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Originally posted by PalynkaAre you saying that it is correct to evaluate Aristotle ideas on the basis of his historicity? The text itself has no meaning apart from his existence?
Does history "matter"? Does it "matter" if the Sumerians existed or not? Does it "matter" if Aristotle's writings are a forgery from the Renaissance?
Seems like a very reductive view of history.
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Originally posted by PalynkaI despair when people lack understanding and show no evidence that they find it worth seeking. I too am an atheist. But I'm not trying to jump up and down on a couch triumphantly screaming that I have proved something about christian ideas just because I have established that there are insufficient facts to prove the existence of Jesus. Form a complete sentence with actual thoughts - until then you're not worth listening to.
This forum makes me weep for humanity sometimes.
As for the second point, I'm a devout atheist. The validity of any moral principles is not at all under discussion here (at least not from me).
Originally posted by TerrierJack"The Sumerian Utnapishtim was written about long before there were Jews but lots of people puff out their chests now talking about their own odd-shaped boat."
I despair when people lack understanding and show no evidence that they find it worth seeking. I too am an atheist. But I'm not trying to jump up and down on a couch triumphantly screaming that I have proved something about christian ideas just because I have established that there are insufficient facts to prove the existence of Jesus. Form a complete sentence with actual thoughts - until then you're not worth listening to.
Is the dating (and therefore the historicity) not important in this sentence of yours?
Originally posted by TerrierJackThis conclusion is coming only from your prejudices about this issue. Nowhere did I claim that the historicity of Jesus leads to any conclusion about Christian moral principles.
But I'm not trying to jump up and down on a couch triumphantly screaming that I have proved something about christian ideas just because I have established that there are insufficient facts to prove the existence of Jesus.
So perhaps it's you who should stop jumping up and down that couch. Sit down. Read what I wrote with a clear mind and you'll see that I've repeated the above idea several times already.
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Originally posted by PalynkaNo.
"The Sumerian Utnapishtim was written about long before there were Jews but lots of people puff out their chests now talking about their own odd-shaped boat."
Is the dating (and therefore the historicity) not important in this sentence of yours?
Originally posted by rwingett"Of course parsing out any concrete details from the available information is probably impossible."
I find the arguments intriguing, but not necessarily compelling. It seems probable to me that Jesus existed in some form. It seems beyond dispute that many of the mythological attributes (like Jesus' divinity) are wrong, but I think the legends are based on something. Of course parsing out any concrete details from the available information is probably impo ...[text shortened]... art, I choose to start from the assumption that Jesus did exist in some form and go from there.
Not if you would just believe God.
Originally posted by PalynkaChrist 'forever lost behind the stained glass curtain of holy myth': yes. It's difficult enough to establish the facts about unquestionably historical figures of ancient times, let alone those who cover their tracks well ... I don't think Price is correct in saying that the balance of the evidence tilts towards Jesus being entirely fictional, though -- just historically unknowable, as rwingett says.
Despite wikipedia claiming that there is no controversy (and locking the page because of controversy), the Jesus Myth hypothesis is still very much alive.
The Jesus project is a project that seeks to investigate and determine the historical evidence for the existence of Jesus.
Here's an interesting article from a skeptic:
http://www.centerforinquiry. ...[text shortened]... ew Testament as Old Testament midrash:
http://www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com/art_midrash1.htm
Could the notion of haggadic expansion (love that term) be applied to the Acts of the Apostles, I wonder.
Originally posted by PalynkaI haven't had a chance yet (too much household stuff the last few days) to do more than skim it. I'm printing it out, since I find it difficult to read more than a page on the screen. Be back in a couple days hopefully...
I posted that thinking of you. I was hoping you could comment on it, although I still have to read it myself...
I’ll note quickly that midrash is mostly sort of a “proto-postmodern” approach, closer to a postmodern literary-critical approach than to a historical-critical approach to the texts. The written Torah is a springboard. Whatever the original authors—E or J or P, as they have been designated by form criticism—intended to convey at that point in history is a question that midrash does not really concern itself with. What the individual reader brings to the table is as valid as the text itself; innovation and creativity in interpretation are expected.
As an example: historically, it seems highly doubtful that upwards of two million Israelites slipped out of Egypt one night, and then wandered within the area of the Sinai for 40 years without being something of a sensation to all the local cultures—and, so far as I know, without leaving archeological evidence, or any historical references outside the Hebrew scriptures. (The Biblical 600,000 figure refers only to adult males; no wives, children, servants, etc.) And the wars of conquest were likely small skirmishes in what was generally a slow “moving in” among the indigenous population (Chaim Potok, Wanderings: A History of the Jews).
And yet, this “sacred myth of Israel” (David S. Ariel, What Do Jews Believe?) is celebrated each year at Passover. Without denying the mythological nature of the story. An escape from mizraim—literally, “narrow/confined places”; the Hebrew term for Egypt—the necessity of wandering in the (physical? psychological? spiritual?) desert/wilderness (midbar) if there is to be any access to a “promised land”. That kind of mythology is as archetypal as anything in the human consciousness.
The notion that “modernist” literalist/historicist readings ought to be the norm for such texts (with all due regard for historical criticism and its contributions), in my mind, belies the nature of the texts themselves. (And leads to my sometime fantasy that, a thousand years from now, there will be “Ring Literalists” who insist that the prophet Tolkein must be read literally, regardless of any extra-textual evidence to the contrary—otherwise, what he wrote is “meaningless”!) And I think that is an error both of the Biblical fundamentalist/literalists, and the secularists who assume that they are right—with regard to the text, but not its validity.
Now myth—or, as I prefer, story—may have its grounding in historical fact, even if those facts have been dramatically (in both sense of that word) re-written. And so, historical-critical analysis has an important place—and for some, it is the more interesting place. I happen to fall more into the literary-critical model.
Poetry is poetry, myth is myth, story is story—and history is history. All have meaning to offer.
That’s all I can get in before Shabbos. See ya later.
Originally posted by vistesdHaving read through the material (although really skimming some chunks of it), here are my comments:
I’ll note quickly that midrash is mostly sort of a “proto-postmodern” approach, closer to a postmodern literary-critical approach than to a historical-critical approach to the texts. The written Torah is a springboard. Whatever the original authors—E or J or P, as they have been designated by form criticism—intended to convey at that point in history is a ...[text shortened]... s history. All have meaning to offer.
That’s all I can get in before Shabbos. See ya later.
First, with regard to the opening comments about midrash and aggadah, I generally concur; and I especially liked the notion of midrash/aggadah being “a species of hypertext”, since the process (as seen in the written Midrashim) seems a lot like “hyper-texting” from source to source on the web.
Second, Jewish listeners/readers in the first century C.E. would have been familiar with, and recognized, various midrashic approaches.
Third, as written midrash/aggadah, the gospels would be among the earliest—if not the earliest—attempts to put Oral Torah into writing. There was a general prohibition on reducing the Oral Torah to written form—but with the dispersion following the destruction of the second temple on 70 C.E., fear of losing the stories (and halakhic rulings) from the collective memory led to written collections of Oral Torah, the first being generally thought to be the Mishnah, completed by Judah Ha’Nasi around 200 C.E. (The prohibition on reducing the Oral Torah to writing seems to be generally viewed as a guard against dogmatizing.)
Fourth, We do, as is pointed out in the paper, undoubtedly lose hints and allusions (and puns) in translation that readers familiar with the original languages would likely pick up on. The example in the paper is Jairus—but that does not mean that the analyst’s conclusion is necessarily correct. (A more interesting one, to me, would be Jesus Barabbas—bar Abbas: “son of the father”.)
Finally, there is an aspect of the analysis in the paper that I find troubling. It is as if one extreme view goes something like: “Our stories are totally distinct from any parallels in other cultures—see how our virgin births are totally different in detail from those other virgin births. Well, those are stories, ours is fact…” Etc, etc. While the other extreme, which this paper seems to lean toward is that similarity must mean copying, or borrowing and reworking—the later work, of course, always being derivative of earlier work. But—
How many bare-bones life stories are there? How many root-myths and archetypes in the human psyche—and does the almost infinite possibility for variations on a theme mean either (1) that there are really no common existential themes, on the one hand; or (2) there are only common themes, in which the variations are simply discountable? Is the story of my life simply discountable because it follows the same “born-live-die” pattern common to all of us? Are not our individual stories (and “myth-tories”!) both individually distinctive, and yet also part of the same common existential themes that enable us to relate to one another?
In the case of the aggadah, there is the fact that we are dealing with a common literature: the Hebrew Bible. And, perhaps, Greek mythology as well. But, it gets a bit like claiming that Hemingway—who surely had access to Greek myth as well—painstakingly, line by line, reworked sections of Homer to produce The Old Man and the Sea!
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I am not going to comment directly on the Christian scriptures at all. With regard to the Hebrew Scriptures (the Tanach), there are numerous kind of literature—narrative story, poetry (and highly poetic prose), essay of a kind (e.g., Ecclesiastes), perhaps proto-drama (Job, with its dialogic form, and chorus of voices in “the friends” ). Underlying some of it is likely some history (e.g., some Israelites escaped from Egypt). But whatever history is there was woven into story. And it is the story that the midrash “hypertexts” to spin new story.
Here, once again, is one of my favorite stories about Torah and story, as told by Rabbi Rami Shapiro:
One Shabbos afternoon, Reb Reuven called me into is study. He was sitting behind his desk and motioned me to take the chair across from him. A volume of the Zohar was lying open in front of him.
“Do you know what the Zohar is?” he asked.
“Of course,” I said. “It is a mystical commentary on Torah written by Moshe deLeon, a thirteenth century Spanish kabbalist who....”
“Nonsense!” he yelled at me, half rising out of his chair. “The Zohar isn’t just a commentary; it’s a Torah all by itself. It is a new Torah, a new telling of the last Torah. You do know what Torah is, don’t you?”
Suspecting that I didn’t, and afraid to invoke his wrath a second time, I waited silently, certain that he would answer his own question. I was not disappointed.
“Torah is story. God is story. Israel is story. You, my university-educated soon-to-be a liberal pain in the ass rabbi, are a story. We are all stories! We are all Torahs!...Listen, Rami,” Reuven said in a softer voice. “Torah starts with the word b’reisheet,* ‘Once upon a time!’”
—Rabbi Rami Shapiro, Hasidic Tales
* Conventionally translated “in the beginning” or “with beginning.”