HISTORICISTS
N E V E R
ENFOLD THIS STUFF IN THE PROFESSIONAL HISTORICAL JESUS MODEL --
AND YOU KNOW THAT
V E R Y
V E R Y
W E L L !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Stone
The Historical Jesus III
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HISTORICISTS
N E V E R
ENFOLD THIS STUFF IN THE PROFESSIONAL HISTORICAL JESUS MODEL --
AND YOU KNOW THAT
V E R Y
V E R Y
W E L L !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Stone
But those more moderate Historical Jesus supporters near if not in Remsberg's 'there is just enough to show Jesus existed as an actual person and little else' camp.
As mentioned before the 'Jesus was really a nobody' option is a solution but it has problems of it own. The first as Remsburg himself pointed out you have no idea what if anything in the Gospels account is accurate. The second is if Jesus was that obscure you cannot exclude the idea that the NT Jesus is a composite character ie effectively fictional.
HISTORICISTS
N E V E R
ENFOLD THIS STUFF IN THE PROFESSIONAL HISTORICAL JESUS MODEL --
AND YOU KNOW THAT
V E R Y
V E R Y
W E L L !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Stone
Yes they do. Read the pro supernatural nonsense that is under Jesus in the 1982 and 1995 editions of the International Standard Bible Encyclopedia for proof of that. Heck the guy who wrote that nonsense clearly states the Christ Myth is the story of Jesus (NOT the man himself) "is a piece of mythology, possessing no more substantial claims to historical fact than the old Greek or Norse stories of gods and heroes..."
Robert Van Voorst's Anthology of World Scriptures presents the supernatural nonsense as history from the get go to the point it gets silly.
Of course there is the ever popular Evidence That Demands A Verdict or as I like to call it Lawyer Who Needs to Learn How Courts Really Work
insanity which is a total embarrassment to the whole historical Jesus side. 
You mean this book?Yes they do. Read the pro supernatural nonsense that is under Jesus in the 1982 and 1995 editions of the International Standard Bible Encyclopedia for proof of that. Heck the guy who wrote that nonsense clearly states the Christ Myth is the story of Jesus (NOT the man himself) "is a piece of mythology, possessing no more substantial claims to historical fact than the old Greek or Norse stories of gods and heroes..."
Robert Van Voorst's Anthology of World Scriptures presents the supernatural nonsense as history from the get go to the point it gets silly.
Of course there is the ever popular Evidence That Demands A Verdict or as I like to call it Lawyer Who Needs to Learn How Courts Really Work
Google. No wonder it doesn't coincide with the views of the HJ side!
tsig
a carbon based life-form
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HISTORICISTS
N E V E R
ENFOLD THIS STUFF IN THE PROFESSIONAL HISTORICAL JESUS MODEL --
AND YOU KNOW THAT
V E R Y
V E R Y
W E L L !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Stone
How does the PHJ differ from the plain old HJ and how does both of the differ from the New Model Jesus?
That is the promotional taken verbatim from an apologist website and has no more relevance then the publishers that peddle Weston A Price's work as that of some lone seeker of truth suppressed by the establishment.
The low ranking customer reviews are more interesting:
"McDowell states that Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible as if it were accepted fact--which it is not--and doesn't offer any evidence to the contrary. All the archeological evidence is pre-1970 and there have been significant discoveries in the last 30 years!"
"But when I read the book carefully I was shocked. For the first time I became aware of how weak and illogical the arguments in favor of Christian faith really were. What I had always been told were iron-clad arguments turned out to be, on close inspection, empty sophistry."
"This is one of the more nonsensical, illogical books I've come across. It attempts to prove the existence of magic, mysticism, enchanted relics, and incantation rituals through circular reasoning, cherry picking, confusing coincidence with cause and effect, and first assuming that it is true and then attempting to prove that the Bible is true by using scripture quotes."
McDowell's "Evidence" is a mirage and a deception is particular interesting but
An Atheist Reads Evidence That Demands a Verdict over on youtube shows just how off the wall the book is in terms of logic and social science.
Jerry Wayne Borchardt's Skepticism and McDowell's "Proof" shows just how face palming bad McDowell case originally was (and to some extent still is)
Oh, the irony.
Fundamentalist Christians believe the supernatural is likely and happened.
Well it is not so much Fundamental Christianity but a Triumphalist view.
The basic idea that there are two historical Jesuses has been around since at least 1909 with Remsburg. Rudolf Bultmann gave them the names Reductive and Triumphalist in 1941 and Biblical scholar I. Howard Marshall in 2004 reiterated these as the two end points of the historical Jesus spectrum.
Combined all these authors you get the following:
Reductive theory (Remsburg's Jesus of Nazareth): "Jesus was an ordinary but obscure individual who inspired a religious movement and copious legends about him" rather than being a totally fictitious creation like King Lear or Doctor Who
Triumphalist theory (Remsberg's Jesus of Bethlehem): "The Gospels are totally or almost totally true" rather than being works of imagination like those of King Arthur.
Many of the classic Christ Mythers like Drews and John Robertson were actually anti-Triumphalist Jesus theorists.
Also some people called "Christ Myther" like Frazer, Mead, Remsburg, Allegro, and GA Wells from 1996 on were are actually reductive theorists as they didn't quite throw out Jesus the man but they did more or less throw out the story of Jesus.
In fact, things got so bad regarding the positions Frazer and GA Wells held that they both had to expressly state they were NOT saying there wasn't human Jesus but rather that they accept there was a human person behind part of the Jesus story.
GA Wells has gone so far as to say that even in his earlier works Paul's "mythical" Jesus may have been legendary ie a possibly historical person so in a reductive sense Wells was NEVER a Christ Myther.
As explained in the Evidence for the historical existence of Jesus Christ:
"A Historical myth according to Strauss, and to some extent I follow his language, is a real event colored by the light of antiquity, which confounded the human and divine, the natural and the supernatural. The event may be but slightly colored and the narrative essentially true, or it may be distorted and numberless legends attached until but a small residuum of truth remains and the narrative is essentially false." - Remsburg
"Jesus, if he existed, was a Jew, and his religion, with a few innovations, was Judaism. With his death, probably, his apotheosis began. During the first century the transformation was slow; but during the succeeding centuries rapid. The Judaic elements of his religion were, in time, nearly all eliminated, and the Pagan elements, one by one, were incorporated into the new faith" - Remsburg
So even if Jesus is a historical myth (ie was a flesh and blood man) you could have the issue of the Gospel narrative being essentially false and telling you nothing about the actual Jesus other than he existed--effectively putting him on par with Robin Hood or King Arthur, who have had historical candidates suggested as much as 200 years from when their stories traditionally take place.
To make Jesus more than that a researcher has to assume some parts of the Gospels narrative is essentially true. But which parts? In answering that question all supporters of a "historical Jesus" get into the confirmation bias problem of effectively turning Jesus into a Tabula Rasa on which they overlay their own views.
"The "historical Jesus" reconstructed by New Testament scholars is always a reflection of the individual scholars who reconstruct him. Albert Schweitzer was perhaps the single exception, and he made it painfully clear that previous questers for the historical Jesus had merely drawn self-portraits. All unconsciously used the historical Jesus as a ventriloquist dummy. Jesus must have taught the truth, and their own beliefs must have been true, so Jesus must have taught those beliefs." - Price, Robert (1997) Christ a Fiction
The fact this keeps happening shows just how little definitive information on Jesus there is in Paul's writings and the Gospels.
Price points out the problem and its result:
"That one Jesus reconstruction leaves aside, the next one takes up and makes its cornerstone. Jesus simply wears too many hats in the Gospels – exorcist, healer, king, prophet, sage, rabbi, demigod, and so on. The Jesus Christ of the New Testament is a composite figure (...) The historical Jesus (if there was one) might well have been a messianic king, or a progressive Pharisee, or a Galilean shaman, or a magus, or a Hellenistic sage. But he cannot very well have been all of them at the same time." - Price, Robert (2000) Deconstructing Jesus, pp. 15-16
"My point here is simply that, even if there was a historical Jesus lying back of the gospel Christ, he can never be recovered. If there ever was a historical Jesus, there isn't one any more. All attempts to recover him turn out to be just modern remythologizings of Jesus. Every "historical Jesus" is a Christ of faith, of somebody's faith. So the "historical Jesus" of modern scholarship is no less a fiction." - Price, Robert (1997) Christ a Fiction)
---
Jesus if he really did exist is on par with Robin Hood and King Arthur; a person that if there ever was a single historical core has been obliterated due by the mythology. It certainly doesn't help that the Christians took such poor care of possible supporting material:
* On Superstition by Seneca the Younger c40 - c62: covered every cult in Rome and yet the only reason we know it did NOT talk about Christianity at all is Augustine in the 4th century complained about it; which if it was closer to the 40 than the 62 doesn't make sense. Yet despite this the work wasn't preserved
* Three of the five books that made up Philo's Embassy to Gaius (c40 CE): the volume that covered Pontius Pilate's rule of Judea in detail is gone
* Clovius Rufus' detailed history of Nero is also gone
* Pliny the Elder's history of Rome from 31 to then present day (sometime before his death in 79) with a volume for each year is also gone
* Annals of Tacitus: entire section covering 29-31 CE which has been cut from the work as if by surgeon's scalpel and given what he says in the preserved 64 CE section (which the oldest copy has been tampered with) it seems Tacitus never mentioned Christianity before 64 CE.
Given that such works needed to be hand copied and the monasteries who did such copying didn't have a library but rather a spare room were nearly anything extra got dumped one doesn't need a 'conspiracy' to explain this issue.
After all the the tampering if not outright forging of the Testimonium Flavianum is thought to be the work of ONE person: Eusebius which one 19th historian described as "the first thoroughly dishonest historian of antiquity"
In fact, only one book of Hippolytus's 10 volume Refutation of all Heresies was thought to have been preserved until the 19th century when books 4 through 10 were found in a Mount Athos monastery. Yet books 2 and 3 which detailed the secret doctrines of the mystery religions of his day were not preserved.
So while odds are was no conspiracy there is a pattern that raises issues about the quality of what the Christians did preserve.
Christians themselves have 'cooked the data' by what works they preserved and what works they either didn't copy or actively destroyed that you have the situation described in the novel Swastika Night where thanks to the powers that bethe history of WWII has been so distorted that it is basically fiction. Only unlike that novel there is no lone book that tells what really happened.
I have suggested three "historical" Jesuses to show the problem:
1) In the time of Pontius Pilate some crazy ran into the Temple trashing the place and screaming "I am Jesus, King of the Jews" before some guard ran him through with a sword. Right place right time...and that is it. No preaching, no followers, no crucifixion, nothing but some nut doing the 1st century equivalent of suicide by cop.
2) Paul's teachings ala John Frum inspired others to take up the name "Jesus" and preach their spin on Paul's visions with one of them getting crucified by the Romans by his troubles whose teachings are time shifted so he is before Paul. (John Robertson actually came up with a variant of this in 1900 with this Jesus being inspired by Paul's writings rather then teachings)
3) You could have a Jesus who was born c 12 BCE in the small town of Cana, who preached a few words of Jewish wisdom to small crowds of no more than 10 people at a time, and died due to being run over by a chariot at the age of 50.
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Those suggested stories are NOT plausible.
Why are you making up stories of Jesus from your imagination when the Jesus character is fully described by Christian writers themselves.
The People antiquity who should know the truth of the nature of Jesus admitted their Jesus existed as the Son of a Ghost and a Virgin and was God Creator.
The suggested human Jesus with a human father does NOT make sense in the NT.
Jesus [God Incarnate] is the "historical" Jesus of the Christians of antiquity.
The suggested human ONLY Jesus is a Myth/Fiction character WITHOUT a shred of historical evidence from antiquity.
Why not? There is no supernatural elements in any of them.
You do know questions end with a "?", right?
Again we have Triumphalist aspect being used to argue against a possible Reductive Jesus. As Carrier said using citing the absurdity of the triumphalist theory is NOT a valid argument against a possible Reductive Jesus. Even Remsburg pointed out that the Jesus of Bethlehem you are rambling on about is a totally different thing from a possible Jesus of Nazareth.
Yes it does as it was a known heresy by the sect that what would eventually become "the Church". We can NOT just look at the particular faction that won the battle over what Jesus was but at the whole picture. Remember the idea of Jesus being just a person is in the Talmud account and would survive to be incorporated into Islam in the 7th century
We know that supernatural aspects were attached to known historical people with Apollonius of Tyana being the poster child. About anything that can be said about the story of Jesus can be said about Apollonius of Tyana and yet the material that shows Apollonius of Tyana was an actual living breathing person is far better then Jesus. Just pointing to the supernatural nonsense in the Jesus story isn't enough.
Heck, there are NO supernatural elements in the Robin Hood account and we aren't sure he really existed!
Again if Jesus was a minor also ran messiah one would not expect much especially if his ministry didn't last long or he didn't have one at all.
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Unfortunately, Craig, with these mythers, you need to unwrap this even more -- as is plain from the obtuse follow-up we've seen here. To wit:
THIS BOOK DOESN'T COINCIDE WITH THE VIEWS OF THE HJ SIDE
B E C A U S E
THIS BOOK IS FROM A TOTALLY CHRISTIAN POINT OF VIEW, WHILE THE HJ SIDE IS TOTALLY
N O N -
SUPERNATURAL IN OUTLOOK AND HAS
N O T H I N G
TO DO WITH CHRISTIANITY AT ALL.
You'll still find the kool-aid mythers doing everything they can here to obfuscate that uncomfortable
F A C T ,
but at least this posting now puts out that
F A C T
on the record and makes it that much harder to ignore. Oh, mythers will still try to ignore it, because
e v a d e
is their middle name. But with this posting now out there, most other readers will see just how shameless they really are in that evasion.
Helpfully,
Stone
YOU SHAMELESSLY USE
THE CHRISTIAN BIBLE
TO ARGUE THAT JESUS OF NAZARETH DID EXIST
THE CHRISTIAN BIBLE
STATES JESUS OF NAZARETH
WAS BORN OF A HOLY GHOST and a VIRGIN and
was GOD CREATOR.
dejudge said:
They are not plausible because they do not match the EXISTING evidence from antiquity.
Christians writers of antiquity claimed their Jesus was a TRANSFIGURING Son of a God and God Creator so it would be PLAUSIBLE for the stories to contain SUPERNATURAL EVENTS.
A non-supernatural Jesus of Nazareth does NOT makes sense based on the writings of Christians.
maximara said:
We know that supernatural aspects are attached to Myth characters.
We know that Jesus of Nazareth is ALL SUPERNATURAL and FICTIONAL elements in the NT and WITHOUT history.
We know that writings of antiquity claimed the fables of Jesus were written by men who were Liars but that the HISTORY of Apolonius was written out of respect for the truth by MEN who LIVED with him of the highest education.
Against Hierocles
maximara said:About anything that can be said about the story of Jesus can be said about Apollonius of Tyana and yet the material that shows Apollonius of Tyana was an actual living breathing person is far better then Jesus. Just pointing to the supernatural nonsense in the Jesus story isn't enough.
Your statement has been shown to be an established fallacy. I have pointed out the Supernatural Nonsense and the non-supernatural FICTION in the Jesus story.
I have pointed out that Jesus of Nazareth is a MYTH/FICTION character. If we remove the supernatural we are left with FICTION.
Ehrman in "Did Jesus Exist?" have explained that many accounts of Jesus which appear "plausible" did NOT happen.
Now, it is stated that Apollonius of Tyana had a HUMAN Father that Apollonius BURIED his FATHER.
Jesus of Nazareth in the NT is GOD CREATOR and born of a Ghost WITHOUT a human father in ALL NT stories.
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And it also states, in different sources INCLUDED in this disparate mishmash of MATERIAL, that he was a carpenter with siblings DWELLING in Galilee. It is not shamelessness on the PART of the Historicists that is evident, but gross AND invincible ignorance of the CHARACTER of the Christian scriptures displayed by the Mythicists.
Nonsense. The Jesus story is everything to do with Christianity: we only know his story b/c of it's supernatural outlook.
His alleged genealogy is bible-outlined (and supernatural), unless you believe the Talmud references to Pandera/Pantera being his father.
Stating He was a carpenter is typical of deity-claims - being a carpenter/builder is a common euphemism for god-leaders.
Sorry Stone, but even Biblical scholar I. Howard Marshall acknowledges "the Gospels tell us the story of Jesus exactly as it happened" as part of 'The description of Jesus in the Gospels corresponds to what he was actually like' section of the historical Jesus spectrum.
Yes, Marshall points out that a naturalistic view throws out the supernatural and odds are the Gospels are totally factual view is talking gibberish but he is also accepting the painful FACT that it IS part of the Historical Jesus spectrum.
As Marshall states "We shall land in considerable confusion if we embark on an inquiry about the historical Jesus if we do not pause to ask ourselves exactly what we are talking about."
As I have said before Josh McDowell's works brought a lot of nonsense to the Historical Jesus table that it really didn't need. At least McDowell seems to have dropped the nonsensical 'Jesus existence can't be proved scientifically' by using physical science baseline idiocy that he was promoting back in the mid 1980s...yes it was as face palming STUPID as it sounds.
According to McDowell in the mid 1980s NO social science was a science because they didn't involved repeatable experiments.
So according to McDowell in the mid 1980s anthropology, archeology, communication studies, economics, education, geography, and about any other social science you could mention was NOT a science.
There is a reason I consider Josh McDowell the worst thing to ever come tp the historical Jesus side and it was because his books made the Historical Jesus side look like clueless simpletons in how courts and science work.
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Further to my previous post viz.
From wikipedia for Tektōn (I'm not allowed to post urls, yet) -
.
From wikipedia for Tektōn (I'm not allowed to post urls, yet) -
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YOU ARE SHAMELESSLY USING SOURCES THAT
ARE RIDDLED WITH FICTION, MYTHOLOGY, CONTRADICTIONS,
DISCREPANCIES, HISTORICAL PROBLEMS AND EVENTS WHICH DID NOT
AND COULD NOT HAVE HAPPENED.
gMark does NOT state Jesus was a Carpenter.
In the myth fables called gMark, a QUESTION was asked about Jesus the TRANSFIGURING water walker.
Mark 6:3
A Christian writer CONTRADICTS you and states that "IN NONE OF THE GOSPELS OF THE CHURCH IS JESUS DESCRIBED AS A CARPENTER".
Origen's Against Celsus 6 "
Please, stop the shameless use of contradictory fiction sources for history.
Please, find sources with credibility.
The Christian Bible supports a MYTH/FICTION Jesus.
The now defunct Jesus Police web site was a treasure trove of information like this:
"...the Greek word for 'carpenter' in the gospels actually stands for an underlying Aramaic term that is used metaphorically in the Talmud to denote a scholar." (Porter, 2004, p. 81)
"In the Gospels, Jesus is called a tekton, a Greek word that meant not merely a carpenter skilled in making cabinets or furniture but a designer, construction engineer, or architect. A tekton could build a house, construct a bridge, or design a temple." (Starbird, 2003, p. 53)
"It is highly unlikely that Jesus was a carpenter. If we examine the 48 parables that occur in the Gospels, not a single one draws upon the experiences of a carpenter. Three of them refer to buildings (e.g., house divided, foolish builder, unfinished tower), and these may offer support for the idea that Jesus’ father was a builder, not a carpenter" - Jesus was a Carpenter "Error"
The Jesus most people know is a mishmash of the Gospel account and later traditions; this is where a good number of Christ Myth theories stumble. They try to address the addons (December 25, three wise men, etc) and wind up spouting nonsense as those points were NOT part of the Gospel account.
Then you have stuff like Zeitgeist which to put it bluntly is just plain several cards short of a full deck bonkers (and not just with how it handles the Christ Myth either)
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