So how do you explain the quantum eraser experiment (note for those who might be excited to respond with recent YouTube physics videos, this is not the delayed choice quantum eraser, and has nothing to do with retrocausality claims)?
For if someone comes and proclaims another Jesus than the one we proclaimed, or if you receive a different spirit from the one you received, or a different gospel from the one you accepted, you put up with it readily enough. I think that I am not in the least inferior to these super-apostles.
2 Cor 11:4-5
Corinth then later on full on deposed Rome’s appointees which led to the letter from the bishop of Rome, 1 Clement that’s almost entirely devoted to trying to damage control the schism.
And why not say (as some people slander us by saying that we say), “Let us do evil so that good may come”? Their judgment is deserved!
Romans 3:8
I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel— not that there is another gospel, but there are some who are confusing you and want to pervert the gospel of Christ. But even if we or an angel from heaven should proclaim to you a gospel contrary to what we proclaimed to you, let that one be accursed! As we have said before, so now I repeat, if anyone proclaims to you a gospel contrary to what you received, let that one be accursed!
Galatians 1:6-9
You can even see some of the specific concepts that there was a schism about, such as whether there was an over-realized eschatology:
As to the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our being gathered together to him, we beg you, brothers and sisters, not to be quickly shaken in mind or alarmed, either by spirit or by word or by letter, as though from us, to the effect that the day of the Lord is already here.
2 Thessalonians 2:1-2 (likely a bit later than Paul)
Avoid profane chatter, for it will lead people into more and more impiety, and their talk will spread like gangrene. Among them are Hymenaeus and Philetus, who have swerved from the truth, saying resurrection has already occurred. They are upsetting the faith of some.
2 Timothy 2:16-18
So I’m not sure where you get the notion there was one big happy family of Christian thought in Paul’s time and the later 1st century CE when literally the earliest records of Christianity we have are so concerned with competing traditions and ideas. You may be mistaking the survivorship bias of cannonical Christianity eradicating most competing thought later on for a picture of unity (as that’s what they try to project) which is why a closer read is warranted.
Plus you know we have no evidence that Buddhism had that fighting after Siddharth death
It had that fighting even before Siddhartha’s death when his brother in law Devadatta broke away to form his own group.
Mormons didn’t break out into civil war after Smith died.
Fictional constructs don’t end up having bitterly opposed factions splintering off within decades of their supposed death, but that’s an extremely common feature of nearly every cult organized around a historical central figure.
The specific depiction of Jesus canonized likely has many fictional elements, but the idea that there was no historical figure in the first place is pretty ludicrous.
I agree, and my stance is the more interpretations the better, as each brings a different perspective to the table which in turn imagines up different experiments to try and prove or falsify different assumptions.
The human need to try and find confirmation of one’s own views is toxic to academia, and all too often fields can be held back due to undue influence of specific thought leaders who subscribed to one perspective or another.
Ok, let’s stay within the confines of individual self-preservation.
If it is necessary for you to have a new organ to survive, but not enough are available through organ donation programs, does the fact that it is necessary to your survival mean that acquiring an organ from an unwilling donor (directly or though black market proxy) is a justified action?
How about a murderer that killed someone and left witnesses? If they are caught, it would mean they are sentenced to death. So it is necessary for their continued self-preservation to minimize the chances of being caught. Does that make their murder of the witnesses of their earlier crime justified?
Your pithy take on necessity = justification is BS at even a cursory examination.
I’m not saying that we shouldn’t have freed the slaves. Just that neither the Union nor the Confederate killing of each other was justified. I’m not saying that the US shouldn’t have fought in WW2. Just that bombing Hiroshima wasn’t justified.
You are the one conflating necessity with justification. And as such you seem to not be able to wrap your head around that while I’m saying mass violence is never justified, that doesn’t mean I’m saying the relative necessity for admirable goals means it was in the best interest of the US to have had a show of overwhelming force at the end of the WW2 conflict in mind of Stalin’s USSR post-war or that Sherman was wise to burn crops as he marched through the South to reduce supplies for Confederate opposition.
Edit: Also, thank you for making my point about how the notion of justified violence is a slippery slope that can easily end up justifying atrocities by relativist moralizing there with the whole “by any means necessary.”
Well, in the sake of pointing things out, GPT-4 can actually correctly answer the prompt, because it arrives at it in the opposite direction. It can tell the integer is even or odd and knows that even or odd integers in binary end in 0 or 1 respectively.
I am willing to accept that Paul always told the truth as far as he knew it to be.
If you think that was what I was saying when I was saying pretty much the exact opposite, I get the sense you aren’t actually reading my comments.
Again, it seems you are more interested in arguing with a strawman.
We know Mark was a Greek and an educated one.
Check your information. Mark was absolutely not both Greek and well educated. His Greek is like a five year old talks. Go look at one of the more literal translations. He starts every other sentence with “And” or “And then”. It’s very rudimentary Greek.
Isn’t it amazing that Paul just happened to have the same injuries that Jesus suffered?
Huh? What are you talking about? When was Jesus struck blind?
The simplest explaination is that James and Cephus were running a grift, Paul took it seriously and literally
I’d be wary of being so sure about the role of James in all this. He’s likely a later addition to the Corinthian Creed and Paul does his little “I swear I’m not lying” after saying he was in Jerusalem a decade earlier but only seen by Cephas and James and no one else.
How do you know you are right? These are balance of probability arguments
Most of history ends up boiling down to probability arguments when you dig into it. It’s one of the more surprising things as you actually read papers, where far too often you’ll see scholars speak with an attitude of certainty around rather spurious evidence. The best tend to make more effort to be conservative with surety.
But between several options of varying probability I don’t find it that difficult to identify what I consider very unlikely and what I consider likely.
For example, I rank the idea of people seeing Jesus alive three days after his execution and then watch him float up into the sky extremely unlikely. As many Christians like to point out, we can’t be certain it didn’t happen, but there’s enough reasons why it probably didn’t happen that I don’t think it did.
You’re talking to someone whose personal mantra in life has been Socrates’ “All that I know is that I know nothing.” Most of existence as far as I’m concerned is probabilities and not certainty, and I value the Epicurean view of entertaining multiple possibilities when it isn’t 100% clear which is correct - I think it’s a large contributing factor to how they were right about so much.
Within that though, I can look at the two scenarios I presented above and see that one poorly fits the available evidence described and other evidence not described, and the other matches much better, as represented by around five years of a deep dive into the subject matter including discussion and debates with scholars of various perspectives.
of a liar
Likely liars. Paul has a number of characteristics of a narcissist and a habit of swearing he’s not lying, and even straight up talks about how he changes what he says depending on the audience. I wouldn’t trust him more than you could throw him, and maybe not even that much (he was allegedly smallish).
The gospel of Mark is also likely propagating lies, whether of original invention or secondhand inheritance.
Then Luke and potentially Mark have possible redactional layers which are further lying about things (like a 180° on not taking people’s money).
Matthew is probably worst of all with the outright lying, and evidentially had extra-cannonical resources in front of him that he was copying from and then making up secret explanations for while in general promoting a tradition of secret teachings (I think it may have come from an ex-Essene community).
John takes what I do think was some rudimentary earlier resource and then actively works to subvert and conceal the origin of that resource with what are likely additional lies, that span at least two redactional layers.
Later on people forge letters from Paul and Peter.
There’s quite a lot of liars involved in forming what we have.
But the thing with liars is that while you can’t trust their positive statements, they tend to reflect more trustworthy things in what they oppose or accidentally acknowledge. You kind of have to treat them like a hostile witness in a court case.
So for example with Mark, one of the most basic ways this manifests is the aforementioned public/private pattern. While I wouldn’t believe what Mark talks about occurring in public that supports his agenda or theology like a faith healing or Jesus telling people marriage is between a man and a woman (anachronistic relevance before Nero married two men in the 60s making same sex marriage an institution in the Roman empire), I tend to think the things it sets up as taking place in public before it immediately tries to contextualize them in a different direction with private explanations are one way to detect things that were part of an earlier commonly known record.
It’s tough work necessitating different approaches and maybe at best there’s about 3-4% of the material in there that I’d confidently label as preceding Mark’s earliest redactional layer.
You mention Mark borrowing from Greek thinkers and while probably true does nothing to prove a historical Jesus.
Not Mark. Mark is oblivious to Greek thought, which is why it’s interesting. The Greek/Roman philosophical influence is very pronounced in Thomas, it is present in things discussed with the Christian community in Corinth, but it isn’t in Mark other than in a vestigial way.
And the specific ways it’s phrased in places in Thomas combines Greek/Roman philosophy with the phrasing and metaphors of prophets in the Old Testament. I’d be very surprised if that core work was from someone who wasn’t familiar with both.
So while no, I can’t be for sure that a historical Jesus existed, I am pretty confident that someone familiar with both Lucretius, Plato, and Hebrew texts composed a number of sayings which ended up attributed to a Jesus in the first century when he was a relative nobody, at least one of which was likely composed during Pilate’s reign, several of which predated Paul, several more of which predated Mark, more of which predated Luke, and more of which predated Matthew. All of which ended up inside the 3rd-4th century only surviving copy of the Gospel of Thomas alongside additional sayings that were composed or taken from canonical texts later on.
To elegantly tie together Plato and Lucretius occasionally using language and metaphors from the OT in the first century seems like a pretty difficult task. It strikes me as bizarre that the person undertaking this Herculean accomplishment would then turn around and attribute it all to a relative nobody from a small cultic tradition who was allegedly executed by the Roman empire at its peak and whose adherents were actively being persecuted by the religious theocracy in Judea before being subverted by a growing splinter tradition largely owing itself to one of the people known to be persecuting them.
Maybe a better fitting version of events is that there really was a historical nobody who combined these things, pissed off the religious theocracy he was under with the conclusions he came to which undermined their authority such that he was killed by the state as soon as it was possible to justify it, then his followers and teachings were actively persecuted in areas the religious theocracy had authority while being actively subverted with a different version of fictionalized events and interpretations in the areas they didn’t have authority so they could bring it all back closer to conservative Judaism and funnel money and resources back to themselves - and then that subversion attempt was so unexpectedly successful that now a third of the world population believes it today.
There’s a number of ways to sort out what predated Mark or was in an earlier redactional layer and what’s in the latest layer of Mark.
One way would be looking at the fringe details that are at odds with canonical church theology and organization at the time it is written.
For example, “carry no purse” in Mark 6:8 would inhibit the ability to make monetary collections. It is very problematic for Paul, and you can even see in 1 Cor 9 that the Christian community in Corinth who he later accused of accepting a different version of Jesus and later depose Rome’s appointees have attitudes against Paul’s doing so which he’s arguing against.
This makes its way via copying into both Matthew and Luke, but then in a post-Marcion version of Luke a line is added at the last supper explicitly reversing not carrying a purse.
Another is Mark 11:16, where he doesn’t allow anyone to carry sacrifices through the temple. This isn’t found in Luke or John, and Matthew who is copying it verbatim explicitly left out this part. It’s a problem because what was carried through the temple were sin sacrifices, and Jesus hasn’t died yet. Cannonical theology is that it was his death that wiped the record clean. So while the other gospels have no issue with his criticism of selling the sacrifices in front of the temple, prohibiting any sacrifices at all from being carried through the temple is a big problem.
Here too this seems more in line with the attitude in Corinth Paul was arguing against that “everything is permissible for me” - which it’s worth noting he doesn’t outright reject but instead tried to make a relativist argument around in interpretation.
Another way we can evaluate Mark is looking at competing textual traditions.
So in the first case above we see a similar but different statement in the middle of Thomas 14 which only endorses accepting food and shelter, and a number of unique sayings in agreement with the concept of not paying for religious service such as sayings 88, 21, and 109.
And again, we can see the similar attitudes pre-existing Paul’s first letter in 1 Cor 9.
For this to be originating in Mark sometime after 70 CE seems highly unusual as it opposes Paul’s fundraising efforts, mirrors earlier attitudes in Corinth, and reflects positions in sayings unique and similar to it in an extra-canonical text.
In terms of the second, an identical pattern emerges.
In Corinth Paul is arguing against the position that “everything is permissible,” then later on in Mark is a line effectively prohibiting sin sacrifices, and in Thomas we see a similar attitude rejecting propiation and instead furthering a relative picture of morality in sayings 6 and 14.
As a bonus, saying 14 doesn’t just cover no propiation and not carrying a purse, both mirroring ideas Paul is arguing against in Corinth, it also covers absolutely eradicating eating restrictions which Paul also argued against with Corinth without directly opposing it and instead appealing to a counter-interpretation based on relative mortality.
So you end up with this picture where Paul is arguing against something, Mark contains some offhand mention supporting the thing Paul was arguing against, later cannonical texts attempt to reverse that, and Thomas contains sayings similar but not identical to canonical sayings supporting those things in entirely different contexts as well as unique sayings that support the same positions.
This is exactly the pattern we should expect if Paul and the canonical tradition was actively working to undermine an earlier and separate tradition of teachings attributed to Jesus.
And here too, the concepts Paul and the later texts are arguing against happen to be in line with the Greek philosophy of Epicurus as recorded in Lucretius who complained that people were too caught up in worrying about what gods thought and there was no point in sacrificing, giving money to religion, or other religious obligations. A philosophy that has its other elements heavily engaged with across multiple sayings in Thomas and attributed with the opposition to the physical resurrection Paul is arguing against in 1 Cor 15.
Which then brings us back to things like Mark 4 where a saying about randomly scattered seeds where only what survives multiplied which even uses the specific phrase of “seed falling by the wayside of a path” - just like Leucretius used decades earlier to describe failed reproduction - is being depicted as being said in public. Followed by a private explanation which is one of only two explanations in antiquity about this parable, with the other being provided by the Thomasine tradition interpreting it in line with Lucretius’s depictions of seeds as atomos and also using language identical to Lucretius’s in doing so. A parable which appears in Thomas without the secret explanation of Mark and the other Synoptics.
I very much doubt Mark was inventing a parable paraphrasing Lucretius, then having it said in public but secretly explained with an interpretation at odds with Lucretius in private, and then a later tradition well after Lucretius was no longer popular reinterpreted it back to Lucretius using his language again in doing so, and that tradition just so happened to also have variations of several sayings in Mark which were problems for the earlier church and in agreement with opposing views in Corinth but in line with Lucretius’s perspectives, as well as multiple unique sayings with similar attitudes. (Along with multiple sayings and ideas Paul seems to be quoting in his letter to Corinth.)
This is all much more easily explained by a pre-Pauline tradition that was influenced by and engaged with Epicurean philosophy and Lucretius specifically which was problematic for Paul’s associations in Jerusalem which he and what later becomes the canonical church attempt to spin back towards conservative Judaism with increasing success over the next century, with Mark as one of the earliest attempts to do so in narrative form. But as the first attempt, it did so sloppily enough small parts of the opposed positions peek through before being better corrected by later efforts.