To: Solon who wrote (16575 ) 3/6/2004 9:14:02 AM From: briskit Respond to Your links make interesting reading, and serve the purpose of getting us to the heart of the matter. I picked up a book called History, Criticism, and Faith. We need to be able to evaluate the available evidence (lack of it, you say ;^}) and ways of thinking about the various reconstructions of myth and history. Perhaps your links are right on the money. They are certainly reasonable and broadly scholarly-sounding explanations, aren't they? I don't remember them being said, but I can imagine hearing it in some college lecture or other. The book I am looking at talks about the importance for Jews/Christians of the historicity question, which you raise. You'll have to pardon the use of terms I know you do not believe, such as revelation. The point is about the place of history in the discussion. "It is precisely because the Christian revelation is grounded in and mediated through history that its precise historical form is important. And in turn it is precisely this that makes important the study of it as history. If our faith is of the kind that would persist regardless of evidence and regardless of historical models, it is an unanchored faith. Its utterances might be indicative of the believer's particular mental states, but they would not be informative about anything that is the case outside them. If it could be shown that the gospel accounts of Jesus were without historical foundation in his life, it is conceivable that I could go on having religious experiences, but the explanation of them would be different. I would have to look beyond the Christian explanation. For the Christian the question of "belief in" is inseparable from the question of "belief that." It is precisely the Christian's belief that God has acted in certain ways in history that determines his belief about the character of God and the destiny of the world. (You'll like this, because it is your accusation!!) If we ignore the significance of history, we leave the field open to the fanatic, the fraud, and the fool. (How about that?! There's the cheese at the end of this tunnel!! You can provide a reconstruction of the historical process which demonstrates--and not merely asserts--that the Krishna story and nature worship was adopted wholesale by the lower class Palestinian Jews and sold as their own story. All you need is convincing evidence that there was no "that" behind the Jesus myth.) Of course, you don't approve of the character of god in the story either. But we don't need to talk about the character issues until we come to some understanding of whether anything happened back then besides Krishna-myth-stealing and phallic worship. If there is no after-life and nothing happened as the NT purports to give witness to, I wish I'd known about the phallic worship opportunities at a much younger age. You are demonstrating a great deal of patience with discussions about these Christian superstitions. I can easily project not having concluded this discussion before Alzheimer's robs me of sentence order. It might be a worthwhile discussion to have, though.
