Christianity-spouting presidential candidates versus philosophy and biblical interpretation

So, a lot of people, and not just her most ardent backers, applauded U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren for raising Matthew 25, namely, the phrase about "whatever you do to the least of these, you have done unto me.

Well ... it's not so nice, in two ways that I mention on Twitter and one way that I'll add to that.

Matthew 25 & "the least of these" is nice, but if you really need a deity to tell you that?
You probably need to learn what the Euthyphro Dilemma is.
It's called #Philosophy, folks, something not enough Americans know as is. Here's a chance to learn a bit https://t.co/W8XSPVIH8J

— I'll Be Biden Time in South Carolina primary 🚩🌻 (@AFCC_Esq) February 26, 2020

So,.what is this dilemma?

Per the link (and you can find it at any basic philosophy website, too, as I slack on a vow to use Wikipedia less this year and stop rewarding its Zionist owner), it's pretty simple, and it comes from Plato. Whitehead wasn't right that all philosophy, or even all Western philosophy, is but footnotes to Plato, but most of pre-1900 Western philosophy mostly is. But I digress.

Plato had Socrates ponder to Euthyphro:

"Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?"

And it IS a dilemma.

In case you don't want to think it through, let me help.

Substitute the word "good," and it becomes yet more stark.

If something good is loved by the gods because it is good, then the idea of goodness stands outside of the gods. If something is good because it's loved by the gods, then divine decrees could be arbitary.

And, yes, Plato used "the gods" plural. But, many classical Greeks were some sort of henotheists, at a minimum. Besides, it actually applies in spades to the Greek-extracted omnipotent + omnibenevolent god of Christianity.

(I had a graduate student at Harvard Divinity, a deep drinker from the "Ground of Being" [use solemn voice] Paul Tillich idea of god claim it didn't, but he was simply wrong.)

So, that's the philosophy issue: Trying to ground human ethics on a divine pronouncement gets you in trouble.

And, per that Wiki link, it's not a false dilemma and the idea exists independently of Platonism.

Per the tag, I've obviously blogged about this before.

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And now for the biblical interpretation side.

Click this link to read Matthew 25, especially the last part from which Warren extracts "the least of these," if you're not familiar.

Three originally independent chunks of text, with a loose unity, come together.

The Parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins is about being prepared for the Last Judgement.

The Parable of the Ten Talents is about manifesting one's faith while living a life expecting the return of the king — "The Return of the King" — it's about expecting the Last Judgement and manifesting faith, not about expecting Aragorn. The parable talks of the "master," to be honest, not a "king," but I couldn't resist the joke.

It doesn't come off as much of a parable as the Virgins, but, the passage begins with "again," indicating that it too should be regarded as a kingdom parable.

The Sheep and Goats ends us.

I don't call it a parable at all, though many commentators do. There is no "again" connecting it, and there is no "the kingdom is like" introduction. "Pronouncement story" (extended) or something like that is a better descriptive.

Anyway ...

It's a story about that Last Judgment to which the two parables above point.

Yes, Jesus does say to the "sheep" just what Warren quotes.

He also sends the goats to an eternal hell. It says that quite explicitly at the end of the story.

So, my second tweet:

Let us also remember that Matthew 25 is overall a biblical chapter about the Christian Last Judgment, with a vengeful omnipotent god sending people to an eternal hell.
Early Xn Fathers like Tertullian got their jollies by imagining part of the fun of heaven wld be watching hell.

— I'll Be Biden Time in South Carolina primary 🚩🌻 (@AFCC_Esq) February 26, 2020

And, yes, all of that, including the Tertullian stuff, is quite true. Yes, it's a punishment based on good works, not Pauline faith, faith, faith. Still, it's an eternal punishment based on this-world temporal evil. Arguably, the Jehovah's Witnesses idea of annihilation is less painful.

But, this is the Golden Rule, right?

Yes, and ...

The Silver Rule, as it's often called, is better. It's more laissez-faire. It's less meddling.

And, it is?

"Do NOT do unto others what you do NOT want done unto yourself."

In other words, live and let live in an ethical sense.

So, all political candidates, above all, presidential ones? "Judge not (by what biblical passages you cite) lest ye be judged."

Lord, Liar, or Lunatic — and mythicist!

C.S. Lewis once infamously posited the false trilemma that Jesus must either be who he said, the Lord, or else a liar or lunatic. Critical scholars have of course countered with a fourth L of legendary accretions. (That's not to say that such accretions aren't at times outright lies by the authors of New Testament books. Nor is it to say that maybe the historical Jesus himself wasn't one, or a bit meshuggah at times.)

Anyway, I recently — due to someone I once "followed" on Disqus and for whom Disqus still gives me notifications even though I no longer follow him (social media click-baitery) stopped at the site of Jonathan M.S. Pearce on Patheos.

Under discussion was a guest post about Jesus mythicism.

The mythicists, of course, would change "Legendary accretions" simply to "Legend."

That said, the light bulb came on soon enough to recognize that Lewis' original trilemma, and their own fourth L, applies to many of them.

Lord — lording it over respondents and thinking they're always right.
Liar — busted some straight-up lies, as I did not too long ago at Godless in Dixie.
Lunatic — not literally, but, some of them are crazy in a everyday sense.
Legend — in their own mind, yes.

The Lord part? Many of them (not saying most, but am saying many) refuse to accept critical scholarship, whether its biblical criticism, archaeology or more.

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The outright liar is related in one case. He claimed Nazareth didn't exist in the time of Jesus. I presented a 2009 archaeological study that said "yes it did." He then claimed the Israeli Antiquities Authority pulled back somewhat from the author's statements.

First, that's not the same as rejecting the findings. Second, new archaeological study, from 2015 and ongoing to the degree it can, has found new evidence that says yes it did exist then. His response? Handwaving and talking about Helena. (He then pulled out Jesus ben Pandera, with his one mythicist website claiming he lived circa 100 BCE. Wrong. That's conflating the idea that the HJ may have been based on a Jesus crucified by Alexander Jannaeus with the ben Pandera of the Toledoth Yeshu.) More here on the actual existence of first-century Nazareth. Tis true that we cannot date to more precisely in the first century, but that alone undercuts mythicists.

(Pictured at right: A house in Nazareth dated to the first century CE and believed by some Christians to be the house of Jesus' childhood.)

Update, Dec. 20, 2020: And, Pearce himself is looking ever more like a mythicist fellow traveler at a minimum. From a new post, I quote.

Rene Salm’s thesis in The Myth of Nazareth: The Invented Town of Jesus that Nazareth did not exist at the time of Jesus, according to archaeological analysis, and not until at least 70 CE.

This is simply not true. One cannot generally date archaeological evidence of habitation to that precise of a time. I'm sure Pearce's quoted author would say something like "but the Judean revolt." And I would respond: Rome did not put every village in Galilee and Judea to fire and the sword. Oh, and I'll take Ken Dark, author of the second linked piece three paragraphs above, over Rene Salm any time. James McGrath, whom I will also take over Salm, offers indirect further evidence for the existence of Nazareth at the time of Jesus.

I want to quote McGrath, as it's another line that to some degree is applicable to mythicists in general:

For those who may have bought into the “Nazareth never existed” nonsense, I encourage you to reflect on the fact that you have listened to the archaeological equivalent of young-earth creationists. They might well be genuinely skeptical in other areas, but in this one they’ve bought into a conspiracy theory, and one that simply does not fit the evidence we’ve long had, much less the evidence that has come to light more recently.

Sorry, but it's true.

Dark also notes elsewhere how soon after Jesus' death Christians were to put labels on some sites as being part of Jesus' history. They still may not be accurate, but the earliest of the labelings could reflect an oral history going back further than the first written sources and so, at a minimum, should NOT be rejected out of hand. 

Pearce says he's "not sold on mythicism" (my emphasis) but he certainly doesn't reject it, claiming he finds Salm's work "interesting though." It must be noted that Salm is not an academic, or even close. Shades of Joe Atwill, he's a music teacher!!! If anything, he's anti-academic vis-a-vis biblical scholarship. You may not be "sold" on mythicism, Jonathan ... but you're close to duck-quacking.

(Update, June 12: Pierce says now he leans away from mythicism, and actually, see below as for what the term is about, cites things like the scandal of particularity to boost a historical Jesus claim.)

Finally, there's the scandal of particularity, perhaps strongest in John, where Nathaniel sneers in John 1:45, "Can anything good come from Nazareth?" and John 7 having the rhetorical question about the Messiah not coming from Galilee. Per Pearce's post in question at his comment, I agree with him than Matthew 2 mangles "netzer." BUT ... Matthew is doing pesher on the Tanakh via the Septuagint. (The author of the Gospel was almost certainly a Greek-speaker.) And, perhaps, this is his attempt to explain away where Jesus is from with hand-waving, or to deliberate conflate different Hebrew words into a bad pun or three, shades of the Yahwist. The wrongness, deliberate mangling, or whatever, is no proof that Nazareth didn't exist. None.

The most likely story, given he had one known Zealot (anachronistic to a degree) and one possible Sicarian disciple is that Jesus was born and raised in Nazareth, and that this was indeed an embarrassment. As gospelers reached the second and third generations, they not only invented a birth for him in Bethlehem, but also invented a Davidic family tree which most likely is totally untrue in both Matthew and Luke.

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Back to the original.

A second outright liar? This person, "pofarmer," not just to me but to others, posits "academic essentialism." In other words, because Bart Ehrman did his undergrad at a Bible college, he can never be really trusted. My response is that because Joe Stalin went to an Orthodox seminary, then he must have remained a secret Xn all of his life. I posted that in response to him, then in the mains. I called him out a second time in mains, and when he wouldn't respond, blocked him.

Lunatics? Well, not lunacy, but psychological projection — beyond the fact that many mythicists, as Gnu Atheists, are the atheist equivalent of Christian fundamentalists, is real.

Legends in their own mind? Yes.

So, the block function on Disqus got a workout. Both liars and two lunatics? Gone.

I have long thought that many Gnu Atheists feel they "Have to" disprove the existence of a historical Jesus to disprove the belief system of Christianity, and that simply doesn't logically follow. I don't have to disprove the existence of Siddhartha Gautama re Buddhism, or, although he wasn't divinized, Muhammad on Islam.

Otherwise, I'm sympathetic to a high degree of legendary accretions, perhaps more than a, say, Bart Ehrman. (He has other issues, such as misinterpretation of the We passages in Acts.)

But, I also know the history of Jesus mythicism, and that its first go-round happened at the same time as the first search for the historical Jesus and a first push for Buddha mythicism.

That said, I wonder if with Gnus, part of it is also the angle that Camus posited in "The Rebel." They feel they have to fight against this Jesus, and the "best" way to "win" this fight is allegedly prove he didn't exist.

That said, although it was a guest post, and I'm not sure of Pearce's own stand on mythicism, any philosophizing type (I think he's got a master's at least in the field) who claims to be "presenting a wealth of evidence in support of a deterministic worldview" is himself a liar. I posted something politely to that effect in the main thread and got no response.