Best article this Christmas

[sandwiches]

Even though it comes from an atheist(?)(Not that atheists cannot write good articles but it is not the usual tripe one expects to see at this time of year):

rjosephhoffmann.wordpress.com/2013/12/20/a-christmas-carol-the-dumb-as-a-doorknocker-atheist-war-on-jesus/#comment-13732

A Christmas Carol: The Dumb as a Doorknocker Atheist War on Jesus

But what really irks me at this time of year is the way they have taken to picking on Jesus. A slim majority have bought into the idea that Jesus never existed because they have already bought into the idea that God doesn’t exist....They end up sounding more like Elmer Fudd on finding a rabbit hole empty: Jesus cannot be the son of God because God doesn’t exist so it is entirely plausible that he didn’t exist either.....What a Christian might believe however is that Jesus was a unique figure among the religious teachers of his day. –That he preached peace and forgiveness among sectarian Jews perpetually at odds with each other and with their Roman overseers. –That he preached a kind of social equality within a society of xenophobes and law- and status- crazed disputants, as litigious as anything you can find in modern America. That he had a healthy respect for women in a culture of male entitlement. That he cared about the poor and the sick—a fact that withstands scrutiny even if you deny that he really performed cures or made the blind see and the lame walk. The motif of Jesus’s care for poor, sick, and marginalized people is as clear a theme as anything we have in ancient literature—in fact, we have nothing else quite like it. It seems merely fatuous to postulate this overwhelmingly human and personal concern of a mythological figure.

[unkleE]

It's certainly a very interesting article, and I appreciated lots of things he said. But I can't help still feeling a bit uneasy.

In his epic discussions with Jesus-mythicists, Tim often points out that arguing against fundamentalist inerrantism is not arguing against all, or even most, christians, and so "proving" that there is an inconsistency somewhere in the Bible isn't the same as proving jesus didn't exist.

It seems to me that Hoffman is in danger of the same error. He is happy to berate fundamentalist mythicists and fundamentalist christians alike, while pressing for his middle ground of urbane humanism which accepts (as he writes elsewhere) that "the gospels retain a stubbornly historical view of Jesus, preserve reliable information about his life and teachings". But I'm not sure if I feel all that happy with this:

I would agree that any Christian who insists on the literal accuracy of the New Testament account of Jesus of Nazareth is naïve. I will agree that anybody who says silly things about the “normativity” of Christian or gospel “teaching” should be ignored, or avoided as a menace. But I don’t think that the solution for a naive literalism is a naïve rejectionism. What neither the fundamentalist Christian nor the atheist literalist gets is that the gospel is a narratively complex expression of simple ideas, not an impacted statement of unexplicated ideas—doctrines– as the church would later claim. Both need to return to their eighth grade chapter on metaphor, figures of speech, and poetic diction before they are permitted to pick up a Bible again. Feeding the hungry, visiting the imprisoned, clothing the naked, revering the peacemakers, forgiving rather than avenging—those are real things. The Centurion’s confession –“Truly, this man is a son of God”—is an interpretation and not even a clear one.

It's almost like once we have established that the New Testament is probably not inerrantly literal history, then all the parts that cannot be accepted by a secular humanist must be metaphor. Of course he's entitled to his opinion, but I'm not sure he wouldn't be scornful of mine. This is OK, except that he, like Maurice Casey, claims to be "independent", whatever that might mean in this context, whereas I can't see how he's any more independent than anyone else. (I thought Casey's book was great, but I thought impartiality was not one of its virtues!) I think he is more central to the range of opinion than the mythicists, but that is all I think he should claim.

So I found the article a mixture of good and overstatement. Thanks for sharing it.