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Permalink Reply by Richard H. McCargar on July 13, 2011 at 11:13pm

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Permalink Reply by Matt VDB on July 14, 2011 at 7:10pm

That's incredibly sad news.

 

Jesus Mythicism is not the Holy Grail of atheism, it is the creationism of the atheist movement: a position without academic support, that seems to only be forwarded and vigorously defended by a small portion of self-published amateurs with an agenda... like Fitzgerald.

To see such an amateuristic hack receive an award for such a crappy little book, should be a lesson to all of us: just because we're atheists apparently doesn't mean we recognise pseudo-history when we see it.

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Permalink Reply by Richard H. McCargar on July 18, 2011 at 12:50pm

Apparently, you haven't read Dr. Bart D. Erhman.

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Permalink Reply by Matt VDB on July 18, 2011 at 12:59pm

Actually I did. I'm quite a fan.

 

I'm even enough of a fan to know that Ehrman's next book is going to be one called "Did Jesus Exist; The Historical, Non-Religious Argument for Jesus of Nazareth" and is going to explain exactly why these silly theories hold absolutely zero traction in the academic community. 

 

"The New York Times bestselling author and leading Bible expert takes on his critics and the vast conspiracy community with a forceful historical argument that, yes, Jesus did actually exist."

 

So, what were you saying again?

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Permalink Reply by Richard H. McCargar on July 18, 2011 at 1:44pm

I'm surprised? Wrong?!?

 

Albert Schweitzer wrote: "The Jesus of Nazareth who came forward publicly as the Messiah, who preached the ethic of the kingdom of God, who founded the kingdom of heaven upon earth and died to give his work its final consecration never existed..... He will be a Jesus, who was Messiah, and lived as such, either on the ground of a literary fiction of the earliest Evangelist, or on the ground of a purely eschatological Messianic conception. In either case, He will not be a Jesus Christ to whom the religion of the present can ascribe, according to its long-cherished custom, its own thoughts and ideas, as it did with the Jesus of its own making..... It is not given to history to disengage that which is abiding and eternal in the being of Jesus from the historical forms in which it worked itself out, and to introduce it into our world as a living influence."

 

Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus: First Complete Edition, trans. W. Montgomery, et al., ed. John Bowden (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001), 478.

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Permalink Reply by Matt VDB on July 18, 2011 at 2:46pm

Albert Schweitzer is another guy I'm a fan off. I have yet to read his books (I haven't yet because they're a century old, so not exactly cutting-edge scholarship anymore) but the book you quote ("The Quest of the Historical Jesus") is essentially the grand-daddy of all the current discussion of the historical Jesus. Many of the current giants in Biblical analysis, like Bart Ehrman, Geza Vermes, Paula Frederiksen, Dale Allison, Casey, are essentially just expanding -although also correcting- the framework Schweitzer proposed over a century ago.

 

However, since you seem to be bringing up Schweitzer in this particular thread, I'm thinking you don't fully understand the context of what you quoted -and I can't blame you because that quote seems to be a pure quote-mine of the kind that creationists often do. Schweitzer is not saying that there was no historical Jesus. In fact, the framework that he proposed in his books and that has been highly influential ever since, is that the historical Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet who thought the end of the world was coming very soon (in keeping with the apocalyptic strains of the Intertestamental Second Temple Judaism of the time), and whose unexpected and violent death became the basis on which the earliest Christians eventually built a new (and far more non-Jewish) religion.

 

That's what Schweitzer's main contribution was (check his wikipedia if you don't believe me). That quote seems to have been taken completely out of context, you can find the complete chapter here (last few paragraphs for summary). It's some pretty weird stuff (because Schweitzer was still a theologian and so wanted to preserve Christianity despite his findings) but what he says is clear: the Biblical Jesus that Christians believe in does not exist, but there is a "true historical Jesus" nonetheless -just not one that Christians will like.

 

If others have told you that Schweitzer is a mythicist, they have been deceiving you or deceiving themselves. He most certainly was not. And neither is the vast majority of modern scholars.

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