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Eric Smearman
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 02 September 2006
Location: United States
Posts: 5824
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| Posted: 04 February 2013 at 5:49pm | IP Logged | 1
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That passage from HITCHIKER'S GUIDE is a favorite. Made me laugh
out loud as it shook up my belief system.
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Robert White
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 16 April 2004
Location: United States
Posts: 4560
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| Posted: 04 February 2013 at 7:58pm | IP Logged | 2
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I think it's important to be clear on the fact that the Bible, while at its core a mythology, is still the most important work of literature, for good or ill, in the western world, if not the world itself. It's also an interesting work of art and pseudo-history.
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Lars Johansson
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 04 June 2004
Location: Sweden
Posts: 6113
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| Posted: 05 February 2013 at 3:33am | IP Logged | 3
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I don't believe that, Robert. In Sweden the Bible was almost forgotten. There are two ways to kill the Bible as I see it, neither I like as it was performed, but the harsh way is by the Communists, and the moderate way is social democratic. They happened almost at the same time in different countries and of course the Communistsc countires didn't do very well. But, if you can live without the Bible that easily (the problems were not that it was mass murderer Stalin, the Communistic dogma that didn't work etc), that in a few years it is forgotten, why should it be an important piece of art? Then you should have some astrology, blood letting, depanning (threepanning or what it's called, opening skull) at school as well.
Edited by Lars Johansson on 05 February 2013 at 3:57am
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John Byrne
Grumpy Old Guy
Joined: 11 May 2005
Posts: 133334
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| Posted: 05 February 2013 at 5:59am | IP Logged | 4
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I think it's important to be clear on the fact that the Bible, while at its core a mythology, is still the most important work of literature, for good or ill, in the western world, if not the world itself.•• Undeniable. The problem arises from the number of people who cannot recognize that the core of the Bible is mythology. The other night I caught a few minutes of the documentary series MANKIND. Where I landed in the episode, they happened to be talking about Jesus, and referred to how much influence and impact was created in the World by this man who died 2000 years ago. I found this troubling, as other segments of the series I have seen seem to be based as much as possible on fact, while there was nothing in this reference to Jesus that indicated his existence is anything BUT "fact". He was presented as a historical certainty, alongside other well-documented figures. That's how Christianity "wins". Most people, even non-believers, accept Jesus as a historical personage, even tho there is ABSOLUTELY NO RELIABLE EVIDENCE to support this position.
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David Ferguson
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 17 March 2007
Location: Ireland
Posts: 6782
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| Posted: 05 February 2013 at 6:29am | IP Logged | 5
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And those Roman guys were pretty good with recording that kind of stuff so you'd think there would be something.
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John Byrne
Grumpy Old Guy
Joined: 11 May 2005
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| Posted: 05 February 2013 at 7:01am | IP Logged | 6
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And those Roman guys were pretty good with recording that kind of stuff so you'd think there would be something.•• Especially given the events reported in the life of Jesus which, it seems, would have had major historical impact. Even aside from the fact that his life allegedly intersects with that of Pontius Pilate, who is fairly well documented, there is the matter of Matthew's "Massacre of the Innocents", an act of catastrophic depravity that is not mentioned even in the other three Gospels! Even Josephus, who dealt with the life of Herod in some detail, and whose writings were subject to later editorializing by Christian scribes, makes no mention of this event.
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Michael Penn
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 12 April 2006
Location: United States
Posts: 12717
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| Posted: 05 February 2013 at 7:16am | IP Logged | 7
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Even if Jesus' bare existence is judged highly probable by a majority of historians, that alone hardly substantiates details about his life as depicted variously, often to the point of irreconcilable contradiction, in the Gospels.
Last night I watched an episode of the PBS-BBC series "Shakespeare Uncovered," this one dealing with the comedies, and the narrator discussed the prevalence of twins in the plays, even one losing the other, albeit temporarily -- jumping immediately to the fact of Shakespeare (or Shakspere, as you will [pun]) had had twins, one of which suffered the loss of the other, and extrapolating theories of art imitating life therefrom. Of course, this fellow did certainly exist, and even without debating his authorship, to speak almost only of his twins as the basis of twins in many and sundry plays so ignores classic comedic tropes of twins, mistaken identities, farce, slapstick, word play, etc etc etc, that the analysis offered -- even assuming it is valid -- is really virtually useless.
What's done with Jesus is like that but far, far worse!
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John Byrne
Grumpy Old Guy
Joined: 11 May 2005
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| Posted: 05 February 2013 at 7:46am | IP Logged | 8
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Last night I watched an episode of the PBS-BBC series "Shakespeare Uncovered," this one dealing with the comedies, and the narrator discussed the prevalence of twins in the plays, even one losing the other, albeit temporarily -- jumping immediately to the fact of Shakespeare (or Shakspere, as you will [pun]) had had twins, one of which suffered the loss of the other, and extrapolating theories of art imitating life therefrom. Of course, this fellow did certainly exist, and even without debating his authorship, to speak almost only of his twins as the basis of twins in many and sundry plays so ignores classic comedic tropes of twins, mistaken identities, farce, slapstick, word play, etc etc etc, that the analysis offered -- even assuming it is valid -- is really virtually useless.•• To drift for a moment, the Plays don't really deal with twins as often as it might seem. There is a false impression created by the fact that "The Comedy of Errors" features TWO sets of identical twins. That the Stratford Man had twins has set his supporters on quests for anything resembling "twinnage" in the works, often stretching the definition to the breaking point. (Seriously, Hamlet counts as twins because he is sometimes "of two minds"? Yeesh!)
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Michael Penn
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 12 April 2006
Location: United States
Posts: 12717
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| Posted: 05 February 2013 at 8:02am | IP Logged | 9
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The episode focused mostly on "Twelfth Night," but no matter -- the interpretation it offered to, no, hammered on the viewer's head was really just too much.
One fact becomes the speculative basis of a grand theory that ignores virtually every other demonstrable contextual reality.
Jesus Mythmaking 101.
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Doug Campbell
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Joined: 29 March 2008
Location: United States
Posts: 367
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| Posted: 05 February 2013 at 9:22am | IP Logged | 10
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Oddly enough, I had been thinking that some of the points raised here were somewhat similar to the the Shakespeare discussion and had been considering a quick post.
As a skeptic and atheist, I usually find myself arguing against the historicity of Jesus as depicted in the Christian literature, but I think some of the statements here go a bit too far, particularly JB's assertion that there is absolutely no reliable evidence supporting Jesus as a historical person.
While I certainly don't believe the evidence even remotely establishes Jesus as a miracle-worker, the messiah, God incarnate or any other such nonsense, it certainly does make a fairly strong argument for his existence as an apocalypticist Jewish preacher who was crucified.
Granted, most of the documents which survive are polemical arguments for Jesus' divine status written by later Christians, but that doesn't mean that everything they say can automatically be dismissed because of bias. After all, biased documents sometimes tell truth even as they passionately argue for a particular interpretation. And we've got numerous different lines of Christian evidence here: Paul's letters, the Q source, and the gospels according to Mark, Thomas, and John, all of which are independent, and yet all of which present a similar view of the broad outlines of Jesus' career, and which locate him in the specific historical context of first century Judea.
And indeed, why would anyone invent the story of Jesus' career to begin with? A crucified prophet makes very little sense from either a Jewish or Roman perspective, and actually would have made Christianity look a bit silly to both of those particular audiences. Why would anyone want to follow someone who seemed to be such a tremendous failure, a blasphemer and a rebel? I think that actually makes a pretty good argument that the core story about Jesus has some basis in actual fact.
Again, just so I'm not misunderstood, I don't think the evidence even begins to make a case that Jesus performed miracles and rose from the dead, or that he was exactly as he is portrayed in the Christian sources (indeed, how could he be, given how often those sources contradict one another?), but I think it at least establish that such a man most likely existed, and probably preserve at least some of his teachings.
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Doug Campbell
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 29 March 2008
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| Posted: 05 February 2013 at 9:31am | IP Logged | 11
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Also, as an aside, the writings of the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus provide a bit of non-Christian evidence for the historical Jesus as well. Josephus' reference to Jesus does appear to have been messed with a bit by later Christian writers copying the documents to make it more robust, but the scholarly consensus is that it still probably represents a non-Christian reference to Jesus. There are also non-interpolated references to John the Baptist and Jesus' brother James in Josephus.
As for other Roman historians, I don't think it's terribly surprising that they don't mention Jesus. Judea was literally the ass-end of the empire, and Jesus was one among numerous Jewish rabble rousers and messianic claimants active during his era. How likely is that to show up in our documentary record?
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Aaron Smith
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 06 September 2006
Location: United States
Posts: 10461
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| Posted: 05 February 2013 at 9:51am | IP Logged | 12
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I think it's important to be clear on the fact that the Bible, while at its core a mythology, is still the most important work of literature, for good or ill, in the western world, if not the world itself. It's also an interesting work of art and pseudo-history.
***
People are often surprised that I, a non-religious person, know a lot about religion and have read all the major religious books. Considering that, unfortunately, religion is at the core of much of the world's history, saying I shouldn't be interested in it because I'm not part of it is like suggesting that I shouldn't be interested in World War II because I'm not a soldier.
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Topic Closed)
