[lbo-talk] Karl Kautsky on Christianity

[Robert Wrubel]

I think we're saying the same thing, Michael, but you
are saying it more sweepingly, and leaving less of the
core when all the layers are peeled off (and I hear
you: there are no coherent "layers" -- just a jumble
of new and old.)
However, if there was only a crazy Hasid who came in
from the country and was killed, the later writers
certainly created an effective fictional character
around him.  The angry, driven, fearless/vulnerable,
compassionate, riddling mystic they created is a lot
more interesting to me than the sententious heroes of
Greek tragedy.

BobW
--- Michael Smith <mjs at smithbowen.net> wrote:


> On Thu, 2007-08-02 at 15:45 -0600, John Thornton
> wrote:
> > Robert Wrubel wrote:
> > > to John:  I'm not sure I understand the aversion
> to
> > > the "historical Jesus" school.  If you strip
> away all
> > > the non-contemporary language (probably 90% of
> the
> > > Gospels) 
> 
> I'm a little puzzled by this statistic. Most
> scholars (faith-based and
> non-, apart from fundies) agree that the four
> gospels attained the form
> in which we now know them between 60 to 100 years
> after the events they
> narrate, or purport to narrate, and that they
> incorporate earlier texts
> and oral traditions. So speaking as a philologist,
> calling this language
> "non-contemporary" seems to commit us to a pretty
> exigeant sense of
> "contemporary." 
> 
> A faith-neutral philological/historical study of
> these quite interesting
> texts teases out a number of layers in their
> construction. Any given
> passage is quite likely to incorporate formative
> elements from various
> layers. It's not like doing archaeology, where you
> shovel away the stuff
> on top to get to the stuff that's lower down and
> hence older. You just
> can't pare away Talmud from Torah that way in the
> gospels -- it's all
> mixed up. You can make some shrewd guesses about how
> earlier material
> was re-shaped by somebody's theological or polemical
> agenda, and even
> about what the earlier material might have looked
> like -- but you can't
> really ever get back to it in any definitive way. 
> 
> BTW, very few people who know the languages and the
> texts and the
> scholarship, faith-based or non-, think that it's
> all just made up out
> of whole cloth. Everybody, apart from fundies,
> agrees that there are
> mythological and urban-legend elements there, but
> also that the point of
> departure for this elaboration of texts is a series
> of events that
> really happened. Backwoods Hasid from Galilee goes
> wandering around,
> attracting crowds, stirring people up, gets iced by
> the Romans, maybe
> with the enthusiastic cooperation of the Temple
> authorities, or maybe
> not -- this is a much-ground ax -- that's the arc,
> and there's a pretty
> good consensus that something like that is what
> started it all. 
>  
> 
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