Just like all Christians are atheists when it comes to all the gods they don't believe in. Mythicism is defined more by what it denies than what it claims.... I know that McGrath knows a lot more about the textual analysis than I do, but I'm not willing to bet that I would come to the same conclusion that he has if I knew what he knows.
Rather than IF "I knew what he knows."; you already know what he knows not!
Per
David Madison:
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In one of the essays, “Chapter 15: A Rejoinder to James McGrath’s Case for Jesus,” Neil Godfrey analyzes the efforts of McGrath to defend the historicity of Jesus. Most laypeople, we can be sure, are puzzled that the topic is up for debate: “Just open the gospels, the history of Jesus is right there!” They are not aware that Jesus studies have been in turmoil for decades, precisely because the gospels, having been written decades after the death of Jesus, cannot be trusted. At the end of John’s gospel we find the claim that “…this is the disciple who is testifying to these things and has written them, and we know that his testimony is true” (21:24), and the author of Luke’s gospel tells his readers that the reported events “…were handed on to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses…” (1:2)
Full stop: any novelist can make such claims, and authors of religious propaganda specialize in such bragging. Historians have noted for a long time that there is
no contemporaneous documentation of any kind to validate any of the word or deeds of Jesus. No letters, diaries, transcripts, Roman government records.
So what are the defenders of Jesus to do? McGrath finds it hard to believe that the early Christians would have invented the story of a messiah descended from David who ended up getting crucified. How would anyone be won over to the new faith with such a story? The messiah was supposed to be triumphant. Wouldn’t his ignominious death have been a turnoff? Hence the story—so much cognitive dissonance—would not have been invented. But this ignores the apostle Paul’s interpretation of events. Godfrey points out that Paul, quoting Psalm 110 and 8 in 1 Corinthians 15, embraces the messianic role of Jesus: “Paul makes it clear that Jesus has fulfilled that Davidic hope by orders of magnitude.” (Kindle, page 355)
But then the death was followed by resurrection, which reversed the bad part of the story, as Godfrey notes: “What was being preached was that Jesus, through death and resurrection, had become the ultimate fulfilment of the all-powerful and cosmos-ruling Davidic Messiah. Admittedly it might have been difficult to persuade many people that the crucified Jesus was the messiah, but Paul was never a witness to Jesus and was able to persuade others of his belief in Jesus’ victory over death nonetheless.” (Kindle, pp. 355-356)
Moreover, “…the Davidic Messiah is ruling from heaven with everything, even the future and death itself, under control. What is appealing and persuasive is the story as we read it: apostles witnessing the risen Jesus and accounts of preaching backed up by miracles. But whether the story is grounded in ‘history’ is another question.” (Kindle, p. 357)
Once the Christian propagandists came up with “death itself being under control,” who would have cared that the messiah had been crucified? Nor would there have been much worry if any real history was at the core of the story. Neither was that Paul’s concern, as Godfrey notes: “The first believer we have on record boasts that his belief came about entirely through visions and revelation in Scripture and from that foundation he made converts. Only decades later does a ‘fleshed out’ story in our gospels, set in a time and place no longer accessible to most readers, emerge.” (Kindle, p. 358)
Yes, that’s the problem with the gospels: set in a time and place no longer assessable—to people who want to find out that actually happened.
McGrath hopes to find an ally in Paul, i.e., the famous text in Galatians 1:18-19, in which he writes, “Then after three years I did go up to Jerusalem to visit Cephas and stayed with him fifteen days, but I did not see any other apostle except James the Lord’s brother.” Doesn’t that settle it? If Paul met Jesus’ brother, then clearly Jesus really did exist. There has been substantial scholarly discussion of this text, for several reasons.
Cephas here means Peter, and it has been so tempting to think of the Peter
as described in the gospels—but the stories of
that Peter hadn’t been invented yet. If Paul had spent fifteen days with
that Peter, why don’t we find many references to the gospel stories in Paul’s letters? How come Paul never mentions the Empty Tomb on Easter morning—wouldn’t Peter have been eager to share that story? Something is seriously
off here.
There has been much discussion as well of the meaning of “the Lord’s brother.” Is this a reference to a biological brother, or does this mean a brother in the inner circle of the early followers of Jesus? Godfrey quotes scholar R. Joseph Hoffmann who is
not a mythicist, but is not much swayed by this text as evidence for Jesus: “In the light of Paul’s complete disregard of the ‘historical’ Jesus, moreover, it is unimaginable that he would assert a biological relationship between James and ‘the Lord.’” (Kindle, p. 361)
It’s probably not smart to rely heavily on Galatians 1:19 as evidence for a real Jesus, because it’s hard to establish that this verse was actually what Paul wrote. That is, there could very well have been tampering with the text by copyists. Godfrey quotes A.D. Howell Smith (from his 1942 book,
Jesus Not a Myth): “There is a critical case of some slight cogency against the authenticity of Galatians 1:18-19, which was absent from Marcion’s
Apostolicon…” (Kindle, p. 363) For an another in-depth discussion of this text, by the way, see Chapter 9 of Richard Carrier’s
Jesus from Outer Space: What the Earliest Christians Really Believed about Christ.
New Testament scholars—McGrath included—who are impressed with the extensive mass of details about Jesus in the gospels, are confident that a real person must be there somewhere. And there has been so much speculation about what bits, what fragments of Jesus-script, can be considered authentic. There must be some, right? Godfrey quotes historian Donald Akenson:
“It is appropriate to discuss the questions of when specific [New Testament] texts were written, how the early versions were stacked together, and what their dates of origin may be, and how these matters of dating relate to early Christianity and to the questions of the ‘historical Jesus’…from the viewpoint of a professional historian, there is a good deal in the methods and assumptions of most present-day biblical scholars that makes one not just a touch uneasy, but downright queasy.” (Kindle, p. 369)
Godfrey also notes the problems of verifying any ancient histories, e.g., those of Rome. He quotes Moses I. Finley:
“Where did the [ancient historians] find their information? No matter how many older statements we can either document or posit—irrespective of possible reliability—we eventually reach a void. But ancient writers, like historians ever since, could not tolerate a void, and they filled it in one way or another, ultimately by pure invention. The ability of the ancients to invent and their capacity to believe are persistently underestimated.” (Kindle, p. 370)
“…ultimately by pure invention…” Which is what so much in the gospels looks like. “With Jesus,” Godfrey says, “there are no sources independent of Christianity itself.” Which is a gentler way of saying: no sources independent of the propaganda pieces written to promote the early Jesus cult.
Doesn’t this add to the incoherence of Christian theology? There is so little in the New Testament that we can trust—the gospels are bad enough, leaving aside the egregiously bad theology of the apostle Paul. If the Christian god wanted a story of Jesus that would stand the test of time, couldn’t he have foreseen the time—since he’s all-knowing—when serious historians would come along and be justifiably suspicious that the Jesus stories look far too much like fairy tales?
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