Post by ignorantianescia on Jan 7, 2018 15:29:14 GMT
With the recentish Mythicist outburst on these fora having fully subsided and Richard Carrier's latest over-long ravings (before the wave of self-promotion) being his usual toxic mix of malice against established experts and a craving for recognition from those same scholars, it looks like as good a time as any to note the availability of an old text debunking Mythicism. This is The Historical Christ; or, an Investigation of the Views of Mr. J. M. Robertson, Dr. A Drews, and Prof. W. B. Smith by Frederick Cornwallis Conybeare (freely available on Archive.org), a book that chiefly takes aim at the views of John M. Robertson and Arthur Drews, to a lesser degree against W. B. Smith, but also addresses Willem Christiaan van Manen and Peter Jensen. Many parts are pretty dated and not relevant to the more sophisticated Mythicism of Doherty and Carrier, but the author is very helpful in noting historical figures who are worse attested than Jesus and in drawing attention to parallel legendary embellishments in the lives of other historical persons. And passages like this still work as indictments of the crazy astral theories when read a little more generally (p. 63):
Besides, it's not as if Carrier and Doherty are innocent of inventing unattested meanings for words, ignoring sound lexicographic methods, like when they decrete that "brothers of the Lord" must be interpreted "in the Pickwickian sense".
Conybeare also tackles a prototype of Nazareth mything and rebuts idle speculation on the term Chrestos, such as Drews' bald claim that "Chrestians" were devotees of Serapis/Osiris. (It is a sad fact that none of these pioneering Mythers imagined that Christianity was invented in the fourth century.) Add to that his colourful prose and the nice polemical barb to Conybeare's writing and his book is well worth reading for reasons other mere than antiquarian interest.
Now the author seems to have been as least as colourful himself. Conybeare was a theologian and academic student of early Christianity, but was also ordained as a bishop in a small fringe Anglican (Anglo-Catholic according to Wikipedia) oecumenical group that would later have Old Catholic links and was active in an atheist rationalist organisation, the Rationalist Press Association. Activity in these organisations seems to have had at least a little overlap in time. His personal view was apparently a modernist kind of agnosticism and he had the hots for "the cause of true Rationalism" and Freethought, though the biographical material on him is rather thin so it is hard to establish the fixity of his views.
Wonderful people these early "Christists," who, although they were, as Mr. Robertson informs us (p. 348), "apostles of a Judaic cult preaching circumcision," and therefore by instinct inimical to all plastic art, nevertheless rivalled the modern archaeologist in their desire to explain old statuary. They seem to have been the prototypes of the Jews of Wardour Street. No less wonderful were they as philologists, in that, being Hebrews and presumably speaking Aramaic, they took such a healthy interest in the meaning of Latin words, and discovered in bifrons a sense which it never bore in any Latin author who ever used it!
Besides, it's not as if Carrier and Doherty are innocent of inventing unattested meanings for words, ignoring sound lexicographic methods, like when they decrete that "brothers of the Lord" must be interpreted "in the Pickwickian sense".
Conybeare also tackles a prototype of Nazareth mything and rebuts idle speculation on the term Chrestos, such as Drews' bald claim that "Chrestians" were devotees of Serapis/Osiris. (It is a sad fact that none of these pioneering Mythers imagined that Christianity was invented in the fourth century.) Add to that his colourful prose and the nice polemical barb to Conybeare's writing and his book is well worth reading for reasons other mere than antiquarian interest.
Now the author seems to have been as least as colourful himself. Conybeare was a theologian and academic student of early Christianity, but was also ordained as a bishop in a small fringe Anglican (Anglo-Catholic according to Wikipedia) oecumenical group that would later have Old Catholic links and was active in an atheist rationalist organisation, the Rationalist Press Association. Activity in these organisations seems to have had at least a little overlap in time. His personal view was apparently a modernist kind of agnosticism and he had the hots for "the cause of true Rationalism" and Freethought, though the biographical material on him is rather thin so it is hard to establish the fixity of his views.