To be a Christ myther requires
either casual arrogance, appalling ignorance, or some mixture of both. A
blogger styled “Vridar” aka Neil Godfrey
is typical of the sort of mixture of both that makes the Christ myth able to find places to reside in the
intellectual cracks of society. I challenged Vridar to debate me on the issueof the authenticity of Paul’s letters here some time ago, and as is also
typical of the Christ myth crowd, he ran with his tail between his legs,
yowling like a scalded dog. I expect little different this time, even as I
issue a fresh challenge over the subject today.
Vridat recently put that combined
arrogance and ignorance to work with an address to what he supposes to be a
“misapplication” of the concept of high context cultures to the point that Paul
does not mention certain life details of Jesus in his epistles. Although I have
been positing this point for years now, Vridar has now been apparently been so
stung by Maurice Casey’s adoption of the argument that he cannot help but reply
– no doubt thanks in good measure to the substantial beating Casey (and Stephanie
Fisher) have been administering to him lately.
Vridar, I might point out, is the
sort who wouldn’t know a “misapplication” of such things if it bit him on the
rear end, and it speaks for itself that the best he can do in reply is appeal
to airline pilot Kris Komarnitsky’s attempt to skittle around the issue of high
context:
JP goes on to argue
that the “high-context” society Paul and the Corinthians lived in can account
for Paul’s silence on the discovered empty tomb. But as JP admits, even in
high-context societies “repeat of detail would . . . occur if some need were
present to repeat.” This just leads us back to the question above. If Paul
is trying to defend Jesus’ resurrection, he definitely has a need to repeat
information. And in fact that is exactly what we see Paul do. He repeats the
basic community creed that Jesus was raised and that this has been confirmed in
the scriptures (1 Cor 15:4). He lists those who Jesus appeared to (1 Cor
15:5-8) which, being an already established Christian community, the Corinthians
must have heard about before. Drawing on the authority of these witnesses,
Paul then challenges the Corinthians, “Now if Christ is proclaimed [by all of
these people] as raised from the dead, how can some of you say there is no
resurrection of the dead?” (1 Cor 15:12).
Here, Komarnitsky’s error is twofold.
First, Paul is not “trying to defend Jesus’ resurrection” in 1 Cor. 15. What he
is answering, rather, is a Corinthian deviancy in which it is doubted that
humans can be resurrected, and in that regard, he makes use of Jesus’
resurrection as a precedent.
Second, the rhetorical purpose of 1 Cor. 15:3-11
also points to a specific need to fulfill: Composing his argument according to
the principles of Greco-Roman rhetoric, 3-11 consists of a narratio, which
would include testimony like this as part of the building of an argument. Thus
it is rather simple to demonstrate the “need” present to offer these details in
context. This is the sort of detailed explanation Earl Doherty needs to
reproduce to validate his 200 alleged “silences” – but as it stands, my
analysis of those 200 showed that in each case he failed to provide anything of
the sort, mostly appealing vaguely to “common sense” or else using low context
reasoning.
Thus it is that when Vridar points
out this or that detail reported by Paul seems to contradict the high context
thesis, it is clear that it is he – not I or Casey – who misapplies,
misunderstands, and misuses Hall’s presentation. His use of Komarnitsky – as opposed
to a serious scholar of anthropology or the social sciences -- typical of those
in the Christ myth camp who are unable to properly process complex ideas like these from
anthropological scholarship.
That leaves a few comments made to
this rather dawdling entry by Vridar. Most of his crowd slavers obediently and
says nothing of value, but here are a few points worthy of addressing if only
to emphasize the intellectual dementia typical of Christ-mythicism.
An oblivious user styled RoHa asks a
list of questions:
I still want to know (a) how they
know the society Paul was writing to was a “High Context” society…
This is the finding of credible and
reputable social science scholarship and is the result of decades of careful
research and study. That RoHa lives in a shell is not a reason for it to be
otherwise.
(b) whether they have a list of what things
would be repeated, and what things would not be repeated, and how such a list
is justified
No list. The fact that RoHa requests one shows that he/she fails to grasp the complexity of the concept. A list would be impossible
because what is “high context” in a context depends on a shifting of conditions,
not on a predetermined list.
and (c) whether any of these guys
has actually lived in a high context society?
As if this matters? It doesn’t. But
several of my readers do live in such a society, and social science research
has been done in the “living laboratories” of actual high context societies.
Again, this is not open to debate as a concept.
A lesser intelligence styled
muuh-gnu states the “gospel writers obviously didn’t” live in a high context
society.
What this user fails to grasp in the
the Gospels, as laudatory Greco-Roman bioi, serve a specific purpose, that of
honoring their subject by recounting their words and deeds. Of course, it would
take a lot of foolishness of suppose that this is any sense would disprove the
entire structure of anthropological scholarship. But the “need” is clearly
demonstrated.
The longest comment comes from a user who
remarks on another commenter’s posting of the Wikipedia item on high context. The
rather idiotic supposition is made that because the article notes rules of
behavior and the social setting as part of the context of understanding what
high context is, this means that it did not extend to other parts of daily
life! This is simply without merit, and an artificial division foisted by the
commenter’s tendentious reading of the Wikipedia description.
The same commenter also offers a
peculiar analogy to the rediscovery of the Law in the Temple at the time of
Josiah, taking from this that “knowledge of the sacred rules of behavior
towards God and his priests were not implicitly taken for granted.
Communication by the priests, the prophets and the books was necessary.” How
this has any bearing on the issue is hard to say. Per the account, the law had
been lost for some time and was unknown to the people. Beyond that, law in
particular was a special “needs” case, as it involved rules to live by on a
daily basis, with associated penalties for failure. As far as I can tell, there
were no penalties for failing to recall such things as that Jesus lived in
Nazareth. Furthermore, the law was to be repeated and meditated upon as
essential to the keeping of the covenant; the details of Jesus’ life are not
part of the New Testament covenant.
The one thing that the commenter
does get right – and which I have never disputed, and indeed made clear in my
own writings -- is that “high context” is a matter of scale. Some social groups
are “higher” context than others, and have to become “lower” in context if they
deal with an outsider. But this does not erase the fact that as a whole, the
ancient Mediterranean was on the “higher” end, which makes the Christ-myther
demand for more detail about the life of Jesus an oblivious one. Furthermore,
the seasoned ekklesia – to whom the epistles were all written – would be an
example of a sub-group “with autonomous rules of conduct and hermetic
professional jargon” which the commenter admits would be characterized as high
context.
A commenter styled J. Quinton
observes:
It seems to me that the “high
context” in Paul’s congregations should have been the LXX, not the life and
teachings of Jesus.
Not in the least. Paul’s congregations
were a decade or more old; the life and teachings of Jesus, by then, would be
as ingrained as the LXX would have been. This is a distinction that many in
Doherty’s thrall – including Doherty himself – fail to recognize: They argue as
though Paul were addressing new converts with no knowledge. Indeed, in Jesus
Neither God Nor Man, Doherty offers an appendix in which he makes this mistake
rather obviously.
Vridar himself
offers another oblivious comment:
Even when it came to “pivotal
cultural values” Paul was quite prepared to spell them out explicitly when he
believed it would reinforce his instructions. Recall his “Does not nature
itself teach you that it is a shame for a man to have long [or whatever the
original meaning was] hair?”
Here again Godfrey’s impenetrable ignorance comes
to the fore. Moral teachings are a special “need” scenario, as they affect real
life behavior. The function of such teachings as these is moral exhortation,
which is in need to stronger emphasis because of the constant social pressure
in an agonistic society to conform to group expectations (and the temptation to
diverge from them). Obviously this has no bearing on such things as Jesus being
from Nazareth. It does have bearing on Jesus’ moral teachings, but as we have
argued, those are to be found alluded to in the epistles as is appropriate.
That closes us for now; but we know
Vridar to be the sort who does not know when he is in a losing cause, so we
expect a reply. However, from here on it will be done at a TheologyWeb thread
here, where we challenge Vridar – or any of his sycophants – to defend their
ignorance.
