Corpus-Paul

[LeeEdgarTyler AT aol.com]

In a message dated 8/15/2002 6:14:16 AM Central Daylight Time, zeba.crook AT utoronto.ca writes:

I'd recommend reading B.L. Mack's new book, _The Christian Myth_.  It's more nuanced
and it sounds to my like a more intelligent program than the mythical Jesus, but is
likely to ruffle as many feathers.

Cheers,

***

Zeba Antonin Crook (Ph.D. Cand)

Also, in the first chapter of his book Jesus Outside the New Testament: An Introduction to the Ancient Evidence, Robert E. Van Voorst gives a lengthy discussion of the "Jesus myth" arguments.  He also summarizes the history of the "Jesus myth" position back to the late 18th Century.

More significantly, von Voorst also summarizes scholarly responses to these ideas.  Doherty et al. repeatedly make the claim that their work has been ignored by the "establishment" (who, according to Doherty's web page, don't see the truth of his position because they've been blinded to such alternatives by the indoctrination of all the years of graduate education which Doherty spared himself). Van Voorst's summary effectively rebuts this claim.

Van Voorst lists seven scholarly objections to the "mythical Jesus" hypothesis, which I'll summarize here as many of them do indeed related to the corpus of Paul. 

1.  It misinterprets the nature and extent of  Paul's silence on *particular* aspects of the life of Jesus and misrepresents Paul's mention of historical events such as the Crucifixion.

2.  It relies upon a radically late dating of most of the gospels.

3. It maintains that the literary development of the gospels could result only from a wholesale invention of the material, ignoring evidence of literary and folkloric embellishment of a common historical source.

4. It ignores the fact that none of the early Christian opponents or "heretics" claimed Jesus to be purely mythic or ahistorical.

5.  "Jesus myth" arguments against the value of non-Christian witnesses to Jesus exaggerate the text-critical and source-critical problems, arguing that they invalidate the entire passages.

6.  The "Jesus myth" argument has been advanced not for scholarly purposes of understanding better the origins of Christianity, but as a highly tendentious anti- or alternative-religious polemic.  (For instance:  The home page of Doherty's web site has links to debates with Christian apologists such as Lee Strobel.  Doherty posts his own reviews of books such as Burton Mack's Who Wrote the New Testament, but you don't find him engaging them in public exchange.  The page also contains such hype as "War of Words Waging on the Web!!" and links to new-age maven Acharya S. who purports to have been a "high shlapop," a "cosmic voyager for millennia," and an "intergalactic troubleshooter and healer.")

7.  The "Jesus Myth" hypothesis does not account for the origin of Christianity or the development of a historical figure of Jesus from the initial myth.  As everyone knows, the apotheosis of mortals is hardly a rare event in the ancient world.  But the notion that people would turn a god into a historical Jewish peasant has no antecedent.  As Van Voorst (p. 16) puts it: "The hypotheses they have advanced, based upon idiosyncratic understanding of mythology, have little independent corroborative evidence to commend them to others."

Ed Tyler

http://hometown.aol.com/leeedgartyler/myhomepage/index.html