Vridar's Come Get Yourself Kicked On High Context Thread

[jpholding]

http://tektonticker.blogspot.com/201...xt-bungle.html

To be a Christ myther requires either casual arrogance, appalling ignorance, or some mixture of both. A blogger styled “Vridar” aka Neil Godfrey is typical of the sort of mixture of both that makes the Christ myth able to find places to reside in the intellectual cracks of society. I challenged Vridar to debate me on the issueof the authenticity of Paul’s letters here some time ago, and as is also typical of the Christ myth crowd, he ran with his tail between his legs, yowling like a scalded dog. I expect little different this time, even as I issue a fresh challenge over the subject today.

Vridat recently put that combined arrogance and ignorance to work with an address to what he supposes to be a “misapplication” of the concept of high context cultures to the point that Paul does not mention certain life details of Jesus in his epistles. Although I have been positing this point for years now, Vridar has now been apparently been so stung by Maurice Casey’s adoption of the argument that he cannot help but reply – no doubt thanks in good measure to the substantial beating Casey (and Stephanie Fisher) have been administering to him lately.

Vridar, I might point out, is the sort who wouldn’t know a “misapplication” of such things if it bit him on the rear end, and it speaks for itself that the best he can do in reply is appeal to airline pilot Kris Komarnitsky’s attempt to skittle around the issue of high context:

JP goes on to argue that the “high-context” society Paul and the Corinthians lived in can account for Paul’s silence on the discovered empty tomb. But as JP admits, even in high-context societies “repeat of detail would . . . occur if some need were present to repeat.” This just leads us back to the question above. If Paul is trying to defend Jesus’ resurrection, he definitely has a need to repeat information. And in fact that is exactly what we see Paul do. He repeats the basic community creed that Jesus was raised and that this has been confirmed in the scriptures (1 Cor 15:4). He lists those who Jesus appeared to (1 Cor 15:5-8) which, being an already established Christian community, the Corinthians must have heard about before. Drawing on the authority of these witnesses, Paul then challenges the Corinthians, “Now if Christ is proclaimed [by all of these people] as raised from the dead, how can some of you say there is no resurrection of the dead?” (1 Cor 15:12).

Here, Komarnitsky’s error is twofold. First, Paul is not “trying to defend Jesus’ resurrection” in 1 Cor. 15. What he is answering, rather, is a Corinthian deviancy in which it is doubted that humans can be resurrected, and in that regard, he makes use of Jesus’ resurrection as a precedent.

Second, the rhetorical purpose of 1 Cor. 15:3-11 also points to a specific need to fulfill: Composing his argument according to the principles of Greco-Roman rhetoric, 3-11 consists of a narratio, which would include testimony like this as part of the building of an argument. Thus it is rather simple to demonstrate the “need” present to offer these details in context. This is the sort of detailed explanation Earl Doherty needs to reproduce to validate his 200 alleged “silences” – but as it stands, my analysis of those 200 showed that in each case he failed to provide anything of the sort, mostly appealing vaguely to “common sense” or else using low context reasoning.

Thus it is that when Vridar points out this or that detail reported by Paul seems to contradict the high context thesis, it is clear that it is he – not I or Casey – who misapplies, misunderstands, and misuses Hall’s presentation. His use of Komarnitsky – as opposed to a serious scholar of anthropology or the social sciences -- typical of those in the Christ myth camp who are unable to properly process complex ideas like these from anthropological scholarship.

That leaves a few comments made to this rather dawdling entry by Vridar. Most of his crowd slavers obediently and says nothing of value, but here are a few points worthy of addressing if only to emphasize the intellectual dementia typical of Christ-mythicism.

An oblivious user styled RoHa asks a list of questions:

I still want to know (a) how they know the society Paul was writing to was a “High Context” society…

This is the finding of credible and reputable social science scholarship and is the result of decades of careful research and study. That RoHa lives in a shell is not a reason for it to be otherwise.

(b) whether they have a list of what things would be repeated, and what things would not be repeated, and how such a list is justified

No list. The fact that RoHa requests one shows that he/she fails to grasp the complexity of the concept. A list would be impossible because what is “high context” in a context depends on a shifting of conditions, not on a predetermined list.

and (c) whether any of these guys has actually lived in a high context society?

As if this matters? It doesn’t. But several of my readers do live in such a society, and social science research has been done in the “living laboratories” of actual high context societies. Again, this is not open to debate as a concept.

A lesser intelligence styled muuh-gnu states the “gospel writers obviously didn’t” live in a high context society.

What this user fails to grasp in the the Gospels, as laudatory Greco-Roman bioi, serve a specific purpose, that of honoring their subject by recounting their words and deeds. Of course, it would take a lot of foolishness of suppose that this is any sense would disprove the entire structure of anthropological scholarship. But the “need” is clearly demonstrated.

The longest comment comes from a user who remarks on another commenter’s posting of the Wikipedia item on high context. The rather idiotic supposition is made that because the article notes rules of behavior and the social setting as part of the context of understanding what high context is, this means that it did not extend to other parts of daily life! This is simply without merit, and an artificial division foisted by the commenter’s tendentious reading of the Wikipedia description.

The same commenter also offers a peculiar analogy to the rediscovery of the Law in the Temple at the time of Josiah, taking from this that “knowledge of the sacred rules of behavior towards God and his priests were not implicitly taken for granted. Communication by the priests, the prophets and the books was necessary.” How this has any bearing on the issue is hard to say. Per the account, the law had been lost for some time and was unknown to the people. Beyond that, law in particular was a special “needs” case, as it involved rules to live by on a daily basis, with associated penalties for failure. As far as I can tell, there were no penalties for failing to recall such things as that Jesus lived in Nazareth. Furthermore, the law was to be repeated and meditated upon as essential to the keeping of the covenant; the details of Jesus’ life are not part of the New Testament covenant.

The one thing that the commenter does get right – and which I have never disputed, and indeed made clear in my own writings -- is that “high context” is a matter of scale. Some social groups are “higher” context than others, and have to become “lower” in context if they deal with an outsider. But this does not erase the fact that as a whole, the ancient Mediterranean was on the “higher” end, which makes the Christ-myther demand for more detail about the life of Jesus an oblivious one. Furthermore, the seasoned ekklesia – to whom the epistles were all written – would be an example of a sub-group “with autonomous rules of conduct and hermetic professional jargon” which the commenter admits would be characterized as high context.

A commenter styled J. Quinton observes:

It seems to me that the “high context” in Paul’s congregations should have been the LXX, not the life and teachings of Jesus.

Not in the least. Paul’s congregations were a decade or more old; the life and teachings of Jesus, by then, would be as ingrained as the LXX would have been. This is a distinction that many in Doherty’s thrall – including Doherty himself – fail to recognize: They argue as though Paul were addressing new converts with no knowledge. Indeed, in Jesus Neither God Nor Man, Doherty offers an appendix in which he makes this mistake rather obviously.

Vridar himself offers another oblivious comment:

Even when it came to “pivotal cultural values” Paul was quite prepared to spell them out explicitly when he believed it would reinforce his instructions. Recall his “Does not nature itself teach you that it is a shame for a man to have long [or whatever the original meaning was] hair?”

Here again Godfrey’s impenetrable ignorance comes to the fore. Moral teachings are a special “need” scenario, as they affect real life behavior. The function of such teachings as these is moral exhortation, which is in need to stronger emphasis because of the constant social pressure in an agonistic society to conform to group expectations (and the temptation to diverge from them). Obviously this has no bearing on such things as Jesus being from Nazareth. It does have bearing on Jesus’ moral teachings, but as we have argued, those are to be found alluded to in the epistles as is appropriate.

That closes us for now; but we know Vridar to be the sort who does not know when he is in a losing cause, so we expect a reply. However, from here on it will be done at a TheologyWeb thread here, where we challenge Vridar – or any of his sycophants – to defend their ignorance.

And it links here at the end. We'll see if Neil is still a chicken.

[jpholding]

One of Godfrey’s hangers-on, “Roo Bookaroo,” shows a remarkable lack of cognizance about what high context entails, as he says on Hoffman’s blog of Maurice Casey’s appeal to it:

All the facts of Jesus’s biography are thus supposed to have already circulated all around the Mediterranean, at a time when most ordinary people were illiterate, and means of transportation excruciatingly slow and dangerous, and communication required the dispatching of personal messengers by land or boat.

Say WHAT?

No, Screwy Roo. That’s not what the argument is. Not even close. The argument, rather, is that once someone joined an ingroup and received the “essentials” they were able to participate in and understand what to outsiders would be “coded” exchanges. “High context” does not mean and never has been taken to mean (certainly not by me, and not by Casey that I have seen) that knowledge of certain things was endemic to everyone.

In light of this, it’s hilarious to see this idiot close with:

Using such ad hoc “anthropological” concepts as if they described an inherent structural law of the Roman Empire world, just to explain a most mysterious phenomenon, is pure legerdemain by Casey. His assumption is improbable and unbelievable. And no additional language by Casey will make it less so.

Seriously. These mythicist idiots fail to understand the most basic arguments I and others make, and then they accuse us of legerdemain???

[TolkienFan]

[Abigail]

An empty tomb does not necessarily mean resurrection whereas a risen body does. At that time being able to point to people who had seen the risen Christ must have been far stronger proof than pointing to an empty tomb.

[jpholding]

Right thread, Ab?

[Abigail]

yeah sorry, I realize the thread is not about defending the resurrection per se.

[jpholding]

http://tektonticker.blogspot.com/201...n-context.html

Update: Vridar's still stupid.

Some time ago I challenged the incompetent Neil Godfrey (aka Vridar) to come over to TheologyWeb and debate me on the issue of high vs low context. Quite wisely, he has chosen to pretend that I do not exist, including in a posting of his in late August on the same subject.

In that post, Godfrey continues to display his usual lack of awareness of his own ability to craft a non sequitur using the highest quality that can be achieved. He quotes Casey:

This is one basic reason why Paul says so little about the life and teaching of Jesus. To some extent, his Gentile Christians had been taught about Jesus already, so he could take such knowledge for granted. He therefore had no reason to mention places such as Nazareth, or the site of the crucifixion, nor to remind his congregations that Jesus was crucified on earth recently.

And replies:

According to this critique we can conclude that Paul forgot to mention anything about the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus – or even that Jesus Christ was exalted subsequently to a heavenly role as our Saviour — to his Gentile converts since he clearly does not take such knowledge for granted but repeats it scores of times throughout his epistles.

Well, no. That’s not what Casey is saying, or what “high context” means. Rather, it means, for example (as I noted in my own work), that a word like “crucifixion” becomes an effective code for all associated concepts which will NOT be explicitly mentioned (such as the location at Calvary, one of Doherty’s peeve-points). High context does not mean NO mention; it means minimally explicit and highly coded references. I daresay that’s a subtlety too complex for Vridar to grasp.

Following this, Vridar he offers an extended quote from Hall’s book culture (from which I and others get chief quotes on the subject of high context) on the subject of literature. Why he does this is hard to say, though I’d guess that it is done in order to persuade his readers that he s actually saying something worthy of notice. The quote is all about a Japanese novel, and Vridar bolds two phrases (“in high-context situations, less is required to release the message,” “how much we take for granted even in the most mun*dane acts,”) for no noted reason, and concludes:

It seems clear to me that the high/low context question in literature is all about how we understand the fullness of what IS said.

Um….well, not “all about” since communication is a two-way street, a point which seems to have escaped Godfrey completely. But “about to some extent” would be correct. He goes on:

It strikes me as a frightful and hopelessly unlearned interpretation of E. T. Hall’s analysis to think that it can salvage scholarly hypotheses of New Testament scholars that argue Buddha never mentions anything to his Western readers about Jesus’ healings, miracles and teachings of right religion and life eternal because he (Buddha) had taught them all that stuff already.

Unfortunately, that one doesn’t get past the level of supersize non sequitur with a side of fries. What little Vridar bolds indicates the opposite of this conclusion, and he seems to be under the delusion that literature and the spoken word somehow will have different rules for “high context”. They don’t, and what he quotes from Hall doesn’t indicate this either.

That ends Godfrey’s mumbling for that phase; while we’re here we can also dig out what few worthy notes exist in the comments from his fanbois, which is just about none of it. One denizen says:

The weakness is, as you point out, that using this principle we can no longer tell whether someone is ignorant of something or well-versed in something as the ‘evidence’ is exactly the same: no mention of it at all.

This is a “weakness”? No, it isn’t. It’s a hard reality of high context. That people like this fellow are simply too oblivious to figure out what is is their problem, not the problem of members of high context cultures, nor of those like myself and Casey who actually make the effort to discern the proper contextualization.

Another of Godfrey’s worshippers has the temerity to suggest that we should reject high context explanations because of Ockham’s Razor: It is “simpler” to suppose Jesus didn’t exist. I take this to mean that it is “simpler” to them because high context makes the issues more difficult for them to figure out with their limited mental horsepower.

More than one commenter (including the famously obtuse Steven Carr) fall for the typical error of confusing Paul’s letters with his missionary preaching, to wit: “Given Paul preached mostly in places far away from Palestine, it might be safe to assume that the news of Jesus had not yet reached that area.” Like Doherty, this Neanderthal fails to appreciate that Paul’s letters were written at least 10 years after his recipients were first preached to.

One particularly dense soul actually gets it right without knowing it:

Every Sunday that I attended church as a youth I was constantly being reminded of the many teachings and deeds of Jesus. Apparently I was living in a “low context” culture all those years.

Um, yes….you were. You still are. That’s the point.

Another sorrowful soul, similarly bereft of comprehension, supposes that “apparently the gospels themselves were written in low-context communities.” Well, no – they represent the written form of what was preached; so that once again, this is someone failing to grasp the difference noted above.

Back to Carr again, who submits yet another oblivious comment as part of his effort to spread graffiti on blogs everywhere:

How come in such a ‘high context’ society, Jews had to continually tell each other why they were celebrating Passover?

They aren’t. Here Carr fails to grasp the distinction between the presentation of information and the enacting of ritual. The parallel in the NT is 1 Cor. 11:23, which would be repeated not to inform, but to reaffirm the core values of the ingroup.

It is of note to see Joe Wallack chiming in, as he has still not gone any further on his “1000 New Testament errors” since I started erasing them years ago.

Yet another poor soul bleats Doherty’s refrain, “[Material from Jesus] surely could have settled some of the disputes. Paul could have written that a particular side of the dispute was correct, because of what Jesus did or said.”

Well, no. Not at all. Doherty made 200 efforts to show that this was the case, and failed 200 times to demonstrate it. The poor soul himself only vaguely appeals to topics such as circumcision, but for several paragraphs of blather doesn’t manage to provide a worthwhile example, only offering the rather imaginative idea that the story of the feeding of the 5000 would somehow have had an application is his dispute with Peter over eating with Gentiles. It wouldn’t have; Paul’s issue had to do with ritual purity, and that was never an issue at the feedings; the poor soul’s ridiculous idea that “maybe there were some Gentiles in the crowd” (really? In rural peasant Galilee?) notwithstanding.

The same ignorant soul says, “It seems impossible that there never were any disputes about what Jesus did or said — especially since the Gospels still had not been written.” Um – what about oral transmission, folks? Like many graphocentrists, this one thinks it “has to be in writing.”

And that’s all, other that repeat bleats of the same errors from others. Our challenge to Vridar to put his neck on the line at TWeb – or for any of his oblivious commenters to do so – remains. Here’s where to go:

(link)

[jpholding]

In other news, Vridar is now engaged in an online war with Acharya S and her followers.

No nuts so deserved each other.