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John D's avatar

“Boyarin’s argument for the pre-Christian existence of these ideas is drawn from circumstantial evidence and extrapolation, based largely on reading Mark as documentation of events that actually occurred: It is predicated on Mark accurately recording Jesus himself seeking out his own execution in order to fulfil preexisting prophetic beliefs.” 😂😂😂

Unbelievable. This is such a consistent theme of his scholarship, but this one is especially hilarious. “As we can see from Boyarin, there is excellent reason to think the concept of a suffering & dying Messiah pre-existed Christianity, because Jesus himself advocated it. Thus, we can lower the probability of his existence by 24.84%.”

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Randy Tripp's avatar

Could I ask you to respond to something could you respond to this it's carrier's attack on Chris Hansen when he tries to defend his ridiculous cosmic sperm bank I'll quote it here But their argument is also moot, and therefore illogical. It does not matter where this angel takes the semen of men. The relevant fact is that taking semen somewhere else (and then taking it back) was readily believed without blush. Therefore, we cannot say there is anything “weird” about Christians thinking, for example, that this same angel took the semen of David somewhere else for God to examine it; in fact, this passage entails that is exactly what many Jews believed happened. Whether this meant taking it to God Himself in the heavens, or to a representative of His on Earth (like the Metatron; although the Talmud does not say that), the same conclusion follows. That’s the only point I aim to prove with this anecdote. So either Hansen didn’t understand the point (and thus is incompetent) or Hansen doesn’t want you to understand the point (and thus is a liar).

Similarly, Hansen complains that this story does not mention storing the semen—as if I didn’t already make that point in JFOS myself. Hansen is therefore misrepresenting again what my argument even is. My argument is explicitly that if semen can be transported this way, taken to and fro among divine beings, then there is nothing that would prevent a Jewish thinker from imagining that God could hold on to it for a secret divine purpose. Because with God, all things are possible. In other words, my argument is not that there are many examples of that happening; my argument is that this is the kind of unique idea that would be entirely expected within Judaism because it entirely fits the way they understood the world, and God, to work. Hansen is again confusing an argument against a presumption (that no one would think of this) with an argument for something definitely having happened. To the contrary, I am making a modal argument: I am not here arguing that this in fact happened; I am only arguing its plausibility, and I am doing that only to argue against claims that it isn’t plausible. And Hansen is either too incompetent to understand this, or is deliberately trying to hide it from their readers.

To my mind this does look a lot like lying, though. Hansen leads their readers to think I gave no evidence for my conclusions, that I just “misread” Niddah 16. But that isn’t how I used Niddah 16; it is one piece of several premises building a whole argument. Hansen acts like there is no other evidence, no other argument, that I simply said “Niddah 16 demonstrates divine sperm-banking.” To think that’s what I said, after reading the actual pages in which I cite this example, is catastrophically incompetent. So either Hansen is catastrophically incompetent—or they well know this is not what or how I argued, and are therefore choosing to lie about it.

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