(Heavy sigh) I don't know why you thought anyone was interested in your repeating your same old notions.
I was responding to notions you posted, to which I either objected--for the grounds I stated, or else as talking points which I wanted to add content to. There is nothing different about this than anybody else's post, other than the fact that I did at least provide some evidence to support some of the ideas I introduced.
The main discussion here is why kmguru gets to write nonsense and is not only left alone, but is made a moderator.
That may be part of the thread topic, but it is not the thread title, it was the topic of your post, which was written in defense of interpreting myth and legend as historical narrative.
All you have done here is show that I am correct in saying that many of you are bogus in your claims to be objective and scientific.
People steeped in math and science do not claim to be objective and scientific. It's a world view. It's quick to detect and correct error. That's all. Most of what I posted defeats the anti-science rhetoric.
My italics and bold above: the eye witnesses are not legendary characters, they are real people and real people by the dozens, if not hundreds.
That is a false statement. The only people who are eyewitnesses to the story of Jesus are people described in the Bible itself. They are not historical people. None of them left autographs. There is no evidence that they ever existed.
As I have said, your summary dismissal of them as legendary does not make it so.
What makes it so, is that after a thorough search, no such evidence is found. It's the opposite of summary dismissal. On the contrary, is it you making summary conclusions that they are historical people without first do that same search and discovering for yourself that it is unsupportable.
How could you possibly know that?
The same way you will come to know it once you try to prove it. It can't be done.
What arrogance for someone to claim 2,000 years after the fact that certain events must be made up or the witnesses incompetent because he finds the events they saw and recorded far-fetched.
People with knowledge of such matters tend to think it arrogant that other people ignorant of such matters would insist that the thing known not to exist exists.
And if they are unbelievable, why then of course, they are impossible. What a small universe you live in, my friend!
People who love truth tend to think the same way about people who shy away from it.
No, no no. 'Getting mileage' out of a post on this forum is of no interest to me. I am merely asking a question with the intent of pointing out the obvious bias and non-objectivity of an overproud science forum. If this thread ended after my current post that would be all right by me. I am not one to pick apart another's post to tease them into ad infinitum responses. That's your game.
My comment was designed to rescue you from a failed proposition. I can see that was futile.
Now you're just getting sloppy. C'mon! Hercules, Helen of Troy? Your list is mostly Greek mythical figures who were the bastard offspring of playful Zeus.
And yet it survives as story that fascinated people on its own merit - without any associated retribution for failing to honor it. And of course it imposes no world view.
Even if they were real, and of course, they are not, they didn't go around claiming to be God in order to teach people the truth about their existence. I am disappointed in you.
Comparing the epic poems of classical Rome and Greece to the Gospels was my response to your claim that the character of Jesus was remarkable. As I said, he expresses a wooden persona. In the Gospel of Thomas and Book of Revelations he is flat (lacking any persona).
Thank you for sharing with us that you know the meaning of words like exegesis and anthropology, but we all know these word too and there's really no need to tell us, unless you suppose you are showing us how clever you are.
The words I use best fit the meaning I'm attempting to convey. In those statements I was correcting you. You were attacking the applicability of the science to the issues you raised. I stated that exegesis and anthropology/archaeology are fields of research that do apply. That's an incontrovertible fact.
More evidence that you have no idea what you are talking about. Jesus unemotional?
As I said, his character is primarily used in the Gospels to deliver adages about Christian doctrine. None of the text is devoted to developing his character. This in part was why I gave you the Gospel of Thomas: for comparison. There you see the complete absence of persona. The wooden persona who merely enumerates adages there is pushed back into the narrative even deeper with the preamble "Jesus said" inserted almost everywhere he speaks.
You mean like when he wept at the sight of Jerusalem from a nearby hill? Or perhaps the time he made a whip and went berserk at the temple market? Or one of my favorite incidents: the cursing of the fig tree. That story shows to me Christ's humanity.
I didn't say the Jesus character was perfectly flat in affect, I said wooden. And I said most of the time. And I went on to explain that it's done in the manner of a vehicle for delivering quips. The parallel type of device in Greek literature would be the presence of an oracle, who is usually used to deliver adages albeit with some sense of a foreboding.
The cases where he gets animated are the stuff of fables. They tend to have a moral to them. We can find just as much humanity in the characters of Grimm's Fairy Tales, such as the old woman who whips her kids and sends them off to bed, or the little girl frightened by a spider, or the crafty fox who tricks the crow to drop the cheese by playing to his vanity. These are devices, nothing more. It is worth noting that some of the fables should be examined in their historical context. Since we know that Judaea was crushed by Rome with unimaginable atrocities on a large scale, the complete absence of any reports of atrocities in the Bible is remarkable. We can only speculate about why those reports are missing. But the fable of the man with a whip attacking the non-religious enterprise on the Temple grounds could be very cryptic way of retelling the Roman desecration of the Temple.
Sure he was God incarnate,
A demigod. This follows the pattern of archetypes from that long list I provided you.
but he would get grumpy in the morning before breakfast, just like me. (I can curse all the fig trees I want though and nothing ever happens to them)
Typically in any legend of this kind the god will be shown violating the laws of nature. How else would the faithful respect them? They're gods; they have to be able to work magic, or the whole premise flops.
Say what? You think Socrates' trip to Piraeus is warm and fuzzy? I don't see it.
No that's not the point at all. What I did there was to illustrate how the story of Socrates begins. He's speaking in the first person. He's been to a festival and makes a few passing remarks about what he liked and didn't like. I contrasted that with typical statements from Jesus, just delivering quips. The difference is that Socrates is given a personality whereas Jesus has virtually none. I did this to give you some idea about how we do rhetorical analysis. The Gospels are entirely the stuff of legend, handed down over generations of oral tradition before some unknown writers first put them to text. The Story of Socrates is the work of the scholar Plato. It's deliberate and organized, almost in the manner of a novel. Clearly it's not legend. That was the purpose of my post, to illustrate that by way of the evidence.
Yes, those are adages all right. I'd expect as much from a God who takes the trouble to walk among His beloved creatures and try to teach them a few things.
It's also a common theme in legends. Paul Bunyon walks around and does stuff. Johnny Appleseed does too. In the Gilgamesh Epic, the man formed out of clay (Enkidu) becomes the friend of the king (Gilgamesh) and they tramp around until Enkidu dies from illness. Gilgamesh is grief stricken but ends up being given immortality. It's all quite similar in construction. The fabled character has to hang around and do stuff in order to resemble a real person living in the real world. In actual historical narratives, the people named are rarely characters at all. Josephus describes perhaps hundreds of people by name, but in the manner of a Twitter feed, giving little snippets of what they are doing. Most of it is like gossip, and some of it is almost heraldic, like his description of the Roman assault on the walls of Jerusalem before they broke through and began going door to door butchering entire families.
However, you've set up a straw man here.
Not me. I'm simply responding to your post with comments, corrections, and arguments.
Where's this scientific objectivity of which you so proudly go on and on about?
Objectivity is the norm here. This is a science board, not an ICR site. We are discussing the truth of a matter, specifically, the fallacy of interpreting legend and myth as historical narrative.
There's a lot more to Jesus than you want to believe.
I am not basing my statements on my beliefs but rather on the evidence of history. The converse of what you said is true: there is a lot less to Jesus than can be inferred by treating legend as historical narrative
However, G.K. Chesterton refutes your point of cool guy Greek philosophers and wooden christs better than I can:
I see you misunderstood what I wrote. I was not speaking of the affect of an actual person when I said "wooden" or "flat". I was referring to the storyteller's use of character in a literary sense. My point was bring forward some of the elements of a story which require us to classify it as legend. You would have no problem with me classifying some legend about Zeus throwing lightning bolts as legend, basing it in part on the flat affect of the god in the story. Here you're objecting only because you have adopted the position that the Jesus legend is historical narrative. It's not, but I understand your intransigence in considering the evidence that it is. That takes us back to the objectivity of scientific inquiry. The person seeking the truth has to remain objective, which means all such bias has to be removed. Otherwise the conclusion becomes contaminated with prejudice.
And that brings is directly to the topic of bias, which is the thread title. As you see there is no strawman in my logic as you say.