Bart Ehrman on the Historical Jesus

[proudfootz]

Well, as has been pointed out to you before, if we are to believe Paul's letters, here is one of his sources of information. 2 Cor 12

I think I did mention trips to various levels of Heaven.

Does this count in the 'reliable historical column' or the visions and revelations' column?

But he received no information from this source.

If Paul is not referring to himself, we could put this datum under the column of 'meeting others prone to visions' column.

Acts 15

Believe Paul if you can, about who taught him what.

Of course, we can't believe Barnabas told Paul anything because, as you will point out, we don't have a letter from Barnabas telling us: I taught that guy Paul all he knows.

Sadly, going by Paul's letters we have little to no information about what other messianists believed.

Maybe he learned how to induce visions and extract spurious 'prophecies' from scripture about Jesus and extract tithes from the rubes.

 

[Craig B]

Sadly, going by Paul's letters we have little to no information about what other messianists believed.

Maybe he learned how to induce visions and extract spurious 'prophecies' from scripture about Jesus and extract tithes from the rubes.

Or perhaps he was taught these useful tricks by Jesus shouting down at him from the sky?

 

[Belz...]

I must admit I'm not sure I fully grasp what it meant.

Can you make this just a little more explicit?

Gladly.

When historians, and many people on this board, talk about gleaning information (I misspoke when I said "truth") from texts, they usually mean that you can determine a lot of things about the author and his or her circumstances from what they write, what they write about, how they write, how they portray themselves or others, their beliefs, etc. (A) and that this information can be entirely independant of the truth value of the author's claims (B).

I think a lot of people in this thread either believe or claim to believe that (A) implies (B) or, in other words, that if you accept that you can glean useful information from the text, in a way that you can perhaps tell what's true or not about some of its claims, that it means you trust the author's claims.

Let's make up an example. If you read a text in which the author claims to have psychic powers, and that he had psychic visions of something that happened to someone close to him before the actual event occured, and that this was confirmed by that someone afterwards, you can glean from the (much larger) text that the event itself occured, even if you don't believe that the person has any sort of power, or even that the other someone really confirmed that the psychic vision was accurate at all.

The same is true for Paul. He claims a whole lot of things, talks and boasts about others, reports things, including visions, meetings with apostles and "brothers', whatever that means, etc. We can surely discern things from these texts and letters, and perhaps even assign probabilities to the reality of some of these events without ever so much as considering that the supernatural claims are true.

That's what I was trying to convey when I said "We must be careful not to confuse truth gleaned from the message, with truth gleaned from the text itself", in response to your question "What sort of 'historical conclusion' do you expect to get from the ravings of a religious fanatic like Paul?". I think there's quite a bit to learn from Paul's lunatic ravings, even if the claims contained therein are false and impossible.

 

[IanS]

Ian


I doubt that Paul did learn from other men that Jesus was the Messiah.

Well that IS what we are talking about in this thread!

OK, so when above you disagreed with me, what you actually meant was that you agreed with me! Agree means disagree. That's "NTK".

Fact is - there is no evidence anywhere in the entire NT of anyone saying they had told Paul that anyone called “Jesus” was the messiah. “Period”.

But there is abundant irrefutable evidence of Paul claiming that he definitely did not get the belief from any other human. He got it by divine revelation, confirmed in scripture.

As I said in my earlier post, that appears to be an inference on Paul's part, his Pharisaic explanation of why a dead man whose corpse had been buried was repeatedly seen by living people, Paul among them.

What “appears to be an inference” ? You mean that Paul inferred that the messiah was named “Yehoshua/Jesus”? Well as I explained to belz about 100 pages ago - Paul could apparently find in the OT a prophecy attributed to Moses saying his successor would be named “Jesus”!

Paul does report meeting with Peter a few years later for two weeks. You would have me conslude that they avoided the subject of Jesus. I find that implausible. That you disagree is NTK, but not actually a problem.

I do not "have you conclude" any such thing.

By that time, Paul had apparently been going about all over Judea for years proclaiming Jesus was the dead but risen messiah that all Jews had been expecting as a matter of god-given certainty since at least the time of Moses.

If Paul ever subsequently met people like Peter, James and John as the pillars of the Church of God, and met them specifically to talk about their shared and very ancient religion of Jewish messianic belief, then they may have talked about all sorts of beliefs and made all sorts of claims about almost anything and everything. But what is conspicuously 100% absent from every account of that meeting (and the corresponding meeting 10 years later), is any hint of any mention by anyone that Peter, James, John or anyone else had ever believed that “Jesus” was the messiah before Paul apparently made that identification in his vision of c.33-36AD.

 

[IanS]

Well, as has been pointed out to you before, if we are to believe Paul's letters, here is one of his sources of information. 2 Cor 12 But he received no information from this source. Acts 15 Believe Paul if you can, about who taught him what.

Of course, we can't believe Barnabas told Paul anything because, as you will point out, we don't have a letter from Barnabas telling us: I taught that guy Paul all he knows.

I have no idea why you think any of that is remotely relevant.

What you are trying to do is what you tried before. Namely to argue that we should throw away the actual record of what Paul’s letters do say. And replace that with the total opposite as your own inventions of things that were never said by anyone anywhere in the entire NT.

You want to discard the facts, and instead make it all up yourself!

 

[eight bits]

proudfootz

On reflection, I'd like to see where Paul reports this occurred 'shortly after death' ...

That is how I read what Paul wrote. There's no ambiguity about where in Paul the passage we were discussing appaears. You're welcome to read the passage however you like.

... and that Paul or anyone else given to visions ...

Paul didn't say any other person was "given to visions."

... was 'grieving'.

I doubt Paul was grieving when his turn came. In any case, Paul doesn't say whether or not anybody else had been grieving earlier, nor did I say he did. What I said was:

Surely it isn't news to anybody here that that kind of experience is a common feature of healthy human grief.

Presumably that's a fact. If you do not find this fact relevant to the discussion, then ignore it.


Ian

No, actually NTK means "nice to know," as in nice to know, but not an important matter to the speaker. You have your view, you're entitled to it, and it differs from mine. OK. As to your fandance about agree and disagree - we agree what your position on the Paul-Cephas meeting is, and we disagree whether your position is plausible.

What “appears to be an inference” ?

Paul apparently infers that the reason why a dead man, whose corpse had been buried, was repeatedly seen by living people was because the dead man is now the Messiah.

I do not "have you conclude" any such thing.

OK. Then I conclude that they more likely than not talked about Jesus.

You and I seem to be in agreement that there is no evidence that anybody thought Jesus was definitely the Messiah before Paul, or that the James Gang initially agreed on the question one way or the other. That doesn't bear against Jesus being on Peter and Paul's discussion agenda.

 

[IanS]

Ian

No, actually NTK means "nice to know," as in nice to know, but not an important matter to the speaker.

Yes, that’s what I thought you meant by it. And it’s what I meant by it.

You have your view, you're entitled to it, and it differs from mine. OK. As to your fandance about agree and disagree - we agree what your position on the Paul-Cephas meeting is, and we disagree whether your position is plausible.

And you are entitled to yours.

OK. Then I conclude that they more likely than not talked about Jesus.

You and I seem to be in agreement that there is no evidence that anybody thought Jesus was definitely the Messiah before Paul, or that the James Gang initially agreed on the question one way or the other. That doesn't bear against Jesus being on Peter and Paul's discussion agenda.

Good. So we do agree that there is “no evidence that anybody thought Jesus was definitely the Messiah before Paul”.

Of course by that date Paul may have discussed Jesus with those "pillars of the church of God", and indeed with everyone he met. But that is three years and more after Paul’s supposed revelation of Jesus as the messiah. Three years in which Paul had apparently spent all day every day preaching his gospel of Jesus all over Judea (if not in other countries too … though how got to those other lands I have no idea).

But that fact remains - as far as we actually know from what was written by anyone, there is no evidence of anyone claiming that the messiah was called Jesus before Paul said that. And any suggestion to the contrary is pure invention, and in complete contradiction to what we actually have as the factual written evidence in P46 (but see footnote).



Footnote - we should however acknowledge that what we rely on as the translation of any of these gospels and letters, depends on the translators being accurate, and depends also upon their translations being accurately reported. And I very much doubt if anyone in these HJ threads has ever seen any original papyrus mss such as P46, or that anyone here has the capacity to translate that for themselves. And I expect that also applies to almost all biblical scholars, including those like Bart Ehrman, Dominic Crossan and the rest who have written books drawing all sorts of conclusions about the precise words of mss like P46. However, if one reads the book by Hector Avalos (The End of Biblical Studies), it seems that it is by no means agreed amongst the actual translators, exactly what the correct translation of many of the crucial words should actually be (Hector Avalos is professor of Bible Studies at Iowa State Univ.).

 

[maximara]

maximara

I read this with some interest

(From Carrier?)

"It is also problematic to claim Jesus was a nobody. I grant that’s an out. But it comes with consequences. Because if it’s so, you are conceding the Gospels are lying (egregiously…and evidently, successfully) and that Jesus never said or did anything in life that would inspire fanatical worshipers or warrant anyone considering him worth dying for–because nothing Jesus ever said or did in life is ever relevant to the gospel preached anywhere in the authentic letters of Paul…which begs the question how he convinced anyone he was the Messiah and Savior who would soon return on clouds of glory if he never said or did anything anyone thought impressive enough to ever discuss until a lifetime later."

You and I have just recently discussed the "nobodiness" issue. The required standard of performance is to leave two or three dedicated workers (not necessarily fanatical, nor worshippers, and I am unsure who died for him on the first generation; maybe nobody). The real magic is compound growth, at 1.2% per annum for about 2000 years so far.

It is an interesting point whether, even as late as Mark, Jesus' Daniel-esque comments are supposed to apply to himself or to someone still to come. Dunker John asks in Mark, but he never gets a yes-or-no answer. Marcan Jesus himself doesn't seem to be on the hook for yes until the Temple trial, and to all appearances, he didn't convince anybody in his audience.

If you think the above by Carrier is interesting you should read what he says before it:

"Just FYI, most experts are historicity agnostics about Aesop and Zoroaster, and odds favor non-existence for both.

Meanwhile, many scholars are agnostic about Homer and Pythagoras (the latter is outside our ability to know, while every expert agrees no one author composed the works of Homer any more than one author composed Genesis, so the historicity of Homer is on the same level as “the author of Genesis”: obviously such an author existed, since the text didn’t write itself, but there was more than one of them over centuries, and we know nothing about them).

Similarly, all experts agree no one person lies behind the writings of “Hippocrates” and we know nothing reliable about “Democritus,” only that he wrote some things that were later quoted and talked about–which entails someone wrote those things, regardless of their name, so “Democritus” is as good a stand-in term for them as anything.

Likewise the evidence for Epicurus is a bit better than we have for Jesus (e.g., unlike Jesus, we have the actual writings of Epicurus himself.)

And so on."

As Carrier says this will be in his book On the Historicity of Jesus which is targeted for June.

These types of comparisons do show the nearly wild flaying about some HJ supporters get into to try and make the very weak evidence for Jesus appear stronger then it really is. IMHO these types of comparisons get really stupid when they involve people and events after the development of the printing press.

As to why the Gospels are myth Carrier goes into that in the youtube video Why the Gospels Are Myth: The Evidence of Genre and Content

 

[pakeha]

[ . . . ]

Let's make up an example. If you read a text in which the author claims to have psychic powers, and that he had psychic visions of something that happened to someone close to him before the actual event occured, and that this was confirmed by that someone afterwards, you can glean from the (much larger) text that the event itself occured, even if you don't believe that the person has any sort of power, or even that the other someone really confirmed that the psychic vision was accurate at all. [ . . . ]

You can also glean from the much larger text that the event never occurred, especially if it isn't confirmed by any other source.

 

[Belz...]

You can also glean from the much larger text that the event never occurred, especially if it isn't confirmed by any other source.

Of course. So much was implied from my larger point, but the specific examples were meant to illustrate it.

In the case of Jesus, however, even if the events (I mean the Jesus preachings and execution) occured, we wouldn't necessarily expect to find much evidence for them, given that, despite the religion's historical importance, the man himself, if he existed, was probably an obscure nobody even in his own lifetime. In this case I don't think absence of evidence is evidence of absence.

 

[dejudge]

I appreciate your point.

No one knows when any of these texts were in fact written.

One can develop a theory on when the texts were written using the existing data.

It is wise to be cautious and not become 'married' to any hypothesis about when exactly the Pauline corpus was composed.

My hypothersis is "married" to the existing data. Up to at least c 180 CE, or at least up to the time of Celsus "True Discourse", the Pauline Corpus was unknown to Celsus based on Origen in "Against Celsus".

"It is wise to be cautious and not become "married" to the assumption that the Pauline Corpus was composed since pre 70 CE and that Paul preached a heavenly never on earth Jesus.

Pauline writers claimed the Lord Jesus was from heaven and was killed by the Jews.

That the majority of the Pauline epistles are already known to be forgeries pseudographs should always be kept in mind when relying on these texts to explore an hypothesis.

I did not rely on the Pauline Epistles for history. I merely exposed that it is historically and theologically bogus and was unknown up to at least 180 CE.

One must first examine the contents of the Pauline Corpus to find out what it says.

 

[maximara]

Of course. So much was implied from my larger point, but the specific examples were meant to illustrate it.

In the case of Jesus, however, even if the events (I mean the Jesus preachings and execution) occured, we wouldn't necessarily expect to find much evidence for them, given that, despite the religion's historical importance, the man himself, if he existed, was probably an obscure nobody even in his own lifetime. In this case I don't think absence of evidence is evidence of absence.

As I stated before Richard Carrier points out the issue with Jesus was originally a nobody idea:

"It is also problematic to claim Jesus was a nobody. I grant that’s an out. But it comes with consequences. Because if it’s so, you are conceding the Gospels are lying (egregiously…and evidently, successfully) and that Jesus never said or did anything in life that would inspire fanatical worshipers or warrant anyone considering him worth dying for–because nothing Jesus ever said or did in life is ever relevant to the gospel preached anywhere in the authentic letters of Paul…which begs the question how he convinced anyone he was the Messiah and Savior who would soon return on clouds of glory if he never said or did anything anyone thought impressive enough to ever discuss until a lifetime later."

Yes absence of evidence is not evidence of absence but as David Kusche points out that argument has its own issues:

"Say I claim that a parrot has been kidnapped to teach aliens human language and I challenge you to prove that is not true. You can even use Einstein's Theory of Relativity if you like. There is simply no way to prove such a claim untrue. The burden of proof should be on the people who make these statements, to show where they got their information from, to see if their conclusions and interpretations are valid, and if they have left anything out."

As I said before the minimal Jesus theory (Carrier's section of "The Minimal Theory of Historicity") has problems. The biggest is that you make Jesus small enough it gets to a point where he might as well not existed and he becomes as "historical" as Robin Hood or King Arthur which was Remsburg's argument over 100 years ago.

Which brings us back to the part of historical myth the HJ proponents avoid like the plague: "it may be distorted and numberless legends attached until but a small residuum of truth remains and the narrative is essentially false"

Take Robin Hood and his love Maid Marian for example. Now as documented in James Burke's Connections 2 we know she isn't real as she doesn't appear in the traditional ballads until the 16th century. However we do find a Maid Marian in a 1285 song ballad by Adam de la Halle in Italy. The plot is that a smooth talker entices Maid Marian to the big city and she soon realizes what is going on and escapes a fate worse then death returning to her boyfriend Robin.

So here we know even if Robin Hood was a real person all the narratives involving Maid Marian are essentially false.

But on every historical point we can check the Gospels are shown to be essentially false.

The whole Temple tantrum as Carrier likes to call it is totally impossible.

"If you want a more historically plausible account of how the Jewish elite would have actually handled the Jesus problem, look at how we’re told they planned to handle the Paul problem (Acts 23:12-21). More likely, they would have killed him immediately upon his vandalism of the temple square, which was guarded by six hundred armed soldiers (with thousands more to summon just a javelin’s throw away in Fort Antonia, which housed a whole Roman legion, adjacent to the Temple: Josephus, Jewish War 2.12.1, 4.5.1, 5.238-248; Jewish Antiquities 20.8.6, 20.8.11), who were not afraid to beat down any rebellious public who got in their way (most especially trouble-makers in the Temple). Certainly in the temple they could have arrested him easily, with ample armed support (note that Gentiles were permitted in the Temple area that Jesus vandalized, so Roman legions could police it, as well as the Jewish guards authorized to kill any Gentiles who entered the forbidden areas).

Thus, as Acts would have it, Claudius Lysias had no difficulty dispatching hundreds of soldiers and cavalry from within Jerusalem to escort Paul outside the city (Acts 23:22-24), and Paul was able to be arrested even in the middle of a riot. As Josephus relates in Antiquities 20.1, the Romans regularly killed political undesirables surrounded by hundreds of fanatical supporters, without wasting time on an arrest or trial. And even Mark seems to imagine the Jews could assemble a large armed force, and indeed arrest Jesus with one (Mk. 14:43, Mt. 26:47; according to John 18:3, they even came with six hundred Roman legionairies, a full cohort)." - Richard Carrier June 14, 2013 blog

The more you dig the more nonsensical the Jesus story becomes.

 

[proudfootz]

proudfootz

That is how I read what Paul wrote. There's no ambiguity about where in Paul the passage we were discussing appaears. You're welcome to read the passage however you like.

Thanks, I'll read it without the addition of extraneous material.

Paul didn't say any other person was "given to visions."

You're correct, Paul only talks about people who have visions and doesn't characterize these people in any way.

I doubt Paul was grieving when his turn came. In any case, Paul doesn't say whether or not anybody else had been grieving earlier, nor did I say he did. What I said was:

Surely it isn't news to anybody here that that kind of experience is a common feature of healthy human grief.

Presumably that's a fact. If you do not find this fact relevant to the discussion, then ignore it.

It isn't relevant, so I just thought it valuable to point it out. Paul says nothing about anyone grieving over a recent death and having visions.

 

[proudfootz]

By that time, Paul had apparently been going about all over Judea for years proclaiming Jesus was the dead but risen messiah that all Jews had been expecting as a matter of god-given certainty since at least the time of Moses.

If Paul ever subsequently met people like Peter, James and John as the pillars of the Church of God, and met them specifically to talk about their shared and very ancient religion of Jewish messianic belief, then they may have talked about all sorts of beliefs and made all sorts of claims about almost anything and everything.

But what is conspicuously 100% absent from every account of that meeting (and the corresponding meeting 10 years later), is any hint of any mention by anyone that Peter, James, John or anyone else had ever believed that “Jesus” was the messiah before Paul apparently made that identification in his vision of c.33-36AD.

Curiously, evidence of the 'historical Jesus' hypothesized by modern scholars is notoriously lacking. No public preaching, healing, debates with Pharisees, cleansing of temples, collecting disciples, etc.

It's pretty much all cosmic christ at this early stage.

 

[dejudge]

Curiously, evidence of the 'historical Jesus' hypothesized by modern scholars is notoriously lacking. No public preaching, healing, debates with Pharisees, cleansing of temples, collecting disciples, etc.

It's pretty much all cosmic christ at this early stage.

There is also no evidence at all of a cosmic christ in supposed early writings of antiquity. May I remind you that the Jews believed the Jewish prophesied Messianic ruler was ALIVE c 66-70 CE and was FIGHTING AGAINST the Romans and would become ruler of the habitable earth.

The Jewish Prophesied Messianic ruler was expected on EARTH--NOT in heaven.

See Wars of the Jews 6.5.4, Tacitus' Histories and Suetonius' Life of Vespasian.

The NT, including the Pauline Corpus, is NOT about a cosmic christ, but about the Lord Jesus, God's OWN Son,, God Creator, who came down from heaven, was Killed by the Jews and Resurrected on the THIRD Day.

The cosmic never on earth christ is a modern invention which is unknown in writings of antiquity.

 

[pakeha]

Of course. So much was implied from my larger point, but the specific examples were meant to illustrate it.

In the case of Jesus, however, even if the events (I mean the Jesus preachings and execution) occured, we wouldn't necessarily expect to find much evidence for them, given that, despite the religion's historical importance, the man himself, if he existed, was probably an obscure nobody even in his own lifetime. In this case I don't think absence of evidence is evidence of absence.

" In this case I don't think absence of evidence is evidence of absence."
Fair enough, Belz...
However, in this case, the evidence seems to point to the story's falsehood, doesn't it? Especially respecting the preaching and execution.

I find myself continually running into walls or following tracks which lead nowhere when I try to discover, via academic reasoning, archeological and anthropological evidence, literary criticism and historical research into the Palestine of the 1st century anything which points to an HJ.

...As I said before the minimal Jesus theory (Carrier's section of "The Minimal Theory of Historicity") has problems. The biggest is that you make Jesus small enough it gets to a point where he might as well not existed and he becomes as "historical" as Robin Hood or King Arthur which was Remsburg's argument over 100 years ago.

Which brings us back to the part of historical myth the HJ proponents avoid like the plague: "it may be distorted and numberless legends attached until but a small residuum of truth remains and the narrative is essentially false" ...

Are HJ proponents willing to accept this possibility?
That the narrative is essentially false?

Curiously, evidence of the 'historical Jesus' hypothesized by modern scholars is notoriously lacking. No public preaching, healing, debates with Pharisees, cleansing of temples, collecting disciples, etc.

It's pretty much all cosmic christ at this early stage.

These three posters have all given me something to mull over on what looks to be an exhausting and demanding Saturday of work.
Well, that and wondering where the celebrations* tonight will be- at the Cybele's fountain or the Neptune's fountain.



*Champions' final match.

 

[eight bits]

proudfootz

Thanks, I'll read it without the addition of extraneous material.

Good. That's how I read it, too. It isn't unusual that only that much is insufficient to ensure agareement. It is best for prodcutive dialog not to misdiagnose the causes of diagreement.

Paul says nothing about anyone grieving over a recent death and having visions.

That's not quite so. You and I had already discussed some parts of Paul's writing that bear on the timeline. We disagreed about those parts. It was pointless to rehash. However, that you and I disagree about the meaning of what Paul said isn't the same as Paul saying nothing on point.

As to grief, Paul's black-letter text describes routine healthy human grieving behavior, seeing the departed after he has departed. Paul offers no further characterization of the people's state of mind. That you attribute their reported experience to something other than grief is fine, but it is something that you have brought to the text. That's not a complaint, just an observation that there is no such thing as reading any natural language text independently of the reader's background knowledge, interests and choices.


Ian

Of course by that date Paul may have discussed Jesus with those "pillars of the church of God", and indeed with everyone he met. But that is three years and more after Paul’s supposed revelation of Jesus as the messiah.

OK, but he wrote years afterwards. By that time, and so for the writings we actually have, Paul has three possible sources for any ideas or information he writes about: his visions, his scriptural take and his consultation and contacts with others.

(The first three years of Paul's preaching were supposedly in Arabia, maybe from a base in Damascus, not Judea.)

I don't know when Paul first came to believe that the man whose corpse was buried was named Jesus. It is possible that Paul had inferred that the buried man was the Messiah before he found out (or otherwise decided) what the man's name was. By the time Paul wrote the letters, he was teaching both a name in life and titles in death: a "Lord Jesus Christ."


max

Thanks for the link.

And though Tiberius was a ruler, Jesus was the Most Important Man in Human History, the One True Agent of God and Savior of the Whole Universe. That kind of outranks “ruler” in importance. Perhaps this guy is forgetting that not even the Christians themselves preserved any reliable historical documentation of Jesus. And that’s weird.

Those "attributes" of Jesus are not historical issues, some of them are not even observable or testable, and they are all religious judgment questions. As to the behavior of early Christians, I am unsure whether it really is "weird." For all I know, the Jerusalem church did preserve something tangible of Jesus, and was unable to transmit that past the 70-130's bottleneck.

(There is some irony that the Jerusalem church today is in much the same position as the Gnostics were before the discoveries in Egypt, especially Nag Hammadi. All we know of the Jerusalem church is from its rivals at the time or from its sometimes "deJudaizing" latter-day allies.)

Now, we (on both "sides") would prefer that the Jerusalem church had behaved differently, or more effectively. But "weird" it isn't. We only have one side of Paul's correspondence, and at most seven letters (some possibly edited together from a few shorter letters). That is consistent with an accidental "preservation," for example, some recipient churches made copies to circulate to their neighbors, and maybe a few of those copies were lightly used long enough to be collected later. Whatever administrative "office" Paul had, if any, it didn't manage to transmit its own records to us.

One heuristic I am fond of is "Always ask 'compared with what?' when confronting conclusory descriptive statements like 'That's weird.'" Paul was literate, dispersed his writing widely in space, to independent friendly organizations with some literate members and with their own autonomous dissemination and conservation activities. All that, and only a few of the carrier pigeons survived the flight. Nothing at all from Jesus? Regrettable, but not especially surprising.

 

[Belz...]

It is also problematic to claim Jesus was a nobody.

I don't think it's problematic at all. We know the Gospels lie already. And executing a common criminal doesn't mean he's well-known.

 

[Belz...]

However, in this case, the evidence seems to point to the story's falsehood, doesn't it?

Why do you say that ? Because of the implausible elements ?

Here's another example: If I say "remember the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center using planes, in which 3000 people died ? President Bush made it happen to justify going to war in Iraq and Afghanistan, using holograms and thermite !"

Someone could surmise that President Bush was a real person, and that such an attack probably occured (given a much larger text or context) even if the rest is ridiculous.

 

[proudfootz]

" In this case I don't think absence of evidence is evidence of absence."
Fair enough, Belz...
However, in this case, the evidence seems to point to the story's falsehood, doesn't it? Especially respecting the preaching and execution.

I find myself continually running into walls or following tracks which lead nowhere when I try to discover, via academic reasoning, archeological and anthropological evidence, literary criticism and historical research into the Palestine of the 1st century anything which points to an HJ.

It appears in this case there is the absence of evidence on the 'ordinary preacher' side of the scale and the abundance of evidence of 'scripture and visions' side.

Originally Posted by maximara
...As I said before the minimal Jesus theory (Carrier's section of "The Minimal Theory of Historicity") has problems. The biggest is that you make Jesus small enough it gets to a point where he might as well not existed and he becomes as "historical" as Robin Hood or King Arthur which was Remsburg's argument over 100 years ago.

Which brings us back to the part of historical myth the HJ proponents avoid like the plague: "it may be distorted and numberless legends attached until but a small residuum of truth remains and the narrative is essentially false" ...

Are HJ proponents willing to accept this possibility?
That the narrative is essentially false?

Unless some new evidence turns up these sort of discussions will inevitably peter out into a wrangle over the same half-dozen ambiguous verses stripped of their context.

These three posters have all given me something to mull over on what looks to be an exhausting and demanding Saturday of work.
Well, that and wondering where the celebrations* tonight will be- at the Cybele's fountain or the Neptune's fountain.

*Champions' final match.

Suerte!