Beware of people who want to “make room” for things
For yet more illiberal bullying from theists and friends-of-theists, you could do worse than to read the comments on this post at the feminist site The F-Word. The post is about C of E priest Miranda Threllfall-Jones saying gosh darn it Jesus was a big ol’ feminist and anyone who says he wasn’t is just a big poopy-head. Our friend Amy Clare, who has written for the F-Word, wrote the first comment to say 1. there is no evidence that Jesus was a feminist and 2. what does it matter anyway? There was some agreement and some disagreement, and then there was a temper tantrum by an outraged entitled Christian.
I am so fed up of people, mostly atheist thinking that it is their right to make horrible comments about Christianity. I am actually surprised these comments ended up on this site. calling the bible a book of fairytales does not show respect to the many Christian feminists (myself included). If the same comments were made about the Koran I doubt they would be included. i have just turned 18 and i have never in my whole life took the piss out of any kind of religion because it is so disrespectful.
The first sentence is especially choice – imagine, we think it is our right to make “horrible comments” about Christianity! But people say silly things all over the internet; nothing to see here. What is worth noticing though is the near-torrent of supportive bullying that followed, and especially the really nasty bullying that came from the people who run the F-Word.
We can’t get into a situation where any feminist who has religious/spiritual beliefs is constantly challenged to prove her religion is true every time she writes/reports on/ wants to publicise feminist activism in religious/spiritual groups.
In other words, we can’t get into a situation where women are actually challenged about their religious beliefs. Er…why not? What is it about feminism that makes that such a shocking prospect? Is feminism a word for “fragile flower” now? Is it a word for “woman who can’t bear to have to justify her beliefs”?
The F Word has always had (or tried to have) a broad interpretation of feminism and that includes religious/spiritual feminists as well as agnostic/atheist feminists. There is plenty of opportunity elsewhere to debate and argue the existence of God/Jesus etc. for the rest of eternity if you want to. I’m just don’t think that this is the right time and place for it.
In other words, stfu.
This was made even clearer in the final comment.
Amy Clare – The issue raised in this post was gender stereotyping in the Church of English; NOT the truth about whether Jesus actually existed. By bringing this up in the first comment, the opportunity for Christian feminists to potentially discuss this issue has been closed down. Atheists are more than welcome to contribute blog posts and features to TFW that analyse and critique religion as it relates to women’s rights, but we would also like to have some space where religious women can discuss feminism as it relates to their religion, without constantly having to justify their beliefs.
Disputing a claim is closing down an opportunity for believers in that claim to speak. If you disagree (according to this logic) you are shutting down anyone who disagrees with you. Disagreement becomes a form of silencing, and the remedy is to silence the person who disagreed. So that’s what “the collective” at the F-Word is going to be doing.
I was merely trying to explain why I think we need to make room for religious/spiritual beliefs within feminism, no matter whether you or I or anyone else views them as being sufficiently rooted in evidence.I will not be publishing any further comments on this thread, unless they relate to the post itself i.e. the issue of gender stereotyping in the Church and whether Jesus can be viewed as a feminist within the teachings of Christianity.
The collective will be amending our charter and/or comments policy in the near future to take the issues raised in this thread (and previously) into account.
If that’s feminism, what am I?
But, fortunately, that’s not feminism. It’s clearly a variant of it, but it’s not the thing itself. Feminism doesn’t think women need to be infantilized; on the contrary, feminism thinks women need to be treated like adults, and that they also need to act like adults. They don’t need to be coddled, and they don’t need to be encouraged to act like frangible fractious babies.
It’s disgusting for those thoughtless atheists to break into the comment thread of a post entitled “Jesus was a feminist.” And, hey, I’m as atheist as they come.
Well, that would be because Christianity is both false and weak. I acknowledge the point you are making. Is it that you wish Christianity could threaten violence so effectively?
Oh, man, where to start. I thought maybe with trying to understand what Jessica meant by I’m a phenomenologist and an existentialist. I’m afraid I’m not getting very far.
I’m tired of people pretending that holy books which support hatred of and discrimination against women really support feminism.
“If the same comments were made about the Koran I doubt they would be included.”
Why is it that some Christians who disagree with Islam also seem to find its existence so very convenient as a distraction tactic? Whenever anyone says anything about Christianity, they bring up Islam right away instead of actually making a valid point about their own religion.
I’ve never understood why religious belief and hypersensitivity to criticism (nay even mild questioning!) seem to go hand in hand with awkward grammar. Thank you for that post!
@Ken – LOL :)
It’s amusing seeing an 18-y.o. going on about how she’s never done X in her “whole life”. Yes, I realise that 18 is all grown up. But her “whole life” of being all grown up is – what? A year? Two years? Maybe about three years at the absolute most, if we assume she was a very mature 15 y.o. Hardly evidence for anything, n’est-ce pas?
Of course, that’s also a reason to cut her a bit of slack. 18 is kinda grown up … but it’s hardly experienced.
“Of course, that’s also a reason to cut her a bit of slack. 18 is kinda grown up … but it’s hardly experienced.”
We are raising the first generation of young adults who must live with all of their humiliating teenage bullshit forever preserved on the Internet.
Good for you, Amy. You are absolutely right. I hope you won’t mind me saying that reading through the row made me laugh, principally because of the infantility on parade from your interlocutors, and because the editor, in her various reprovings and final shut-down of everything, and in her quite sickening condescension, sounded exactly like a not very bright primary school-teacher laying down the law to a room-full of fractious children – and when I was at primary school such teachers wielded rulers with which to smack the children’s calfs.
Really? Then why use “Jesus was a feminist” for a title? Would they be happy with an article called “Jean Valjean was a misogynist”?
I’d cut an 18 year old a bit of slack myself. But one day she is going to have to learn that what you produce, whether it’s a piece of work or an argument, isn’t going to be treated with the same indulgence as the pictures that you painted at primary school, or your lumpy attempts at pottery, which your parents stuck on the fridge or put on the mantelpiece. Other people who don’t love you for your cute little self are going to trash them.
I think feminism is more prone to this kind of thing than any other “ism”, and some feminists cry like babies if you ask for a bit of logic and reason.
BTW I think you can make a case for Jesus as being more female-friendly. The women in the New Testament seem freer than today’s women in Saudi Arabia, being able to converse with men who aren’t their immediate kin for instance and their reportage and views being treated seriously. It was one jibe against Christianity that women took to it.
Amy, I couldn’t agree with you more.
The entire point of the F-Word post seemed to be an exercise in imaginative historical re-interpretation. The desired end result was presumably to make Christian women feel better about a religion that has been, and is, overwhelmingly patriarchal.
@ KB Player – I don’t about that. You hear similar claims about Mohammad, peace be upon him, and his Sharia law being pro-women and liberating them with his enlightened laws. At best there is some anecdotal evidence that suggest he may not have been a complete misogynist. However by the same anecdotal evidence he didn’t speak very nicely to his mother in public, was rather rude to non-Jewish women and the least said about the infamous washing-feet-with-hair incident the better.
Back in the day when I was still trying to take Catholicism seriously I also heard a bit of the “Jesus is a feminist” “God is also female and I can cherry-pick 3 verses from the bible to prove it” arguments. The interesting thing was that virtually nobody took it seriously even inside the rather liberal university chaplaincy that existed there, and it was certainly never included in Sunday homilies. It absolutely was never heard of in your average neighborhood parish church. It seemed to be a clever device to keep slightly more liberal Catholic women distracted while the rest of the church got on with business as usual.
Yet another person who does not understand logical positivism. How on earth will that “meme” be stopped?
Once again, the positivists at best claimed to have no metaphysical position, at worst were phenomenalists (not phenomenologists, though the dangers of both are the same – subjectivism. And I don’t mean the opposite of the snake oil fascism lite of Rand, either.)
I will begin to believe all this Jesus stuff when I read the first Veronica 1st gospel. I doubt I will ever see it.
Fair enough, grania.0. I’m always interested in women’s rights in the past – eg women had more rights and freedom of movement in ancient Rome as compared to ancient Greece but it isn’t something you can make policy out of for today.
It’s jihad envy.
@ KB Player:
I take your point about early Christianity being a bit more attractive to women than some other contemporary religions but then so was the cult of Isis. If someone said that Isis was a feminist and someone else pointed out that actually she doesn’t exist and Egyptian mythology is no guide to how to live in the modern world I doubt the latter comment would get the same sort of trashing as Amy Clare did.
I might believe that Jesus was a feminist if I believed Jesus actually existed.
Arguments like this are as ludicrous as arguing over whether Santa Claus supports gay rights or the Easter Bunny opposed slavery.
‘ i have just turned 18 and i have never in my whole life took the piss out of any kind of religion because it is so disrespectful.’
I’d say any 18 year old who hasn’t taken the piss out or religion hasn’t lived yet.
“The Church of English”? What’s that then? Somewhere where the blessed Lynne Truss is high priestess, no doubt.
I’m sorry, but reading through some of those comments put me in mind of Douglas Adams and his Golgafrinchians. Nasally inserted, anyone?
Thanks for writing this, Ophelia, and thanks for all the supportive comments everyone!
It’s quite ironic that the moderator of the thread in question said The F Word would welcome articles from atheists and agnostics which analyse and critique religion as it relates to women’s rights… because I submitted exactly such an article to them last year, and they never published it. Eventually, I got the hint. Thankfully it was published here on Butterflies and Wheels instead (‘Why feminism must embrace reason and shun religion’), earlier this year. :-)
I’m probably going to stop reading The F Word now, but maybe I’ll check back now and again to see whether they’ve got any posts up discussing the feminist nature (or otherwise) of astrology, the celestial teapot and the leprechaun that sits on my laptop telling me to burn stuff.
I did say a few times in the thread that I’d almost had it with feminism – that’s not quite true. I’ve had it with the brand of feminism being pushed by TFW and its ilk. Feminism, like Ophelia quite rightly says, is about treating women like adults.
‘… the leprechaun that sits on my laptop telling me to burn stuff.’
Oh, thank god I’m not the only one who’s seen that – I thought I was losing my mind!
“feminism is about treating women like adults.”
Does any religion treat women as adults.. ? For that matter does it treat anyone as adult ?.. It just tells you that you need to be taught, taught what ? taught things any average school kid can produce without reading a single word from these holy books.
Look however deep into the books, you will never find anything that any school kid already does not know.
So the defense of religion is nothing but a defense of its power, that is defense of patriarchy…..pseudo-feminism would be the word to describe religious feminism.
Arguably Quaker. If you go to a Quaker ceremony you’ll see what I mean.
But I’m just picking nits here. :)
On the topic of the original F-word post, I think if you take at face value what is said in the gospels, it’s pretty clear that the character of Jesus was not a feminist in any sense of the word. That said, a number of the early Christian sects circa 100-300 BC were radically pro-gender equality. Of course, they were also in favor of universal abstinence… but whatever, the point is indeed, Who cares?
Ah yes, but what is a feminist?
This is the view of most ordinary people, a view that I have to agree with –
Feminists are resentful, belligerent and quarrelsome women. They are also usually ignorant and misinformed with weak self control. Feminists use to be called
‘men haters’ and ‘troublemakers’
. They have always been around throughout human history and their main intent is to create ill will, bad feeling, and malice between men and women, usually by unfounded assertions – even lies. The term to describe them is ‘misandrists’, who have an attitude of ‘misandry’.
The cause is the maternal instinct which regards men as either a mating object when in lust, or a potential danger to the family unit to be driven away when not, by making life as difficult as possible. The male equivalent – male aggression – is the pack hunting instinct. Throughout history this has resulted in armies and wars.
Mature and well balanced people recognise the problems and control their instincts and emotions using basic social skills and practical common sense, something the selfish feminist is very lacking in.
The Abrahamic religions make it a point to treat all of humanity like stupid, bratty kids who “deserve” to be punished by their “heavenly father.” For a Christian church to deny women their essential adulthood is a subset of the whole religion’s repugnant insistence on the permanent infantilism of all humans — written in especially large print.
Well you don’t actually have to agree with that ridiculous view of what feminism is, Dave; you choose to. And your version of “the view of most ordinary people” is quite remarkably detailed. Do you really know what most ordinary people think?
As for the substance of your claim, it’s idiotic.
[This is not the Dave who usually comments here, Dave Andress; this is a different Dave.]
Nice one Dave, you’ve given me a good laugh there. Is that the script from a 1952 public information film, or did you copy and paste from an MRA site? Either way I particularly like the bit about ‘when in lust’. Ooer.
What you wrote is so ludicrous that actually I have to conclude you’re not real. A bit like Jesus.
Aw F-word, that got mangled somehow in the cutting and pasting. Ophelia, feel free to delete it, and I’ll repost if you want. :-(
Ok Paul, will do. Yes do repost.
Dave seems like a resentful, belligerent, and quarrelsome man to me.
And anyway, since many men consider themselves to be feminists, his definition falls down from the very first sentence.
Reply to Jame Sweet
‘his definition’? It was not a definition, it is a general view, a view I share, of most ordinary people. And the fact a man considers himself to be a feminist does not make him one, anymore that a man who considers himself popular with women is in fact so.
The term ‘feminist’ is such a vague one, with such a wide definition, it is in effect a meaningless term, and it is the view of the majority of ordinary people that gives in any meaning. Furthermore – if you are really unaware of the view I described then you must live a very introverted lifestyle.
Reply to Amy Clair
‘I have to conclude you’re not real. A bit like Jesus’
The evidence for Jesus is conclusive.
Oh no, I am well aware of the viewpoint. I think it is a strawman viewpoint. Have there ever been misandric feminists? Oh sure, but there’s this popular perception that it’s a large part of the movement. It’s not. It’s like, four people. Seriously. It’s probably as prevalent as, well, atheists who oppose gay marriage. They exist, but — what the fuck?
No no, see this caricature you have described, while a far too prevalent perception, was not a reaction against a subset of feminists who “went too far”. It is an invention created by men who are afraid of losing their male privilege. (Note that I’m not saying it is some dark conspiracy — the creation if this caricature was probably not even a conscious act) That caricature is now used to intimidate women from considering themselves a feminist.
How often have you heard a woman say, “Oh, I’m all for equal rights for women, but I’m not a feminist!” That’s very sad, because that’s basically saying, “I don’t want to be treated like shit, but I also don’t want to be perceived as being too loud about it because then men will think I’m a bitch.”
And let’s be clear: That situation doesn’t exist because of some alleged uber-feminist misandric fringe groups. I mean, have you ever heard someone say, “Oh, I’m all for equal rights for all ethnicities, but I’m not a civil rights activist!” for fear of being associated with the Black Panthers? That’s silly. No, this “I’m-for-equal-rights-but-not-a-feminist” attitude is because of men like you who perpetuate the mythical image of a feminist as a “resentful, belligerent, and quarrelsome woman”. Whether you know you are doing it or not, you are intimidating women from speaking out for themselves.
Note also the word choice. “Quarrelsome”. In other words, willing to argue. If this were a man advocating for his chosen cause, you might call him “outspoken”. but if it’s a woman, especially if she dares to talk about gender issues, then she’s “quarrelsome”, a “troublemaker”. In a way I’m surprised you left out the favorite bludgeoning word of those who seek to perpetuate male privilege.
This is the message that men ought to be sending: It’s okay to be feminist! Women have historically been screwed over to an unimaginable degree, and though things are much better now (in the West at least), women still get screwed over far too often. Even something as subtle as being called “quarrelsome” instead of “outspoken”, while not discriminatory per se, screws women over by intimidating them from speaking out about the things they care about. How can a reasonable ethical thinking person not oppose that bullshit?
How can a reasonable, ethical, thinking person not be a feminist?
I don’t really want to get into the issue of whether Jesus actually existed, but the issue of the sparsity and paucity of evidence is really important for feminist Christian argumentation.
There is no reliable evidence that Jesus even existed, and nothing remotely like good evidence that he was a feminist, especially in a modern sense. There are no authentic independent attestations of Jesus’s existence, outside the Gospels. Josephus mentioned him, but only as the guy around whom the Christian cult formed—he was taking the Christians’ word for it that there was in fact such a guy. Other supposed contemporary attestations are extremely dubious. (E.g., apparently later Christian insertions into earlier texts; the apparently earliest versions of the documents don’t mention Jesus at all, and the insertions don’t fit linguistically.)
The Gospels are generally agreed by non-fundamentalists scholars NOT to have been written by the disciples whose names they bear. Those names are later and clearly mistaken attributions, in modern terms. (There was a tradition in the Mediterranean region of writing anonymously, pseudonymously, and often in the name of a respected teacher figure, rather like Plato’s sock-puppeting of Socrates. Modern ideas of authorship, plagiarism and attribution don’t necessarily apply.) The fact that we’re not even sure Jesus existed—or more importantly, whether he existed even roughly as described by any of the various conflicting documents we have—means that there really is little evidence to support any of the varying common scholarly interpretations of Jesus. The earliest Christian writings in the Bible appear to be the Gospel of Mark (not by Mark) and the writings of Paul, who clearly never met Jesus himself, and led the Christian movement in strange directions. (Often antifeminist, but that doesn’t mean that the other and earlier people were feminists.) The Synoptic Gospels (Mark, Luke, and Matthew) apparently cribbed from an earlier document scholars call Q or the Sayings Gospel Q. That was a apparently just a list of aphorisms and parables to which Jesus’s name became attached. (Maybe because he really said them, or maybe because his name was attached to them later for any of several plausible reasons. At least one of the other Synoptic Gospels cribbed from Mark. We don’t really know if any of the narrative stuff about Jesus’s life is correct. A lot of it appears to be made up well after the fact and interpolated among the sayings of Jesus. Much of it appears to have been made up to retroactively support the claim that Jesus was the fulfillment of ancient Hebre.)
My question for the people arguing that Jesus was a feminist is this: do you know this kind of stuff? (Have you read Price, and/or a good varied sample of the “historical Jesus” literature?) Do you really think you can make a good historical case? My impression is that to make any interesting case, you have to pick and choose which bits of scripture to take seriously, guided by an underlying theory of a historical Jesus, but that ends up being a mostly circular argument and an exercise in projection. Few people who do that make it clear enough which parts of scripture they’re dismissing as somehow inauthentic, and why, because they don’t want to make it clear that they really don’t trust scripture, or have to argue why we should trust some parts of it, when we don’t trust the rest.
I guess another question I have for the people trying to use Jesus as a feminist figure is: are you sincere? Or is this just an effort to cobble up a story, pretty much any story, to counter more orthodox antifeminist interpretations, as a defensive measure? Do you really believe Jesus was a feminist, and that prophecies—just-so stories about his lineage, riding into town on an ass, etc. Much may have been retrofitted to explain Jesus’s unexpected death. (The core of orthodox Christian theology, about Jesus’s dying for our sins, may have been cobbled up after his crucifixion, which may have been a big surprise to him and to his followers. Orthodox Christianity may be almost totally unrelated to his actual message, even assuming he existed and had a coherent message.) Serious and respected scholars disagree about almost everything about Jesus, picking and choosing which stuff they consider relatively reliable, and plausibly reading him as very different kinds of figures, e.g., as (1) a progressive social revolutionary, or (2) a Stoic- (and/or Cynic-)like non-revolutionary social “outsider” critic, (3) a Hebrew-style messiah (that is, more of a religious revolutionary and military leader than a social critic of the modern sort) (4) a traveling wonder-worker, of a the sort which was a dime a dozen at the time—lots of people wandered around the region doing “miracles” at that time (5) an apocalyptic cult leader (6) a non-apocalyptic mystical teacher and cult leader unlike any of the above, or maybe (7) a legend that grew by accretion around a relatively small and uninteresting kernel of truth around one or a few historical figures, like William Tell. (William Tell never did most of the things attributed to him, including founding the Swiss Confederacy. “William Tell” was apparently a bunch of different people whose exploits got attributed to some particular guy. Jesus may be a similarly legendary figure, with multiple independent lines of description and narratives getting lumped together–rather like Paul Bunyan accreting tall stories from many origins, but more serious.)
Robert M. Price has written a couple of books about this sort of thing, which are worth reading if you think the historical Jesus is somehow important. Price was a member of the Jesus Seminar, which brought together a bunch of serious “historical Jesus” scholars, defending the various points of view above. Price goes back and shows just how weak the historical evidence for the different styles of Jesus really is—“Historical Jesus” scholars often seem to pick and choose what to take seriously in order to project a desired idea of Jesus. This is a horrendous problem for any sincere and responsible argument from Jesus to feminism. The evidence just isn’t there, or isn’t at all compelling, and you can make comparably good arguments for a very different Jesus.
My own best guess is roughly this: 1. That there was a guy called Yeshua (a common name), or came to be called that, who said some of the Sayings. Others were added to the list by people around him, or the list may have been a list of valued sayings and the particular figure of Jesus may have been fabricated as a kind of figurehead. (Not an uncommon pattern of legendmaking.) 2. There may have been a crucifixion of that guy or some other guy who was later conflated with him, and much of orthodox Christian theology is a response to that, trying to find meaning in a leader’s stunning failure. (Also not an uncommon pattern in cults.) 3. Some of the narrative of Jesus’s life was just to personalize a relatively abstract figure who left little authentic narrative. (Also a common pattern.) 4. Much of the religiously-freighted narrative of Jesus’s life was retrofitted to sell Jesus as the Jewish messiah, to make him appealing to Jews. This probably occurred well after the death of any historical Jesus, but mostly before the fall of the Second Temple in 70 AD. 5. Some time after the Romans crushed the Jewish rebellion and destroyed the second Temple, more stuff was added to reframe Jesus as a religious figure appealing to non-Jews. (It was no longer cool to be “Jewish,” and the Jews hadn’t really bought into Christianity.) The Jesus story was adapted to a non-Jewish audience. (This started with Paul but most of the narrative detail was added later by others.)
As an atheist, I don’t see how any of this should really matter to feminism, but that’s not my point here. My point is that making any argument about Jesus is difficult if you’re not going to make dogmatic claims that will be countered by equally good dogmatic claims. Dogma and faith aside, we just don’t know who Jesus was, or have any real evidence that he was progressive in ways that go beyond what might have been said by a Stoic or Cynic hundreds of years earlier in Greece or Rome, and filtered around the Mediterranean to be said later by some itinerant countercultural Jew, after Hellenization of many urban Jews. And if we do argue dogma and faith, we have the problem that this modestly progressive view can be countered by views of Jesus as the fulfillment of the Hebrew scriptures, the Law, etc. There’s plenty of orthdoxly religious stuff attributed to Jesus in the Bible that can be used to argue for the oppression of women, and no good historical evidence for a clear, consistent, plausible and well-evidenced story either way. The Bible is an incoherent mess written by many hands with conflicting points of view over long periods of time, and the Jesus story in particular appears to have been repeatedly mangled from whatever kernel of truth it may have had—including clearly tangling it up with earlier messes. (Fulfilling The Law, making Jesus the prophesied Jewish messiah who was actually nothing like our concept of Jesus, etc.) Is there any evidence that he was somehow a useful authority on feminism?
Well, dang. It looked okay in preview, but came out mangled and deformatted again. Sorry.
<blockquote>The evidence for Jesus is conclusive.</blockquote>
Well, so, there you go, Dave is a moron.
Note that I’m not saying you are a moron because you are (I assume) religious. Plenty of non-morons believe in Jesus. But they believe whether there is evidence for his existence or not. Which is a lucky thing for them because, uh, there’s no historically evidence for it (nor much against it, for that matter… my gut feeling is there was a historical Jesus, but it’s anybody’s guess, really)
Unless you were talking about Pablo…. (reference to WEIT thread, I know Ophelia will get it)
FWIW, the instinct for men to perpetuate male privilege is a strong one. I am sure I do it without being aware of it. I consider myself a feminist, and yet I accidentally employ anti-feminist language and attitudes pretty regularly. It’s really hard not to; society is structured that way, and I strongly suspect we’re sort of biologically wired that way, too.
The first step is realizing that a) as a man, you certainly have and will continue to have advantages for your entire life that you are often not even aware of; and b) it is likely, though not certain, that you will at times exploit and/or perpetuate those advantages without even being aware of it. There is a blind spot that develops from growing up in a position of privilege, and the sooner we can acknowledge that blind spot the better. The more aware you are of that blind spot, the smaller it becomes.
I don’t ever expect to eliminate it altogether, though. And so it is of the utmost importance that those who are coming from a position of privilege, and yet seek to behave ethically, always maintain the utmost humility in terms of our perceived ability of understanding those who we have historically been privileged over.
Dave, you forgot to answer my question: what makes you think you know what most ordinary people think?
Oh no no, that’s quite wrong. Thinking oneself popular is an opinion about the minds of other people (as in claiming to know what most ordinary people think), but considering oneself to be a feminist is an opinion about one’s own mind. The latter is a good deal more reasonable to claim than the former.
I put in a few conjectural breaks, Paul. I hope they work for you. :- )
Dave,
Please try to read my long post above, despite the loss of formatting. (I don’t think it’s actually that hard.)
If you think there’s conclusive evidence for Jesus, what is it?
I suspect you could benefit from reading Robert M. Price’s Deconstructing Jesus (and no, it’s not deconstructionism in the annoying pomo sense) or maybe his more recent The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man. (I haven’t read the latter myself, but it may be more “pop” and accessible. The former isn’t a tough read, though.)
The dirty secret of “historical Jesus” studies is that there’s no conclusive evidence, and not even any actually good evidence, about Jesus. The best candidate for an authentic record of an actual person is the Sayings Gospel Q, the original of which was lost long ago, but whose existence can be fairly reliably inferred. (E.g., from many sayings and parables occurring in the exact same order in the gospels, with different narrative interpolations and theological extrapolations.) And given the culture of philosophical schools and cults at the time, you mustn’t count on such a list of “teachings” actually corresponding to what the teacher actually taught, as opposed to the teachings of a group of people who attribute their supposed coherence to the workings of a single authoritative progenitor figure, who may be entirely mythical.
Like James, I suspect there was an actual human individual around whom legends grew, but that’s just a guess, and beyond that, the “historical” record shows all the usual signs of mythmaking, like the “historical record” of William Tell. The further back you go, in light of more recently-discovered but older documents, the less clear the story gets, which is the opposite of the case with most actual historical figures. It’s quite clear that most of what people think is known about Jesus likely comes from later accretions by people cribbing from various earlier sources and grinding various axes. (E.g., making him out to be the Jewish messiah, when that was fashionable, or god Incarnate risen from the dead, after he died, etc.)
One thing Jesus clearly didn’t do was make it easy to establish that he actually existed, or especially what his actual message was. That makes perfect sense if you view him as one philosophical teacher or apocalyptic cult leader or miracle worker or self-professed messiah among many, whose school or cult happened to evolve to hit the big time, under various political pressures and subject to various personal reinterpretations. It doesn’t make much sense if you think he actually was God incarnate who actually said and did most of the things attributed to him by orthodox Christianity, unless you think he wanted it to be an exercise of faith to even believe he existed at all, much less to divine what he actually wanted you to think and do. He also mostly wasn’t nearly as novel and original as the majority of Christians think—most of what he allegedly said was in the zeitgeist at the time, largely due to the influence of the Greeks and neighboring cultures—and certainly left no demonstrably superhuman insights.
(Both the sayings and the narratives bear suspicious resemblances to things that people attributed to others earlier—e.g., the cult of Mithra, ambient Greek Stoicism, well-known Jewish prophecies that his followers would naturally try to shoehorn him into once they decided to sell him as the Jewish “messiah,” Greek metaphysics alien to Judaism but popular among Hellenized Jews at the time, and anti-Jewish themes added to the story once people started marketing it to Gentiles, and so on.)
It is pretty clear that we don’t have first-hand accounts of Jesus, and that the second- and third- and fourth-hand accounts we do have are not distingishable from common mythmaking. Much of the narrative detail is obviously false—e.g., a confusion of two different Herods, a Roman census that didn’t happen and couldn’t have worked the way the narrative required, various timeline and geography errors, various things that would have been quite noteworthy and worth recording to the Romans but apparently weren’t noticed or recorded by them, and clear alleged fulfillments of clearly misinterpreted ancient prophecies, etc.
(And then there’s Paul, my unfortunate namesake, who was the single biggest influence on modern Christianity, but who never met Jesus in the flesh—and whose distinctive views of Jesus and the movement were apparently not particularly popular with people who plausibly actually knew Jesus, up close and personal. Paul reshaped the Jesus movement(s) in his own twisted image; what the original image was is quite unclear, and it’s clear there was considerable diversity pre-Paul.)
Modern historians and historical linguists have tools that cast very grave doubt on the authenticity of the gospels, and of supposedly contemporary independent accounts of Jesus. For example, there are no actually contemporary independent accounts of Jesus that aren’t pretty clearly later Christian insertions into older texts. (The language is typically in the wrong dialect and/or refers to later events that a contemporary writer could not have actually have known about, and/or which does not appear in copies from Egypt or Syria or wherever—only in copies from Rome or whatever, which inherit an insertion from a Christian copier.) The only authentic “independent” attestations within decades of Jesus’s (alleged) corporeal existence are in fact not actually independent at all—they are quite clearly hearsay, relating specifically Christian storytelling third- or fourth-hand.
There might be an authentic signal in there, but it’s pretty well lost in the mythmaking noise. From an outsider’s point of view, there’s no evidence that Jesus is any more authentic than William Tell. Both may have existed, but if so, both were probably not much like their public, pseudo-historical images, and both were less important for who they actually were than for influential stories later told about them.
Ah, thanks, Ophelia. That helps. (And maybe obviates some of the redundancy in my last post. Oh well.)
Reply to James Sweet –
‘Oh no, I am well aware of the viewpoint. I think it is a strawman viewpoint. Have there ever been misandric feminists?’ –
‘misandric’? Where did you get that word from? Source please. –
As my life is measured in decades and not in eons, I shall not attempt to read your meaningless waffle, let alone inform and educate you. If you do have any relevant points and can state them in standard English, I will be pleased to answer you. –
[duplicate deleted – ed.]
Dave – “misandric” is a perfectly good word. Look it up, if you can’t figure it out.
You haven’t answered my question; I’ve asked it twice now.
No; you don’t get to just paste in your previous comment instead of answering questions and objections.
Reply to Paul W.
Many thanks for the info. and I stand corrected. I had assumed that the Gospels were conclusive evidence but it would seem not. If it all originated in the letters of Mark then it’s source is very sparse indeed. It’s need is obvious with the decline of the military Roman Empire and the requirement for a way of subjugating the peasantry – hence the Holy Roman Empire, which ruled not by military brute force and crucifixion, but by superstition and fear of hell.
Have you read ‘The Genius of the Few’ by Christian O’Brien. It is a scientific analysis and it is well worth having your own copy and keeping as important reference. I do urge you to obtain this, you will not regret it – I promise you.
Having read this book, and as a Physicist, I can see evidence here for a hot air balloon technology by a more advanced western northern culture, This evidence is also very apparent in the freeing of the Jews by Jehovah.
Jame Sweet
I have, unlike you, looked it up. It is misandrist or misandry.
As you are an idiot I shall cease to post with you. Goodbye.
Misandry – noun – hatred of men
Misandrist – noun – hating men
Source Chambers Concise Dictionary 1991
Oh I see, it wasn’t a “what does that word mean?” it was a “you got the suffix wrong nyah nyah” – how sophisticated. Would you like me to point out all your many typos?
Or the fact that you said goodbye and returned seven minutes later?
You’re a riot! Pleeeeeeeeeeeeease don’t leave – I looooooooooove you.
Ophelia Benson
Reply to Ophelia Benson
Sorry I nearly missed you.
I know what ordinary people think because I have worked with a very wide range of people throughout my life. I also am very gregarious and hence have a large number of friendly contacts. Note these are all real life contacts, and completely independent of academic theory and academic institutions – especially those involving philosophy. Further more my contacts are able to express their opinions freely, which is not the situation in academic institutions.
‘Thinking oneself popular is an opinion about the minds of other people, but considering oneself to be a feminist is an opinion about one’s own mind. The latter is a good deal more reasonable to claim than the former.’ Mmm, nice point to which I concede. I gave a poor example. My point, badly made, was that to claim something that is ill defined, and excluded by a recent definition, as per popular opinion, is invalid.
In short, the viewpoint I gave excludes James Sweet as he is a man.
And if I may anticipate a following point – the definition of feminism –
Chambers Concise Dictionary 1919 – advocacy of women
’
s rights, of the movement for the advancements and emancipation of women.
1. Belief in the social, political, and economic equality of the sexes. 2. The movement organized around this belief.
http://www.dictionary.reference.com – 1. the doctrine advocating social, political, and all other rights of women equal to those of men. 2. an organized movement for the attainment of such rights for women. 3. feminine character.
Wikipedia – refers to political, cultural, and economic movements seeking greater, equal, or, among a minority, superior rights and participation in society for women and girls.
Some what confused. Furthermore men and women are different, so equality between the two is an idealistic concept not realisable in practise. e.g. as in tennis matches, a clear example of segregation for the benefit of women. So the fight for equality is rather like the search for the Holy Grail. A waste of time!
Must go, I’m late for the pub. Nice posting with you.
:)
Reply to Ophelia Benson
‘Would you like me to point out all your many typos?’
Yes please, that would be really helpful.
Jame Sweety does not know the meaning of misandric, as it does not seem to exist, unless you have a source. Neither does he know the popular meaning of feminism, as he claims to be one – ha ha ha.
I love you too darling, even if you do delete parts of my comments. No doubt there are other parts you would like to delete too.
Really must go –
Bye. XXX
You sure talk a lot for somebody who keeps leaving!
Dave,
You’re seriously uptight about “misandric”, such that you’d call somebody an idiot over it, and flounce off?
It’s in wikipedia and wiktionary, and occurs elsewhere (e.g., articles about the subject), and it seems like a fine combination of misandr+ic to me. English is productive that way, so it doesn’t have to be in a dictionary to be a valid construction, either as the obvious adjective, or as a noun for somebody to whom such an adjective is applied and the actual noun is omitted.
The choice of -ist vs. -ic endings is not something to be overly prescriptive or dictionary-bound by. They have slightly different connotations, and both are often useful.
If you don’t understand that sort of linguistic issue, it’s really not a good idea not to condescend about the linguistics of such things and whether somebody else did it “wrong.”
Even if you were right, which I don’t think you were, it’s still pointless huffy priggery. Get over that.
Oh holy cow, I hadn’t seen Dave’s last responses to Ophelia. What a troll. (Women aren’t physically matched to men in tennis, so the idea of equality of rights is a waste of time? Hyeesh.)
And this guy’s professedly “a Physicist?” With a capital P?
I don’t buy it.
Oh no, I just googled the book he recommended, The Genius of the Few, and the subtitle is the story of those who founded the Garden of Eden. Ancient hot air technology indeed. Whee!
I think Physicist with a capital P must signify a theoretical physicist. As opposed to actual.
Ya. Overall I think he do not talk like a real physicist.
Reply to Paul W.
As it is a common noun I should have put ‘physicist’. My mistake.
I have now read and studied your comment above, as urged by you, and am most impressed and convinced, assuming your facts are correct.
I was also most impressed by The Genius of the Few, and am surprised at your scornful dismissal of it. Perhaps having accrued some knowledge of Biblical theory you now have a closed mind. Pity.
Troll? If the difficulty of claiming Jesus was a feminist can be shown through the fact that there is little hard evidence for him or his beliefs, then it can also be shown by the fact that there is no clear universal definition for the term ‘feminist’. Something all three of you have carefully avoided in the general abuse of me. Something I am not impressed by.
My statement –
Furthermore men and women are different, so equality between the two is an idealistic concept not realisable in practise. e.g. as in tennis matches, a clear example of segregation for the benefit of women. So the fight for equality is rather like the search for the Holy Grail. A waste of time!
Your extrapolation –
Oh holy cow, I hadn’t seen Dave’s last responses to Ophelia. What a troll. (Women aren’t physically matched to men in tennis, so the idea of equality of rights is a waste of time? Hyeesh.)
An illogical and invalid interpretation through false association and the principle of ‘inversion’.
I have raised the query of what is the universal definition of femininism for the purpose of enabling the assertion that Jesus was a feminist, but while resentfully denying my view, you are unable to put forward your own, and have became belligerent and argumentative, as illustrated above.
Off for tea now (fish today) then down to the pub to discuss this thread with ordinary people.
Yes Dave, you raised the query of what is a feminist, and then confidently and immediately answered your own question based on what you apparently know ‘ordinary people’ think. Methinks you don’t really care that much about what anyone else has to say, let alone actual feminists (who may know a little bit more about what feminism means than these so-called ‘ordinary’ people you made up).
If you’d really, sincerely wanted to know what feminism meant you could have simply asked, and then waited for a response from someone who identifies as a feminist (myself, Ophelia, several other readers), or indeed anyone. But I suspect that’s not what you wanted. You wanted to spout misogynist crap and then play the victim. Why, I wonder? To wind people up on what is obviously a liberal, feminism-friendly thread? Why would someone do that?
There’s no clear universal definition for the word ‘troll’, but I agree with most ordinary people when they say you are one.
Now Dave – don’t be silly. Your comment 24 was hardly just a “query of what is the universal definition of femininism” – it was a contemptuous and hostile characterization of feminism, which entails a contemptuous and hostile view of women (since all feminism is at bottom is the idea that women are and should be treated as equals to men). You can’t really expect a woman to take kindly to that, and you presumably know that a woman runs this site – so your comment 24 was (at least) a deliberate provocation. It’s too late to pretend otherwise now.
If you comment further (and please don’t feel obliged to), please use an initial – a random one is fine – because there is another Dave who has been commenting here for years; we need to be able to tell the two apart.
Amy Clare
Your first comment to me clearly identifies you as the troll. You obviously have not kept up with the thread ..I do not need to ask a direct question for a query to be raised. Did you not read my comment of –
Troll? If the difficulty of claiming Jesus was a feminist can be shown through the fact that there is little hard evidence for him or his beliefs, then it can also be shown by the fact that there is no clear universal definition for the term ‘feminist’. Something all three of you have carefully avoided in the general abuse of me. Something I am not impressed by.
Trolls do not make relevant and sensible comments.
Ophelia Benson
Your accusing me of being provocative for giving my view point on an open forum is rather narrow minded. It is not that provocative anyway, as most feminist must be aware of what many people think about them.
‘it was a contemptuous and hostile characterization of feminism, which entails a contemptuous and hostile view of women’
It is obvious from the tone and wording of my original comment that it was neither contemptuous nor hostile. Nor did it refer to women, whom I both like and respect. Your attempt to include all women in your definition of feminist is indignantly contested by the women around here. You are in a very small, and shrinking rapidly, minority.
I am going to speak bluntly to you both. You have avoided the issues and open honest debate, responding with rudeness and sarcasm, apparently unable to answer the points I raised in my original comment with reference to Ophelia’s article. You have now descended to stupid lies.
Lies – because they are not true
Stupid – because they can readily be seen to be not true
The opinion of the ordinary people in the pub (women included) on reading this thread (I took a hard copy) is not supportive of you and is, at this time, as I described in post 24. I actually found myself supporting you on occasion in the face of some extreme comments. If you do not want to see other people’s opinions then do not come on to an open forum.
Just email and tweet among your group of approved people.
You have disappointed me and I’m off to watch TV now.
As you seem to getting upset about this I am going to ceasing posting in this thread. (Now is your chance for another sarcastic remark, Ophelia)
hahahaha, Dave’s little tantrum about “misandric” is hilarious.
TBH, I had reservations about it because I was aware — as Dave assumed I wasn’t — that it’s only “sort of” a word. However, it sounded more clear than any of the other alternative wordings I tried, and I figured it was friggin’ obvious what was meant by it.
In any case, regardless of the validity of my usage, the “I’m not going to debate you because you spelled a word wrong” defense is hiLARIOUS!
Perhaps the reason Dave doesn’t want to debate me is because I acknowledge that his definition, unfortunately, is a far too commonly accepted definition of “feminist” — and I then went on to describe why. There’s not really anything Dave can say to that. He can’t assert that he was just parroting the common definition, because I’ve already granted that. He could rebut my point that misandrist feminists are nothing more than invented bogeyman simply by rattling off a few examples, but he can’t. (Ironically, the actual feminists on this site probably could name one or two high-profile feminist academics who have made apparently misandrist comments in the past — but Dave can’t, because he has no fucking idea what he is talking about.)
The only thing left for Dave to do is admit that he is promulgated this “common definition” because it protects against the erosion the historical misogyny that has continued to benefit both him and me.
Dave – if you must keep commenting – do please at least stop telling us where you’re going all the time. It’s tiresome. And enough with the vox pop reports from the pub, too.
(Though I must say, if you really did bore people in the pub by trying to make them read some random item from off the interwebz complete with your scintillating commentary – that may be too funny to miss.)
I know I’m quite late to the party, but no one else pointed out the hilarious problem with his example. Women are different from men, and his example of women’s clear and inconquerable inferiority was…TENNIS? Really?!Three words: Billie. Jean. King.
Heh.
Of course if we had said that Dave The Man would have said that guy she whupped was way past his prime as a tennis player therefore Jesus.