IN DEFENSE OF "JESUS"

[◊ Weezer ◊]

18 minutes ago, DarkBishop said:

 

 Maybe one day definitive proof will be discovered. 

 

 

Don't hold your breath!  

[mwc]

17 hours ago, DarkBishop said:

 

There is no need to play the victim and leave. Lets just accept that we have a difference of opinion and be respectful toward one another. For instance instead of saying, "True enough, its not like things like illusory truth effect exist". 

 

Maybe, "I understand why your saying that, but I think it could be illusory truth effect".  Would be a better way to word your opposition. 

 

When texting, wording is very key and can easily be taken the wrong way. If you weren't trying to make veiled off handed comments then I apologize for my accusation. I tried to ignore the first couple I picked up on. But I'm not the type to just sit there and take it forever.

     I'm not sure how to respond so I'll just wing it like usual.  I already said I wasn't trying to do any of this and I have no good response to anything you may have perceived.  I guess there's such a long history of bad faith arguments around here (and kind of everyone anymore) people just look for them everywhere.  I figured I would just take a walk instead of continuing inadvertently pissing you off because this all seems far more important to you than it is to me not because I wanted to play the victim.

 

17 hours ago, DarkBishop said:

Let's talk about Illusory truth effect.

 

The reason I don't think the texts reflect illusory truth effect is first because of the consistency in the thought that Jesus was crucified across all of them. If it was illusory truth effect it would have had to of been propagated by Paul, Peter, and all the earliest christians. Even in his undisputed epistles to the churches Paul talks about the crucifiction of Jesus. Paul would have been alive when Jesus was alive. Reportedly he himself was persecuting Christians. If his story is to be believed then I doubt he was persecuting Christians for following the teachings of someone who never existed or never actually offended his leaders. 

 

But then there are other factors like Peter. We have to assume that the main thing Peter and Paul disagreed on was that Gentiles had to follow Jewish Law as part of being a Christian. There was never an indication that they disagreed over whether or not Jesus was Crucified. 

 

However, I have pondered on the idea that like Joseph Smith and The creation of The LDS church. Maybe the 12 Disciples came together and made the story up. If all people involved in the creation of the myth kept there stories straight that would give credit to illusory truth effect. Everyone except for them would assume that since all the disciples were saying the same thing that it must be true. And we already know that those who wrote the gospels were probably writing it from second  hand knowledge maybe even third hand, presumably from the various testimonies of the disciples. But it was already being turned into legend. 

 

So maybe they did. But to push it to the point that your willing to die for a lie....... well.... if it were me, I wouldn't do it. I would have to dip out and disappear before I got martyred. 

 

I think it is more likely that these early Christians were inspired by something more than a lie. I really think they had a leader that inspired them who was crucified and died. 

 

But again, I can understand why there is such a good argument for mythicists. And maybe I just need to hold on to the prospect that he was a real person for my own peace of mind. 

 

DB

     Here's a good example of where I think you think I'm making a point that I am not trying make.  Looking back I've noticed you've brought up mythicism more than once.  I am not arguing that point in this thread (unless someone wants me to to do so).  I am only arguing for historical jesus.  That there are variations surrounding an historical jesus is beyond my control and might sound like I'm making a move towards mythicism.  I am not.

 

     For example, there can be an historical jesus *and* that historical jesus could have died on a cross *and* that historical jesus could have never had a tomb even though it is in the texts.  This is pretty much the mainstream academic view.

 

     So, what about the illusory truth effect? From here:

Quote

Repeated information is often perceived as more truthful than new information. This finding is known as the illusory truth effect, and it is typically thought to occur because repetition increases processing fluency. ... However, these truth rating increases were logarithmic in shape. The largest increase in perceived truth came from encountering a statement for the second time, and beyond this were incrementally smaller increases in perceived truth for each additional repetition. ...

 

... This finding is known as the illusory truth effect (for a review, see Brashier and Marsh 2020) and was first reported by Hasher et al. (1977). In this experiment, participants were exposed to a list of plausible statements, some of which were true (e.g., Lithium is the lightest of all metals) and some of which were false (e.g., The capybara is the largest of the marsupials). Participants were asked to judge the truthfulness of each statement. This process was then repeated during a second and third session. However, during these subsequent sessions, half of the statements had been previously encountered during the previous session(s), while the other half had not been encountered before. Results showed that with each successive session, participants rated the repeated statements as more truthful than they had in the previous session. Furthermore, these repetition-related increases in perceived truth did not vary based upon the objective truth of the statements. ...

 

... The effect occurs regardless of whether the time between the repetitions is minutes (Arkes et al. 1989), weeks (Hasher et al. 1977), or even months apart (Brown and Nix 1996). Furthermore, the effect does not depend upon the source of the statements (Begg et al. 1992) and occurs even when participants are explicitly told that the source of the statements is unreliable (Henkel and Mattson 2011) or when the initial statement had a qualifier that cast doubt on the statement’s validity (Stanley et al. 2019). Further evidence of the robustness of this effect comes from studies showing that the illusory truth effect even occurs when the repeated statements are highly implausible (e.g., The earth is a perfect square; Fazio et al. 2019) or when the repeated statements directly contradict participants’ prior knowledge (e.g., The fastest land animal is the leopard; Fazio et al. 2015). ...

     If I'm not arguing for a non-historical jesus (it can allow for it but I'm trying to emphasize that's not what I'm going for here by repeating myself) so what am I saying?  If we leave the "core" alone (ie. real preacher guy that somehow wound up getting real crucified) then I am saying that this starts to fill in the "bad" details of that story.  How do we have such a poor set of trials?  How do we wind up with a strange crucifixion?  What about all the rest of the close but not really sort of details?  Or even those bits where jesus is face to face with the actual devil?  You can see that if someone, anyone really, starts to fill in the details then those details can start to become true even if they're counter to what people might actually know.

 

     I don't want to write a lot but you touched on a lot of things and I'm trying to not be terse like I did before (though I'm kind of thinking that I might go back to it).  The idea of being martyred for a lie for instance.  There's no evidence that they did.  That's a much later tradition for Peter and Paul (and the rest actually).  I would have to check but I think for Peter and Paul the first we hear of it is about a century after it would have happened (though I want to say that some try to infer it from earlier documents).  I don't recall if the rest are attested that early but I want to say they are not since it was only starting to come into fashion (so to speak...that martyr meant dying instead of just a sort of witness under duress) during the second century CE.  That doesn't mean they couldn't have died that just means "martyr porn" sort of became a thing and everyone but John got offed.

 

     That aside "lie" is too strong of a word which is why I'm saying this last.  As I pointed out about in the truth effect stuff the origin doesn't really matter although the result works out the same.  So someone can provide information, for any reason, and we don't have to assume "lie" but perhaps what they honestly believe to be totally accurate is entirely incorrect, but it gets passed along as truth.  We might, in hindsight, want to say this is a lie but it is not.  For example, if you ask need to catch the only bus to your destination and I truly and honestly tell you it leaves at 3pm but you get there and it left at 2:30pm did I lie to you?  I was incorrect but my intent was not to deceive you or cause you harm since I myself would have arrived at the same time had I needed to catch that same bus also missing it.  Why did I think it was 3pm?  Maybe it used to be that time?  Maybe someone repeated that time to me and it sounded right so I took it as truth and passed it along (tying it back to the truth effect stuff).

 

          mwc

 

[TheRedneckProfessor]

Calm down, fellas.

[☆ DarkBishop ☆]

On 6/11/2023 at 6:17 AM, mwc said:

If I'm not arguing for a non-historical jesus (it can allow for it but I'm trying to emphasize that's not what I'm going for here by repeating myself) so what am I saying?  If we leave the "core" alone (ie. real preacher guy that somehow wound up getting real crucified) then I am saying that this starts to fill in the "bad" details of that story.  How do we have such a poor set of trials?  How do we wind up with a strange crucifixion?  What about all the rest of the close but not really sort of details?  Or even those bits where jesus is face to face with the actual devil?  You can see that if someone, anyone really, starts to fill in the details then those details can start to become true even if they're counter to what people might actually know.

 

     I don't want to write a lot but you touched on a lot of things and I'm trying to not be terse like I did before (though I'm kind of thinking that I might go back to it).  The idea of being martyred for a lie for instance.  There's no evidence that they did.  That's a much later tradition for Peter and Paul (and the rest actually).  I would have to check but I think for Peter and Paul the first we hear of it is about a century after it would have happened (though I want to say that some try to infer it from earlier documents).  I don't recall if the rest are attested that early but I want to say they are not since it was only starting to come into fashion (so to speak...that martyr meant dying instead of just a sort of witness under duress) during the second century CE.  That doesn't mean they couldn't have died that just means "martyr porn" sort of became a thing and everyone but John got offed.

 

     That aside "lie" is too strong of a word which is why I'm saying this last.  As I pointed out about in the truth effect stuff the origin doesn't really matter although the result works out the same.  So someone can provide information, for any reason, and we don't have to assume "lie" but perhaps what they honestly believe to be totally accurate is entirely incorrect, but it gets passed along as truth.  We might, in hindsight, want to say this is a lie but it is not.  For example, if you ask need to catch the only bus to your destination and I truly and honestly tell you it leaves at 3pm but you get there and it left at 2:30pm did I lie to you?  I was incorrect but my intent was not to deceive you or cause you harm since I myself would have arrived at the same time had I needed to catch that same bus also missing it.  Why did I think it was 3pm?  Maybe it used to be that time?  Maybe someone repeated that time to me and it sounded right so I took it as truth and passed it along (tying it back to the truth effect stuff).

 

          mwc

 

I did assume you were taking a mostly mythicist standpoint. And thats my bad. I was actually hoping to hear some good argument for that side if you were speaking from the mythicist standpoint. 

 

But this is the way we should discuss amongst ourselves. Without being terse. 

 

It seems we have hardly any record of any of the deaths of the apostles. I had always assumed there was some extra biblical evidence. The closest we have apparently is a passage from Josephus but its the same passage that mentions James the brother of Jesus. I've already heard some believe that may have been added later. I don't know that I count 1 clement as an extra biblical source. 

 

 

It looks like there is way more legend than truth in everything we were taught. Maybe that is actually fitting since several of the apostles were fisherman. Lol looks like a big fishing story to me. Maybe when the Holy Roman Catholic church was formed they decided there wasn't enough flare in the story line so they got creative. Giving everyone a martyred and risen Jesus, martyred apostles, and a true under dog story for the ages. 

 

DB

 

[◊ Weezer ◊]

On 6/12/2023 at 8:08 AM, DarkBishop said:

 

Maybe when the Holy Roman Catholic church was formed they decided there wasn't enough flare in the story line so they got creative. Giving everyone a martyred and risen Jesus, martyred apostles, and a true under dog story for the ages. 

 

AMEN BROTHER!  Perfectly said.

[mwc]

     From the paper "The Martys and Spectacular Death" (Margo Kitts, Journal of Religion and Violence , 2018, Vol. 6, No. 2 (2018), pp. 267-294) p.277:

 

Quote

In sum, it would appear that the semantic range for martys, martyra, and martyrion has expanded by the time of these first-century writings, from a legalistic context where the martys witnesses oaths and is invited to punish violators, to one which includes the identification of the martys with the victim who suffers and dies in testimony to a perceived truth. This coincides with other well-studied cultural transformations attested in Roman representations of contests in the arena and upcoming in the Christian martyrologies. As many have observed about Greco-Roman influences on the martyrologies,54 the Greco-Roman ideal of resolute heroic death will combine with the pathos undergirding the biblical expectation that the messiah had to suffer and to die (alluding to, e.g., Isaiah 53) to create an ethos establishing Christians who endured humiliating deaths in the arena as victorious warriors who won glory in the life to come. By simulating the Roman ideal of masculinity, a virtus comparable to that of the soldier and gladiator,55 Christians in the arena and their hagiographers promoted a culture of valiant suffering. It is argued that during the Empire period disenfranchised gladiators came to be seen not as debased slaves, but as defiant heroes taking pleasure in the struggle up to the moment of death (Barton 1993, 20). Similarly, disenfranchised Christians subjected to torture in the arena inverted their stature, dying not as tepid, impotent victims, but as consecrated warriors committed to dying the good death (Collins 1994; Shaw 1996; Grig 2002, 328–329).

     P. 281:

Quote

Contemporary tastes notwithstanding, the taste of ancient audiences was honed to dying spectacles. Great spectacles demanded a witness, as did martyr spectacles—a martyr (witness) for a martyr (witness) (Barton 1994, 43; Cobb 2017, 48). Not only staged death in the arena, but, later, martyrological reports about it, gripped Christian audiences especially. As Grig observes about the martyrological reports, the Christian relish for scenes of violence and suffering was “a highly particular distillation of a very Roman predilection” (2002, 323). According to her, Christian hagiographers exceeded Roman tastes by representing Christian torture and endurance in such a way as to create uniquely Christian fictions of power (2002, 327–328).

     The paper goes into more than this but this touches on what's already been said here.  As you can see the meaning of the word changed over time and by the second century we land at a point where the xians may well be adopting this sort of Greco-Roman hero sacrifice story as their own in an effort to elevate their status.

 

     At this point I can't see anything that would indicate the Catholic church was behind any of this.  As the "orthodoxy" they seemed to be rather neutral on the whole thing at this time.  So their members could take up their own positions I suppose but that isn't really the same as an authority pushing an agenda.

 

          mwc

 

[☆ DarkBishop ☆]

Just gonna let Bart do the talking.

 

DB

https://youtu.be/hkL_Nb3GCcA

 

[mwc]

11 hours ago, DarkBishop said:

Just gonna let Bart do the talking.

 

DB

https://youtu.be/hkL_Nb3GCcA

 

     Yikes!  That video is about an hour long.  Is there a summary or transcript somewhere?

 

           mwc

 

[☆ DarkBishop ☆]

7 hours ago, mwc said:

     Yikes!  That video is about an hour long.  Is there a summary or transcript somewhere?

 

           mwc

 

The meat of it is only about 30 minutes. I like watching the videos because when he is talking he tends to go on rabbit trails but the are usually very informative and related to the question or subject at hand. 

 

Basically there is very little about the deaths of most of the apostles. And by the time it was pinned down some of them were obviously legend by then. He thinks Stephen may not have even existed because he is only mentioned in acts. And I already know from watching previous videos and his books that acts may be a later forgery. 

 

He does point to the early church Bishop Eusebius as writing down most of the storys that we have all heard today. 

 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eusebius

 

DB

[TheRedneckProfessor]

1 hour ago, DarkBishop said:

I like watching the videos because when he is talking he tends to go on rabbit trails but the are usually very informative and related to the question or subject at hand. 

 

 

[mwc]

18 hours ago, DarkBishop said:

The meat of it is only about 30 minutes. I like watching the videos because when he is talking he tends to go on rabbit trails but the are usually very informative and related to the question or subject at hand. 

 

Basically there is very little about the deaths of most of the apostles. And by the time it was pinned down some of them were obviously legend by then. He thinks Stephen may not have even existed because he is only mentioned in acts. And I already know from watching previous videos and his books that acts may be a later forgery. 

 

He does point to the early church Bishop Eusebius as writing down most of the storys that we have all heard today. 

 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eusebius

 

DB

     Ah, okay.  I think I'm following what you're saying.  We seem to be saying two different, but related, things again.

 

     I was speaking about the evolution of the concept of martyrs (more specifically the usage of the word martyr in its various forms as opposed to what we might consider to be martyrs) from pre-xian into the xian era where you seem to be speaking more specifically about the creation of the stories of the apostolic deaths. 

 

     I do agree that the details come from later sources.  Here's a Google Docs I came across that has a really good list of sources for the "eyewitness" apostles and their deaths (it has the references and quotes if you scroll down).

 

          mwc