From: tycchow@cayley.mit.edu (Timothy Y. Chow)
Subject: Re: Who is Christian - a simple answer
Organization: None.  This saves me from writing a disclaimer.
Date: Tue, 26 Jan 93 20:39:23 GMT

This discussion probably does not belong on talk.origins, so hit 'n' now to
skip it.

In article <1jv8amINNokc@morrow.stanford.edu> salem@pangea.Stanford.EDU (Bruce Salem) writes:
>In article <1jpnkmINN272@dmsoproto.ida.org> rlg@omni (Randy garrett) writes:
>>But Christ taught that He was divine.
>
>	Did he now? Or do we simply misread out of all context the code
>language of Jewish sects in the First Century.  In one sense Christ was
>divine, by definition, he was the heir of the House of David, the legitimate
>theocracy, and would have been called divine by that virtue alone, by
>birth alone, just at the Japanese would have called their Emperior
>divine up until the end of WWII.

It's more than this, though.  Ignoring skepticism about the Gospels for the
moment, Jesus claimed to be the Christ (John 4:25-26) and the Son of God
(Matt. 26:63-64), and those who heard him understood him to be blaspheming
(Matt. 26:65, John 5:18).  These can't be explained as late (you suggest
fifth century) additions, because we have much earlier manuscript
attestations (3rd century, and fragments from 2nd century) than that.

>not much of what he said was new, if he actually said it at
>all, but part of a tradition of teaching that was well established

I mentioned this in a previous article.  There is plenty of stuff in
the Gospels that is not just part of a well-established tradition.
Those who argue that Jesus did not say much new typically begin with
the *assumption* that the church put words into Jesus' mouth to bolster
their Christology, and hence that anything in the Gospels resembling
early church doctrine has to be rejected as historically unreliable.
The limitations of this assumption and the biases it introduces have
long been recognized in Biblical scholarship, though incautious use of
the assumption persists in more popular books.

>Accepting Christ's divinity does not suddenly validate what he said,

This depends on what you mean by "divinity."  If you accept, for example,
John's Christology, then I don't see how you can still reject what Christ
teaches.  It's more consistent to reject Jesus' divinity than to accept it
and reject his teaching.

>	In a real sense there is a built in irony in all of this,
>despite the claim that there is an external all-powerful authority
>for what constitutes faith, the range of belief and the ways people
>act suggests that in fact the greatest authority for belief is individual
>choice

I think you're abusing the word "authority" here.  By saying that individual
choice is the greatest "authority" for belief, do you just mean that choice
is the most powerful of the forces that determine what one *actually*
believes?  This seems to be the most one can deduce from observation, but
then it seems you want to go on to say that one *ought* to set oneself up
as the ultimate authority on the question of what one's beliefs *should* be.
This doesn't follow.  Analogously, the variety of people's moral beliefs
does not imply moral relativism, as a growing number of (secular) moral
realists argue.

>It is concievable to me that the whole story was an event
>blown all out of proportion by subsequent legend.

This hypothesis has been beaten to death by scholars.  Legends take time to
grow, and there just wasn't enough time between the event and the recording
of the event for any significant legendary development to take place.
Textual evidence suggests that the narrative of Christ's crucifixion and
resurrection was one of the earliest to assume a fixed form, because it was
crucial to the early church to get the facts straight on this critical
issue.  The passion narrative shows very few if any of the legendary
features surrounding some of the accounts in apocryphal texts.

>	The whole story is a metaphor, an embellished history,

This is possible, but to support this hypothesis you'd need to explain a
lot of things.  For example, it seems that your historical skepticism is
very high.  Such skepticism is popular among NT scholars, but it needs to
be justified.  Secular historians such as Adrian Sherwin-White often
express surprise at the methods of NT scholars, whose skepticism is far
more extreme than that which is normal for historical research.  I
personally don't think that this extreme methodological skepticism is
justified, especially because the early Christians took pains to ground
their faith in historical reality.  If they were just concerned with
abstract spiritual truths, how do you explain Luke's painstaking concern
for historical accuracy, or Paul's concern with the historicity of Christ's
resurrection (I Cor. 15:1-14)?
-- 
Tim Chow     tycchow@math.mit.edu
Where a calculator on the ENIAC is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighs
30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and weigh
only 1 1/2 tons.                               ---Popular Mechanics, March 1949
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