Veyne is of course not the answer. We have such substantive critique, but it gets rejected out of hand by some editors here as the work of theologians and people who are devoted to promoting Christianity. For instance, there's The Historicity of Jesus by Shirley Jackson Case, originally published in 1912 by the University of Chicago, as it turns out. This particular book isn't cited in the article, though an article by Case is. Case's work was influential in creating the impression in the early part of the 20th century that the arguments of Drews, Smith, Robertson, et al. had been definitively refuted.
- I could provide you with a large list of articles in the area I once edited, where I tried to apply precisely that principle, only to be consistently overruled by authoritative editors and administrators who insisted on pasting in sections cluttered with dismissive quotes from outside scholars (with nowhere Veyne's standing) or second-rate diatribe merchants, because the RS rules allowed it. An example, which is a disgrace, is Israel Shahak. And the muck stuck. Wiki is full of systemic bias, very much like the world, and the in-house rules provide no way to cope with it.Nishidani (talk) 08:24, 16 August 2010 (UTC)
- If you want an example of someone finding value in the work of CMT proponents, Schweitzer is one place to look. He has lots of praise for some aspects of Bruno Bauer's work, for example.
- However, something that gets continually questioned on this page is whether the CMT is fringe, whether it has mainstream acceptance, whether Wells and Price are experts on early Christianity, etc. etc. Veyne is one of many sources that establish that this theory is not mainstream. --Akhilleus (talk) 02:18, 16 August 2010 (UTC)
- The problem is that many of the exact same arguments are used by Jesus didn't exist as a flesh and blood man and the extreme minimalist crowd. The only real difference between them is where they fall on the "was there anything there?" issue--that is it. That is a very questionable foundation to build an entire article on.--BruceGrubb (talk) 19:30, 16 August 2010 (UTC)
In all honesty, it's fairly hard to find substantive criticism of the CMT because the CMT itself isn't substantive. In the end, it all boils down to: "Everything that was ever written by people who came into contact with this person was completely faked, including third-party uninvolved sources who were reporting on Jesus." I know that's a bit of an oversimplification, but it's kind of an absurd theory when you think about it. I doubt you can find a lot of substantive criticism about how the earth is flat, for example. Either way, this cite does go to the issue of whether CMT is a fringe theory (which it clearly seems to be.) Deep Purple Dreams (talk) 21:58, 18 August 2010 (UTC)
- Actually that is not what the CMT boils down to. It really boils down to: "the Gospel account is so mythological that nothing included that the man described within can be shown to be historical." As for those "third-party uninvolved sources" the Historicity Of Jesus FAQ (1994) by Scott Oser goes over them.
- Josephus--Testimonium Flavianum known to have been tampered with and no church father seems to refer to it until the 4th century even if they reference Josephus in other matters. The second passage is thought to be authentic but has syntax problems making it unclear if the Jesus brother of James refereed to became high priest or not. Also Oser neglects the fact that back in the 1900s Historical Jesus supporters were using Hegesippus to present a c69 CE date for the death of James the Just... Josephus indicates a c64 CE death date--a full half decade difference. Even if both passages were entirely genuine in Josephus' eyes this Jesus was just another would be savior who didn't amount to beans--otherwise he would have devoted more space to him.
- Tacitus--Written in c116 this at best tells us only what the Christians believed. As early as 1950 it had been suggested that the word was originally "Chrestianos" not "Christianos" and we now have proof that is likely the case. This along with the use of procurator rather than prefect indicates Tacitus was at best repeating hearsay and not checking anything. This is akin to saying papers talking about the John Frum cult prove that John Frum existed.
- Pliny the Younger--only confirms that Christians existed c100 CE. Gives not a single detail as to the Christ the Christians revered.
- Suetonius--"As the Jews were making constant disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus, he expelled them from Rome". Since in his Life of Nero Suetonius clearly knew the difference between Jews and Christians, used Chrestus rather than Christus, and implied that this "Chrestus" was instigating these disturbances (ie was alive) this likely has no reference to Jesus and only wishful (or should that be desperate) thinking makes it a reference to Jesus.
- Thallus--Why anyone would even use this is beyond me. Supposedly the Histories referenced as the source material went only to the 167th Olympiad which would be only to 109 BCE. What we do have is Syncellus of the 9th century quoting Julius Africanus of the 2nd century who in turn refers to Thallus. So to get things to fit (see Suetonius above) the 167th Olympiad is fudged into the 207th Olympiad or 217th Olympiad. Things just go down hill from there.
- And that is the best "third-party uninvolved sources" the supporters of a historical Jesus can point to. Josephus, the best of the "usual suspects", wrote his account c94 CE or nearly six decades after the events--more than enough time for the urban legend mill to crank out a ton of "grain".--BruceGrubb (talk) 01:08, 19 August 2010 (UTC)
- How is arguing the merits of the theory a useful project for the talk page? john k (talk) 02:32, 19 August 2010 (UTC)
- I stated that I was oversimplifying it a bit, but only to get across the absurdity of the theory to illustrate why cites like Veyne are important. Deep Purple Dreams (talk) 03:47, 19 August 2010 (UTC)
- John K, because it show just flawed the argument of those those who attack the CMT can be. The Veyne cite is as I have demonstrated is flawed on Non sequitur (logic) grounds and uses obvious strawmen; it is hard to take it seriously and seems more an example of throw any theory out there in the hope something anything sticks. Take the following from Schweitzer in the 1906 version of The Quest of the Historical Jesus and note how out of context it could be read to imply the exact opposite of what Schweitzer intended (this is regards to reconstructions of Jesus and not in regards to the man's existence):
- "There is nothing more negative than the result of the critical study of the Life of Jesus. The Jesus of Nazareth who came forward publicly as the Messiah, who preached the ethic of the Kingdom of God, who founded the Kingdom of Heaven upon earth, and died to give His work its final consecration, never had any existence. He is a figure designed by rationalism, endowed with life by liberalism, and clothed by modern theology in an historical garb."--BruceGrubb (talk) 08:29, 19 August 2010 (UTC)
- Dumping self-published Usenet FAQs onto this page isn't much help in improving the article. --Akhilleus (talk) 14:37, 19 August 2010 (UTC)
- Mind explaining just what that has to do with what you are replying to?--BruceGrubb (talk) 15:34, 19 August 2010 (UTC)
- It's not useful to dump self-published, non-expert views on ancient documents onto this page. First, because there's a tremendous amount of genuine scholarship published on these sources; second, because discussion of those sources is at historicity of Jesus or the individual articles devoted to those sources (e.g. Josephus on Jesus); third, because talk pages are not for general discussion of the article's subject, but for discussion of how to improve the article. Oh, by the way, the Schweitzer quote you posted above is quite nice, but doesn't really pertain to this article, does it? Could fit in at historical Jesus or Quest of the historical Jesus, if it's not there already. --Akhilleus (talk) 01:37, 20 August 2010 (UTC)
- Considering these very same points have raised elsewhere your comments still don't make sense. Also my comments were related to Deep Purple Dreams' misunderstanding of the CMT entirely being in the Joseph Wheless mold.
- Of the usual suspects Josephus is the one that has been the one constantly called a forgery and when Remsburg presented back in 1909 this he cited Rev. Dr. Giles, of the Established Church of England and Rev. S. Baring-Gould, (Lost and Hostile Gospels) as only two people who point this out.
- Even The historical Jesus: a comprehensive guide 1998 By Gerd Theissen, Annette Merz Augsburg Fortress Publishers pg 83 admits Tacitus is not that good. The Jewish Sources of the Sermon on the Mount 1911 By Gerald Friedlander G.Routledge & Sons, Bloch Pub. is even harsher with Tacitus.
- "To these witnesses is sometimes, though rarely, added a fourth, Suetonius, a Roman historian who, like Tacitus and Pliny, wrote in the second century. In his Life of Nero, Suetonius says "The Christians, a race of men of a new and villainous superstition, were punished." In his Life of Claudius, he says: "He [Claudius] drove the Jews, who at the instigation of Chrestus were constantly rioting, out of Rome." Of course no candid Christian will contend that Christ was inciting Jewish riots at Rome fifteen years after he was crucified at Jerusalem." (Remsburg 1909)
- I guess all those must be "self-published Usenet FAQs" too even though the Usenet didn't even exist in 1909 or 1911.--BruceGrubb (talk) 04:40, 20 August 2010 (UTC)
- It's not useful to dump self-published, non-expert views on ancient documents onto this page. First, because there's a tremendous amount of genuine scholarship published on these sources; second, because discussion of those sources is at historicity of Jesus or the individual articles devoted to those sources (e.g. Josephus on Jesus); third, because talk pages are not for general discussion of the article's subject, but for discussion of how to improve the article. Oh, by the way, the Schweitzer quote you posted above is quite nice, but doesn't really pertain to this article, does it? Could fit in at historical Jesus or Quest of the historical Jesus, if it's not there already. --Akhilleus (talk) 01:37, 20 August 2010 (UTC)
- Mind explaining just what that has to do with what you are replying to?--BruceGrubb (talk) 15:34, 19 August 2010 (UTC)
- Dumping self-published Usenet FAQs onto this page isn't much help in improving the article. --Akhilleus (talk) 14:37, 19 August 2010 (UTC)
- It's still a blob of useless decontextualized data, full of misleading simplifications and outright errors, outdated sources and I fail to see the point of posting it here. FAQs that quote sources reflecting opinions dating back over a century are guides to historical positions, not to contemporary arguments.Nishidani (talk) 09:35, 20 August 2010 (UTC)
- Actually, Oser's FAQ largely comes from Michael Martin (philosopher)'s "The Case Against Christianity" (1991). All I was showing with Friedlander and Remsburg was the information Oser presented has been presented before going back over 80 years (ie predating the internet). As for the "misleading simplifications and outright errors, outdated sources": "we do not know whether Thallus actually mentioned Jesus' crucifixion, or whether this was Africanus' interpretation of a period of darkness which Thallus had not specifically linked with Jesus." (France, R.T. The Evidence for Jesus 1986, p. 24) Is R T France recent enough for you?--BruceGrubb (talk) 12:22, 20 August 2010 (UTC)
- Not really. Virtually everything we think we know in ancient history, in the sense of knowing something to be a 'fact', is a theoretical, or, as Veyne would say, a retrodictive construction, based on a close assaying of probabilities, nothing more. Every element from Suetonius, Pliny the Younger and Tacitus has a long history of contentious exposition, in isolation, and taken together. FAQs don't tell you that, as they do not tell you that an historian, in analysing the evidence of three (or even four if one includes Josephus) sources, will keep in mind the strong probabilities that all three knew each other, were present roughly contemporaneously in the same quarter (north and south) of Asia Minor, and dealt with the same phenomenon, i.e., Christians, who were active in that area, etc. To cite one, in summary fashion, and reductively, then another, then another, is not how the historical imagination works. That's why FAQ sheets are anodynic fools' caps.Nishidani (talk) 12:42, 20 August 2010 (UTC)
- Any yet when you try to show that complexity people complain that "it is too complicated." When you get down to the basics the "third-party uninvolved sources" often presented all have problems and the two best (Josephus and Tacitus) even if they were totally genuine are so late that even they can be explained through what we would call urban legend. Comments like Paul Veyne's with badly thought out comparisons certainly don't help the pro historical Jesus side.--BruceGrubb (talk) 14:40, 20 August 2010 (UTC)
- Who cares what people think? We write from sources written by scholars who are comfortable with, delight in, complexity. I don't think you will find many specialists in Tacitus, as opposed to generalists, who doubt the genuineness of Annals.15.44. Everything from style, hostility and the survival of the manuscript through Christian scribal transmission which would have found his contextual description repugnant, argues for its genuineness, as does the fact that he, unlike many ancient historians, worked from official archives. 'Urban legends' were not grist for his mill, except perhaps in part in his treatment of Tiberius. The fact, again, that Tacitus, Pliny the Younger and Suetonius belonged to the elite, friends, and all members of a circle of that elite with formal administrative experience in Christianizing areas of Asia Minor, is what historians call strong circumstantial evidence to corroborate a general thesis. To reply to your earlier query. R. T. Frank is patently a poor witness on this since his thesis is based on a premise that real knowledge of Jesus must be based on the internal analysis of the Gospels and not on pagan sources. In this his method is diametrically opposed, incidentally, to that of a great historian like Paul Veyne, who thought pagan witness, precisely because it was beyond the 'pale' was owed more credibility than Christian sources. He summarily discounts, against the overwhelming majority of Tacitus specialists (check their doyen, Ronald Syme's, Tacitus, Clarendon Press, Oxford vol.2 (1958) pp.468-9), strong secular evidence virtually contemporary with the one of the Gospel writers (John) because he wishes to argue that only the Gospels themselves can provide us with authentic historical knowledge. In doing that, he violates a major canon of historiography (and linguistics). One trusts the specialists on technical questions, not outsiders, and evaluating this, to cite but one example, requires technical expertise that the sceptics listed do not have. Frank's judgement is 'theological', not historical. Nishidani (talk) 16:36, 20 August 2010 (UTC)
- This reads like some of the stuff you might get out of McDowell's Evidence That Demands a Verdict which looks good until you examine the information he is presenting.
- The fact is Pliny the Younger only confirms the existence of Christians and they believed in a Christ--that is it. The logic there is akin to saying since the John Frum cargo cult exists then there must have been a John Frum.
- Suetonius is so vague that it is useless, Tacitus seems to be doing the kind of silliness seen in American Shogun where B-52's are mentioned in regards to MacArthur's overseeing of Japan--one big problem--the B-52 didn't even exist as prototype until 1952 over a year after MacArthur left Japan and didn't enter into actual service until 1955. Tacitus should produce the kind of 'huh?' that talking about Secretary of the Army Robert Porter Patterson would to any scholar of US history but they use it anyhow.
- I have no idea who this R. T. Frank guy is; I am referring to R. T. France as in the country between Spain and Germany.--BruceGrubb (talk) 22:19, 20 August 2010 (UTC)
- Thanks for noting the slip. The rest of your remarks show you don't understand how history, or at least ancient history, is written. Nishidani (talk) 22:25, 20 August 2010 (UTC)
Alexander the Great, Apollonius etc
In my view, using Paul Veyne's quote will make it look like that is a typical refutation of CMT. Since it looks exactly like Veyne's throw-away dismissal has no thought behind it, it might make CMT look better than they thought to some. E4mmacro (talk) 08:11, 20 August 2010 (UTC)
- We had that with the comparison with the holocaust denial nonsense. Even comparison with Julius Caesar is not fair as the later being a head of state in the late Classical period would have mountains of contemporary evidence showing he existed. Even Alexander the Great had known (but now largely lost) written contemporary material about him and there are contemporary mosaics and coins depicting him--again far more than is for Jesus. Why not comparisons with Apollonius of Tyana or Sun Tzu? In fact, both of these would make far better comparisons with Jesus than most of the others I have seen.--BruceGrubb (talk) 15:03, 20 August 2010 (UTC)
- Sima Qian, Sun Tzu's biographer, lived several centuries after him, if he existed. Apollonius of Tyana doesn't fit either, since Paul writes within a decade, and Mark within 40 years of the assumed crucifixion, within living memory, whereas Apollonius's biographer is writing at least 120 years after Apollonius's death, when all contemporary witnesses, if he did exist, were no longer alive.
- To be strictly true, you have to say we don't know for sure when Mark wrote; it could have been closer than 40 years, but it could have been after Josephsus wrote, making it 70 years after the reported death of Jesus, when no witnesses would be expected to be alive. Since Paul never gave any biographical details or dates for Jesus's life, there was nothing for anyone to contradict, except perhaps that he had a brother named James. E4mmacro (talk) 06:40, 21 August 2010 (UTC)
- Sima Qian, Sun Tzu's biographer, lived several centuries after him, if he existed. Apollonius of Tyana doesn't fit either, since Paul writes within a decade, and Mark within 40 years of the assumed crucifixion, within living memory, whereas Apollonius's biographer is writing at least 120 years after Apollonius's death, when all contemporary witnesses, if he did exist, were no longer alive.
- You seem to ignore that major metropolitan figures are well-covered in antiquity, as one would expect, while events and people on the periphery are not. To compare Caesar and Alexander with marginal figures (from a contemporary imperial perspective) from the backblocks, where little was reported, and only that which concerned security and state administration, is to make a false comparison. Ancient history is written as reported, which means, as Veyne and many others emphasize, we known very little of what happened, and that little is skewed to the interests of literate empires. Any major history of Greece and Rome, covering the first four centuries, will name numerous figures recorded by extant sources several centuries later. The Christ of popular imaginings, the Christ of pious theology and hermeneutics, all these are demonstrable fictions, though of deep analytical interest. The historical Jesus, i.e., the basic figure we try to sift out from the huge mother-lode of lore, legend, and theology, by combing both the internal method, and external witnesses, is a historical probability, assumptional certainly, but so are hundreds of other major figures we habitually treat as major historical agents in antiquity. Try applying the same methods of austere, pyrrhic scepticism here to the wiki page account of Hillel the Elder, particularly against these words in the lead of our article
so far as is known, Jesus (Hillel the Elder) did not write anything, nor did anyone who had personal knowledge of him. There is no archeological evidence of his existence. There are no contemporaneous accounts of his life or death: no eyewitness accounts, or any other kind of first-hand record. All the accounts of Jesus come from decades or centuries later
- and you get the same result. In short, the theory treats 'Jesus' as a singularity, whereas, mutatis mutandis, if you suspend the normal methods and hermeneutics of pure historiography, he is no such thing, since a large number of revered religious figures and near contemporaries are known, and accepted as historical figures, despite their being known from sources written centuries after their death. Nishidani (talk) 19:21, 20 August 2010 (UTC)
- Actually, Apollonius of Tyana had works written about him shortly after his death but not of those works have survived. In the case of Sun Tzu you supposedly hold his actual thoughts (Art of War) in your hands--something not true of Jesus. As for Paul he give no definitive temporal markers showing that the Jesus he is talking about is a recent person. Mark's dating is tradition and could be no more historical than Columbus sailing west to prove the world was round. As Price points out using Irenaeus and his 50+ year old Jesus as an example that there was something really wonky about the Jesus timeline as late as c180 CE. About the only good thing about Irenaeus is his showing that the majority of the Gospels existed around this time.--BruceGrubb (talk) 21:39, 20 August 2010 (UTC
- If you are referring to Damis of Ninevah, we only know of that, a rumour, through the often unreliable source that is Philostratus's life, and a few Byzantine echoes. Many authorities challenge its existence. The same goes for the letters by Apollonius Hadrian is said to have collected.Nishidani (talk) 21:44, 20 August 2010 (UTC)
- 'supposedly hold'. Yes but you don't, demonstrably, since Sima Qian, his late biographer, says he served with He Lu (闔閭), which puts him around 500, yet 'Sun Tzu' mentions in that text the crossbow, which only begins to be mentioned 150 years afterwards. The conflicts internal to that text are numerous. He mentions armies that are vast arrays at a time when no local warlord or prince could muster more than a few thousand. It's all like the Bible's battles. etc.
- Paul gives no definitive temporal markers. He talks of Christ 'crucified', and that choice of language and reference is echoed in pagan writers, such as Tacitus (at least Tacitus' s Latin supplicio adfectus strongly lends itself to that, under Pontius Pilate).
- In sum, I don't think you understand what historical method consists in. It is not taking evidence piece by piece, discussing each item separately. No one does that. The historical method consists of taking all of the evidence, and all analyses of each item in the congeries of evidence, and weighing each piece against the others, in order to come up with a synthesis of likelihood. You rarely have truth in history, you have, as Thucycides argues, likelihood as often as not. I'd have no problems with proof Christ didn't exist, personally. What I find odd, as a pagan, watching Christians, ex-Christians, and atheists battling this out, is that their arguments do not employ generic historical reasoning, but invent specific protocols to prove or disprove something that cannot be proved either way. Historians are less uncomfortable with the fact that all our knowledge of the past is, as here, approximate, based on probabilities.Nishidani (talk) 22:10, 20 August 2010 (UTC)
- Actually, Apollonius of Tyana had works written about him shortly after his death but not of those works have survived. In the case of Sun Tzu you supposedly hold his actual thoughts (Art of War) in your hands--something not true of Jesus. As for Paul he give no definitive temporal markers showing that the Jesus he is talking about is a recent person. Mark's dating is tradition and could be no more historical than Columbus sailing west to prove the world was round. As Price points out using Irenaeus and his 50+ year old Jesus as an example that there was something really wonky about the Jesus timeline as late as c180 CE. About the only good thing about Irenaeus is his showing that the majority of the Gospels existed around this time.--BruceGrubb (talk) 21:39, 20 August 2010 (UTC
- The followers of Spartacus were crucified so that in itself is not a temporal marker. Also as pointed out by other scholars crucifixion was reserved for crimes against Rome and slaves and but the Gospel account portrays Jesus being tried for blasphemy a crime Rome could have cared less about. As pointed out by others the whole crucifixion account has problems from medical and social political standpoints--death by crucifixion took days not hours and a common aftermath was to leave the body up for the scavengers. So why the exceptions in this particular case and since it was so unusual why no noting by contemporary sources?
- Again you repeat the basic methodological error. You treat each datum as a decontextualised item, as if the fragmentary 'disiecta membra' of the mosaic of history were each to be played with, tessera by tessera, without imagining that they are residues of an original whole.
- Tiberio imperante per procuratorem Pontium Pilatum supplicio adfectus erat, consists of two temporal markers, Tiberius being generic, Pontius Pilate being specific, and also fixing the area where the presumed execution took place. A third temporal marker is that he is dealing with events, dated to 64 CE, this from an annalistic historian who used official reports and the Senate archives. Χριστὸν ἑσταυρωμένον ('Christ put to the pale/crucified':Paul,Corinthians1.23) occurs in a text roughly 25 years after the assumed execution. Two reports dated to within a decade of one another (55CE-64CE), though the second is only registered by someone writing 60 years further on. Tacitus, Suetonius, and Pliny the Younger knew each other, had to deal with Christians and wrote at the same time. The conjuncture of independent witnesses counts for much in history, much as the question of who Socrates was depends on assessing the conflicting evidence from Aristophanes' play The Clouds, from Xenophon's account and Plato's theatrical reinvention of him in the dialogues. It is not easy to reconcile those three sources, but together they are accepted as indirect historical evidence, as are Tacitus, Suetonius and Pliny jr.
- This and other pagan evidence contemporary with them, i.e., Lucian's De Morte Peregrini, interwoven with what the imperial chroniclers just glance at, constitute reasonable 'evidence'. As I pointed out with the example, one of hundreds, from Hillel the Elder, much of ancient history affirms the existence of people for which the evidence is scarce, oral, and registered hundreds of years after the event, often only by true believers.
- With regards to the Historical method as pointed out by Charlton in his 1981 "Archaeology, Ethnohistory, and Ethnology: Interpretive Interfaces" Advances in Archaeological Method and Theory. Vol. 4 pg 153 quoting Hawkins (1964) "Historical accounts are in no sense empirical data" and yet we seem to see a lot of this.
- Veyne and most other historians would underwrite the cliché.
- Robert L. Schuyler (1977) "The Spoken Word, the Written Word, Observered Behavior and Preserved Behavior; the Contexts Available to the Archaeologist" in Historical Archaeology: A Guide to Substantive and Theoretical Contributions Vol 10, No. 2 pg 347-360 gave views on how the problems that archaeological, documentary, oral, and enthographical data required the changing of methodology to suit what each was able to tell you eticly and emicly. Don't seem to see much of that here either.
- You corrected me on Frank = France. I will return the courtesy and correct the Freudian lapsus or metathesis in your writing 'enthographical' (above and below)for 'ethnographical'. 'Enthographical' to a classicist, sounds like an error for 'entheo-graphical', which means writing about people possessed by a god or spirit.
- When researching the Native American epidemics during the contact period I was struck by how 'left hand doesn't not know what right is doing' the literature was with things like disease methodology and ethnographic evaluation of documents out to lunch. I get much the same feeling regarding ethnohistory reading through the historical Jesus material. There are many claims that would fall under historical anthropology regarding what the Jews and Romans would have done but the historical method seems ill-suited to formulating enthohistoric theories. Some of it reads like modern mind in the ancient world with little to no consideration of the different mindset of the time.--BruceGrubb (talk) 00:20, 21 August 2010 (UTC)
- Of course. The first rule in any anthropological exercise is to master the 'native' language and culture, which most discussants and writers do not trouble themselves to do. I've read most of these threads as an example of American culture's political fixation on religion, which, to a European, seems quite bizarre. I can understand where American sceptics are coming from sociologically, i.e., they are reacting to the diffuse evangelical cults that proliferate and elbow their way into most spheres of public discourse. But I don't think they, or the Hitchens of this world who take this dispute publicly, have the foggiest notion of what life, belief and culture was in Ist century Palestine. They are talking about a modern neurotic refraction of Pauline theology. As to ethnomethodology and history, look at Keith Windshuttle, who made a minor stir for a while because, in recounting the frontier wars, he only accepts documents from the colonizer of a people that lacked literacy, but retained a strong oral culture. The voiceless thus disappear from the sanguinary record, whitewashing the conquest. Rome was the colonizer of a people in Palestine that had high literacy, except for that stratum, the poor, which generated the dissident sect of Judaism that later became known as Christianity. All sources, those close to local authority and those written by bureaucrats of the imperial power, were hostile to it. They customarily practiced genocide, and ethnic cleansing. When the documents of those who were washed over by the tsunami of praetorian tactics were written, they were written in shoddy provincial Greek (as Charles Bradlaugh put called that vernacular), full of legends, tales, and folklore. But while historical anthropologists are very careful about the circumstances of power governing the production of documents in their chosen period, most of the arguments I see here are blithely disattentive to such nuances, or to the strong impression Paul's epistles give that he (a man very well connected to both hostile persecutive parties)is very keen to rig up a version that theologizes so obsessively, it is clear he wishes to decontextualize whatever historicity resides in these legends and traditions, in order to frogmarch the dissidents towards an apolitical, evangelical, pro-Roman quietude. etc.Nishidani (talk) 10:52, 21 August 2010 (UTC)
- This is seriously ridiculous. Wikipedia is not an internet forum. If Bruce Grubb wants to debate the evidence for Jesus's historical existence, this is not the place to do it. At least Noloop generally confines his tendentiousness to actually arguing about what should be in the article. john k (talk) 03:52, 21 August 2010 (UTC)
- The point you seem to have missed is back when we had an arguments section ([[4]]) all the above was in the article so this is about information the article once had that has gotten lost in the successive edits. We have next to nothing about what the various authors for the Christ Myth theory said about these third party sources--did they dismiss them as forgeries out of hand, did they point out other interpretations that made their support less viable, or a mixture of these.--BruceGrubb (talk) 04:41, 21 August 2010 (UTC)
- That is not what you were talking about at all. If you want to talk about changes to the article, talk about changes to the article. Dumping paragraphs of text about why the theory is plausible is not helpful; it just encourages debate about the merits of the theory, rather than about the proper state of the article. john k (talk) 16:35, 21 August 2010 (UTC)
- The point you seem to have missed is back when we had an arguments section ([[4]]) all the above was in the article so this is about information the article once had that has gotten lost in the successive edits. We have next to nothing about what the various authors for the Christ Myth theory said about these third party sources--did they dismiss them as forgeries out of hand, did they point out other interpretations that made their support less viable, or a mixture of these.--BruceGrubb (talk) 04:41, 21 August 2010 (UTC)
- This is seriously ridiculous. Wikipedia is not an internet forum. If Bruce Grubb wants to debate the evidence for Jesus's historical existence, this is not the place to do it. At least Noloop generally confines his tendentiousness to actually arguing about what should be in the article. john k (talk) 03:52, 21 August 2010 (UTC)
Jesus! How many of the "Jesus camp" (loosely speaking) editors on these articles are admins? Off the top of my head: Andrew, Akhilleus, Slrubenstein, john k, John Carter. Noloop (talk) 03:39, 26 August 2010 (UTC)
What the article is about
Bruce, you seem to think the article is about explaining the Christ Myth theory. The editors have decided the purpose of the artricle is to make sure the reader knows it is a ridiculaous theory in all its forms. But good luck, anyway. E4mmacro (talk) 06:49, 21 August 2010 (UTC)
- Bruce, rather, seems to think that the talk page is about arguing over the validity of the Christ Myth theory. john k (talk) 16:35, 21 August 2010 (UTC)
- E4mmacro, this article should be about explaining the Christ Myth theory not regurgitating out poorly thought out dismissive strawman statements like Paul Veyne's. As for "ridiculous theory in all its forms" even that is not true as there are definitions that that would include ideas that are not off in the ozone. The idea that there was some sort of messiah myth floating around that a historical 1st century teacher was plugged into because he had the same name as the preexisting mythical messiah to form what is essentially a composite character which by definition wouldn't be historical is not "ridiculous"
- Another thing to remember many of the ideas used by Christ Myth theory are also used by more mainstream authors. Clinton Bennett in In search of Jesus: insider and outsider images Page 206 shows that both Carl Gustav Jung and Joseph Campbell held there were archtypes behind all hero stories. Regarding Joseph Campbell Bennett states "His The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) advanced the theory that a single myth stands behind the stories of Krishna, Buddha, Apollonius of Tyana, Jesus and other hero stories." Note this is not the same as saying these men didn't exist but it does fit Walsh's definition that for the Christ Myth theory the myth was first.
- As for defending it which version?
- Jesus was an entirely fictional or mythological character created by the Early Christan community
- As for defending it which version?
- Jesus started out as a myth with Historical trappings added later (Walsh) including an obscure historical teacher (Dodd)
- Jesus was historical but lived c100 BCE (Price, Robert M. "Jesus at the Vanishing Point" in James K. Beilby & Paul Rhodes Eddy (eds.) The Historical Jesus: Five Views. InterVarsity, 2009, p. 65)
- The Gospel Jesus is in essence a composite character and therefore non historical by definition.(Price, Robert M. (2000) Deconstructing Jesus Prometheus Books, pg 85)
- There is not enough to show Jesus existed (Jesus Agnosticism)(Eddy, Paul R. and Boyd, Gregory A. The Jesus Legend. Baker Academic, 2007. pg 24-25)
- or
- The Gospel Jesus didn't exist (Doherty)
- All these have been used as definitions for Christ Myth theory or one of its supposed synonyms. Are they all equally off the rails? I think not.--BruceGrubb (talk) 09:33, 22 August 2010 (UTC)
Could references be specific?
Additionally, biblical scholars believes (sic) that relatively early material regarding the historical Jesus is found in the Gospel According to John.[83]'
- Follow the link read the source, and you find an extensive and intensive discussion of the meaning of the word γράφειν in the Greek of St.John. Bauckham is challenging an interpretation by J.H.Bernard and Gottlob Schrenk, which he admits 'many scholars', indeed 'scholar after scholar', among them one of the greatest Johannine experts, follow, in his view 'uncritically', a view which actually posits the ostensible author had a considerably less direct relation to the writing of that text that would appear to be the case.
- One author is used to obtain the generalization 'biblical scholars'. The text itself states that many biblical scholars disagree with his position.
- The sentence startles an outsider reader's eye. The Gospel of St. John is generally regarded as the most unreliable source for information about the historical Jesus, and the impression is disingenuously given here that the contrary is the case, and gathers in the general consensus of historians.
- This is one example of many, and reason to think that Noloop has a point, which I would rephrase this way. A historical issue should be preferentially or discretionally sourced to works written specifically on historical issues as historical issues, and not from works with a predominantly theological-hermeneutic approach, as is for example the otherwise eminently qualified Richard Bauckham's book above. Bauckham's reasoning in that chapter evolves only to buttress a theological position based on non-historical premises.
- This kind of editing is an example of the tendentious use of otherwise good RS material to create the impression that the article itself deals with a theory neutral historians regard as untenable.
Nishidani (talk) 17:11, 21 August 2010 (UTC)
- I'm going to take this sentence out; not only is Bauckham's position highly controversial, but the material in question doesn't deal specifically with the Christ myth theory. If this "counterarguments" section is going to be in the article (personally, I don't think it should be), it should be limited to authors who have directly addressed the CMT. --Akhilleus (talk) 18:04, 21 August 2010 (UTC)
(2)
one or more individuals who actually existed, but that they were not in any sense the founder of Christianity
- Doesn't anyone have a feeling that this is grammatically dubious, and stylistically cleft-handed?Nishidani (talk) 10:03, 24 August 2010 (UTC)
- I quite like it as a workaround. What's meant is that the composite was not in any sense the founder, but I think whoever wrote it was trying to avoid the word "composite," because not everyone argues that. SlimVirgin talk|contribs 12:50, 24 August 2010 (UTC)
- Then
one or more individuals who actually existed, but that none of them was in any sense the founder of Christianity
- (_E=mc2_) aka Nishidani (talk) 17:02, 24 August 2010 (UTC)
- That's better simply on grammatical grounds. I take SlimVirgin's point that "they" can hint at an idea that a composite figure was not the founder (how could one be, anyway?), but I doubt this interpretation will occur to anyone who hasn't been following this talkpage in depth. So I'm instituting Nishidani's change; if it's important that the article deal with the "composite" point, it should do so directly rather than by implication. --Akhilleus (talk) 18:20, 24 August 2010 (UTC)
- That's fine with me. SlimVirgin talk|contribs 19:18, 24 August 2010 (UTC)
- We had composite character in the lead in a long time ago [5] but it got lost in the shuffle of updates. That definition read as follows:
- The Jesus myth hypothesis (also referred to as the Jesus myth theory, the Jesus myth, or the Christ myth) brings the historical existence of Jesus into question. It ranges from the idea that figure of Jesus of Nazareth is not a historical figure, but an entirely fictional construct of various forms of ancient mythology, through the idea that he is a composite character created through the transfers from and embellishments on the life of an earlier religious teacher who lived sometime during the 1st or 2nd century BCE, ending with the idea that the Gospel Jesus has had so much added that no details regarding an actual historical person can be determined.
- This accurately and directly deals with Drews, going through Mead, to Price. Think this with a little rewording could be reused?--BruceGrubb (talk) 01:36, 25 August 2010 (UTC)
- That's fine with me. SlimVirgin talk|contribs 19:18, 24 August 2010 (UTC)
- That's better simply on grammatical grounds. I take SlimVirgin's point that "they" can hint at an idea that a composite figure was not the founder (how could one be, anyway?), but I doubt this interpretation will occur to anyone who hasn't been following this talkpage in depth. So I'm instituting Nishidani's change; if it's important that the article deal with the "composite" point, it should do so directly rather than by implication. --Akhilleus (talk) 18:20, 24 August 2010 (UTC)
- I quite like it as a workaround. What's meant is that the composite was not in any sense the founder, but I think whoever wrote it was trying to avoid the word "composite," because not everyone argues that. SlimVirgin talk|contribs 12:50, 24 August 2010 (UTC)
Is O'Hair a "New" Atheist?
Why is Madalyn Murray O'Hair included in the section on New Atheism? The latter is (according to our article's definition) a post-9/11 phenomenon, O'Hair died in 1995. Gabbe (talk) 09:33, 23 August 2010 (UTC)
- I wasn't keen on that either and was thinking of removing it, along with one of the other names. It was originally added before the New Atheism title, which accounts for that discrepancy, but I think it's still inappropriate as part of a list of atheists who've mentioned that Jesus might not exist—but so what? SlimVirgin talk|contribs 09:44, 23 August 2010 (UTC)
- O'Hair definitely isn't a New Atheist. I don't really understand why she and Dan Barker are mentioned in the New Atheism section, because as far as I can see from the citations they've only mentioned in passing that Jesus might not have been historical. I think they should be removed unless it turns out that they've written/commented extensively on this subject. --Akhilleus (talk) 18:57, 23 August 2010 (UTC)
- Ditto.Nishidani (talk) 19:15, 23 August 2010 (UTC)
- Removed. SlimVirgin talk|contribs 19:30, 23 August 2010 (UTC)
- On the "written/commented extensively on this subject" would the chapter "Jesus: History or Myth" in Dan Barker's Losing Faith in Faith (1992) qualify? It does show that Barker isn't a New Atheist either as his conversion happened long before 2001.--BruceGrubb (talk) 04:16, 24 August 2010 (UTC)
- Removed. SlimVirgin talk|contribs 19:30, 23 August 2010 (UTC)
- Ditto.Nishidani (talk) 19:15, 23 August 2010 (UTC)
- O'Hair definitely isn't a New Atheist. I don't really understand why she and Dan Barker are mentioned in the New Atheism section, because as far as I can see from the citations they've only mentioned in passing that Jesus might not have been historical. I think they should be removed unless it turns out that they've written/commented extensively on this subject. --Akhilleus (talk) 18:57, 23 August 2010 (UTC)
It would seem to me that the above-named journal would be an excellent source for material regarding this subject. I can't address myself whether it appears to take one side or another as a matter of course, but it seems to me that it would be likely to at least discuss these theories with some degree of regularity. WorldCat here indicates that there seem to be quite a few copies available, if anyone is interested. John Carter (talk) 17:10, 25 August 2010 (UTC)
- Actually, I have seen no articles in this journal that discuss the CMT in any depth, even superficially. I have online access, and have skimmed many of the issues to see if there's anything relevant, and I didn't find anything. This doesn't surprise me, because the CMT is simply not something that's discussed much in academia. This is more evidence to what we already know is the case—that the vast majority of scholars who study early Christianity regard Jesus' existence as a historical fact. --Akhilleus (talk) 19:07, 25 August 2010 (UTC)
- You're probably right then. Thanks for checking. John Carter (talk) 19:15, 25 August 2010 (UTC)
Alvar Ellegard in the lead
Why is this sentence:
Alvar Ellegård argues that theologians have failed to question Jesus's existence because of a lack of communication between them and other scholars, causing some of the basic assumptions of Christianity to remain insulated from general scholarly debate.
in the lead? CMT is a theory held by a tiny minority of Biblical scholars. Ellegard, a CMT advocate, argues that it is because of a lack of communication. Yet, other biblical scholars would argue it is because there is more than sufficient evidence. Furthermore, Ellegards' expertise is in the linguistics of English. Flash 19:20, 25 August 2010 (UTC)
- OK. I agree that the content of this article, considering it is about a fringe theory, should reflect the views of that fringe theory. However, I think that the article should still, at least in the lead, indicate that it is about a fringe theory. Putting a fringe theory explanation of why a fringe theory is counted as a fringe theory by the majority of academia the majority of academia is to my eyes going a little far. This is particular true considering that it hasn't apparently received any explicit support within the CMT fringe advocates. While the content does I think maybe belong in the article, placing it before the majority opinion which rejects the theory is probably unwarranted. And, considering it is the apparently unsupported opinion of a single person, specialist or not, I think it could more reasonably be placed in a later section. John Carter (talk) 19:32, 25 August 2010 (UTC)
- I agree that the Christ Myth Theory is fringe but you also have people like Doherty defining it as being the Gospel Jesus didn't exist and vague or poorly worded definitions that can be read as implying it is more mainstream then it is. Take Bromiley's "This view states that the story of Jesus is a piece of mythology, possessing no more substantial claims to historical fact than the old Greek or Norse stories of gods and heroes,..." for example. You can point to the American Tall Tales and Dime novels as examples of stories with people who really lived as a main character but that never really happened. The problem is saying a story of someone is not real is not the same as saying the person the story is about is not real. Also there is some indication that some of the old Greek or Norse hero stories could be mythologizing real people and real events. So this definition is more confusing then informative.--BruceGrubb (talk) 04:29, 26 August 2010 (UTC)
- I continue to support the inclusion of the Ellegard point in the lead. It offers a meta perspective about the nature of the scholarly debate in this field. It may explain why the majority of scholars seem to support one viewpoint, and as this article is about the minority view, it's appropriate to include an observation about why it might be in the minority. SlimVirgin talk|contribs 18:55, 26 August 2010 (UTC)
The introduction presents what the overwhelming consensus of the scholarly community is. Why do you feel need to present the argument of a CMT advocate, before saying what the consensus is? Doing so suggests to the reader that the overwhelming consensus is not credible.
Just state the facts. We don't need to present a CMT advocate excusing it. Flash 19:31, 26 August 2010 (UTC)
- This article is about CMT, and there are precious few facts here, just opinions. If we cannot present the views of CMTers in this article, then where? SlimVirgin talk|contribs 19:59, 26 August 2010 (UTC)
- The article being on CMT is not an excuse for it being biased towards it. The statement you entered distorts the fact and begs the question of whether the consensus is credible. Flash 20:18, 26 August 2010 (UTC)
- Considering there isn't even consensus on just what the CMT even is (unless it is in reference to Drew's book of that name and even there things are wonky in places) there is already begging the question that there is some form of uniform CMT that every definition that we have seen can fit under. So far after some three years of waiting ever since I threw that gauntlet down we haven't seen anything even remote like--even from an unreliable source.--BruceGrubb (talk) 08:25, 27 August 2010 (UTC)
- It is very obvious that there is no "overwhelming consensus of the scholarly community," since the vast majority of sources used in all these article are presumed to be a representative sampling of the scholarly community. The vast majority of sources in these articles are Christian theologians or priests, and popular books. Noloop (talk) 20:17, 26 August 2010 (UTC)
- Flash, this article can't reflect religious views. It is purely about history and scholarship, and the ways in which the issue of Jesus has been approached. So a discussion of that approach is entirely appropriate for the lead. If you want to find another such meta comment from another scholar to balance it ( someone addressing Ellegard's point, for example, and if you read the paper you'll see there might be something from one of the other commentators), that would be fine. SlimVirgin talk|contribs 20:24, 26 August 2010 (UTC)
- I didn't say anything about "religious views" nor did I suggest that it is not about history and scholarship. The statement, which excuses a statement of fact from a CMT perspective is POV. You don't see arguments excusing the fact that there are few first century sources relating to Jesus, do you? Yet you want the article to do it for the consensus statement. Flash 20:29, 26 August 2010 (UTC)
ReaverFlash, previous discussion on Ellergard, as promised previously. [6]. You have now been reverted by two people, recommend you pause for a moment and read previous thread. Elen of the Roads (talk) 20:33, 26 August 2010 (UTC)
- Flash, I don't know what you mean by excusing a statement of fact. SlimVirgin talk|contribs 20:37, 26 August 2010 (UTC)
- Excusing a statement of fact means someone explaining away a fact is so. For example, fact is there are few first century sources relating to Jesus. Excusing the fact would be presenting the argument, "People back then didn't record everything, and it is remarkable that we even have multiple sources, etc, etc." Flash 20:44, 26 August 2010 (UTC)
Flash, you have violated WP:3RR. PeaceLoveHarmony (talk) 20:39, 26 August 2010 (UTC)
- Flash, Brief summary of previous discussion as it seems you'd rather edit war than read it - we pooled every scrap of evidence we could find that there was once one (not two or more) living man who provided the basis for the accounts in the Gospels - even if he never did or said those things. We came up with pretty much nothing - there is no evidence. We examined the approach to other "legendary" religious and cultural leaders, Buddha, Confucious, guy who founded Taoism etc, and noted that scholars in both east and west were universal in their willingness to concede that there was no evidence that these individuals existed, and to explore the possibility that they were mythical figureheads. While (as you'll see from the discussion) there was not universal agreement to this approach, there was an acceptance that Ellergard had something to say that addressed this.Elen of the Roads (talk) 20:48, 26 August 2010 (UTC)
- How is that relevant to what should be included in the article? I fail to see how what you said relates to the article. Flash 20:57, 26 August 2010 (UTC)
- ReaverFlash, unless you read some of the archives, you won't actually have much idea what relates to this article, and why. A lot of discussion has gone on. Elen of the Roads (talk) 21:57, 26 August 2010 (UTC)
- I've read the previous section on the sentence. The sentence was only added by SlimVirgin very recently. Flash 22:03, 26 August 2010 (UTC)
- Actually it was added on 1 August, after a very substantial debate the link to which I have provided you with once already, and has remained in the article despite the discussion on the development of the article continuing pretty much unabated from that point. There is no consensus to remove it. I suggest you stop, think, and come back with a really good case for removal that will sway us all and overturn the existing consensus. In this article, it can be done. Elen of the Roads (talk) 22:22, 26 August 2010 (UTC)
- I've read the previous section on the sentence. The sentence was only added by SlimVirgin very recently. Flash 22:03, 26 August 2010 (UTC)
- ReaverFlash, unless you read some of the archives, you won't actually have much idea what relates to this article, and why. A lot of discussion has gone on. Elen of the Roads (talk) 21:57, 26 August 2010 (UTC)
- How is that relevant to what should be included in the article? I fail to see how what you said relates to the article. Flash 20:57, 26 August 2010 (UTC)
I've stated the reason why it should be removed. It distorts the fact and begs the question of whether the consensus position presented is not credible. Flash 22:27, 26 August 2010 (UTC)
- Have you actually bothered to read the thread that I gave you the link to? You would not think such a shallow statement would convince anyone if you had. Far from distorting the fact, it presents one of the foci of the matter at hand. Elen of the Roads (talk) 23:06, 26 August 2010 (UTC)
- You maintaining that I lied about reading a few paragraphs is extremely counter-productive. Furthermore you completely ignored my point, which is that the sentence begs the question of whether the consensus position is credible. Flash 23:32, 26 August 2010 (UTC)
Edit warring is not a useful way to solve this problem.
That said, I don't support having the Ellegard sentence in the lead, and I don't think there was a good consensus for having it there—more like, people weren't willing to fight to get it out. Which is a kind of consensus, but not a good one. I do think that the material would be fine in the body of the article. In other words, I agree with what John Carter said above. And I'm really surprised to see that so many people here are willing to disregard the academic consensus that the gospels and other NT material provide evidence for the historical Jesus, and are so quick to label this a religious position. --Akhilleus (talk) 00:35, 27 August 2010 (UTC)
- This article is about dissatisfaction with the so-called academic consensus. So, it is very natural for the reasons for that dissatisfaction to be presented in the lead. Also, if the sourcing in these Jesus articles is truly representative, then the consensus only exists among Christian academics.
- On a related note, I 'd like to add the following to that paragraph: "Historian Joseph Hoffman questions whether there has been a "methodologically agnostic approach" to the historical existence of Jesus." [7] Please discuss with an open mind. thanks. Noloop (talk) 05:12, 27 August 2010 (UTC)
"Christian theologian"
In this edit, Noloop characterizes R. Joseph Hoffmann as a "historian" and Graham Stanton as a "Christian theologian." I'd appreciate some explanation of the difference in characterization, since Hoffman has an M.T.S. from Harvard and a Th.M. from Harvard Div School, and a D.Phil. in Theology (I think) from Oxford. Why not describe Hoffman as a Christian theologian, since his degrees are all in theology and his specialty is early Christianity? On the other hand, why exactly characterize Stanton as a "Christian theologian"? The point may be moot, since the edit was reverted, but since this matter might come up again some clarification of the reasoning behind characterizing Hoffman and Stanton differently might help. --Akhilleus (talk) 00:26, 27 August 2010 (UTC)
- I described Hoffman as a historian because that's how the source described him. I didn't know about his other degrees. I have no objection to adding them, although there is no question of a Christian bias in his stance. He is emphasizing a need for more agnosticism. Noloop (talk) 05:06, 27 August 2010 (UTC)
- So you would object to describing him as a Christian theologian? Why is it that with Hoffmann, there is no question of a Christian bias? I can find you plenty of statements by Christians (not to mention people of other faiths, or none at all) that say that there is a need for objective criteria to assess the historical evidence of the NT. Does this free them from questions of Christian bias? --Akhilleus (talk) 13:45, 27 August 2010 (UTC)
- Actually, I am reading what you say closely. Perhaps I'm overinterpreting it; but in your first response above you said you had no objection to adding his degrees. That's not the same thing as saying that he's a Christian theologian, unless you believe that every person with an MTS/Th.M. or D.Phil. in theology is a Christian theologian. The phrase "Christian theologian" is somewhat ambiguous; it could either mean someone who studies the theology of Christianity from a historical standpoint, with no particular faith perspective; or it could mean someone who studies the theology of Christianity and attempts to defend and propagate it. You generally seem to mean the latter when you speak of theologians. --Akhilleus (talk) 18:27, 27 August 2010 (UTC)
- Also, in at least, admittedly online, university here, it is clearly possible to get a masters degree in theology in a subject which, actually, has little or anything to do directly with Christianity. John Carter (talk) 19:30, 27 August 2010 (UTC)
- Global Ministries University is "accredited" by the Accrediting Commission International which itself is not recognized by either Council for Higher Education Accreditation (C.H.E.A.) or the United States Department of Education making this accreditation meaningless. If that wasn't enough to throw out this example Quackwatch, Walston's Guide to Christian Distance Learning By Rick Walston pg 87 and several others indicate that Accrediting Commission International is simply the accreditation mill International Accrediting Commission with a name change and in a neighboring state after the Attorney General of Missouri shut IAC down. Small wonder the theology degree is wonky.--BruceGrubb (talk) 20:24, 27 August 2010 (UTC)
- Also, in at least, admittedly online, university here, it is clearly possible to get a masters degree in theology in a subject which, actually, has little or anything to do directly with Christianity. John Carter (talk) 19:30, 27 August 2010 (UTC)
- Actually, I am reading what you say closely. Perhaps I'm overinterpreting it; but in your first response above you said you had no objection to adding his degrees. That's not the same thing as saying that he's a Christian theologian, unless you believe that every person with an MTS/Th.M. or D.Phil. in theology is a Christian theologian. The phrase "Christian theologian" is somewhat ambiguous; it could either mean someone who studies the theology of Christianity from a historical standpoint, with no particular faith perspective; or it could mean someone who studies the theology of Christianity and attempts to defend and propagate it. You generally seem to mean the latter when you speak of theologians. --Akhilleus (talk) 18:27, 27 August 2010 (UTC)