What strawman!!! You have no historical evidence of Paul and Jesus.
The Historical Jesus III
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What strawman!!! You have no historical evidence of Paul and Jesus.
Well first of all, whilst you are entitled, as any of us are, to say that Carrier 100% wrong, I remind you that his analysis of that passage in Zechariah 6, and in particular, his analysis of what Philo believed from that same passage, is published in a peer reviewed book, and that apparently means that greater experts than you and I have looked very carefully over Carriers argument, and decided that he has a plausible interpretation there. They may not agree with his interpretation, and you are certain that his interpretation is 100% wrong. But Carrier can point to the fact that his interpretation is set out at length in at least two quite long sections a of book endorsed by peer review.
OK, so lets have look at what that passage in Zechariah actually says (or at least, what Bible Gateway gives as the correct translation of that particular passage ... it's always, afaik, somebody's translation from the Greek Septuagint, so we are relying on the accuracy of a chain of translations) -
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Zechariah+6
Zechariah 6New International Version (NIV)
Four Chariots 6
1. I looked up again, and there before me were four chariots coming out from between two mountains—mountains of bronze. 2 The first chariot had red horses, the second black, 3 the third white, and the fourth dappled—all of them powerful. 4 I asked the angel who was speaking to me, “What are these, my lord?”
5 The angel answered me, “These are the four spirits[a] of heaven, going out from standing in the presence of the Lord of the whole world. 6 The one with the black horses is going toward the north country, the one with the white horses toward the west, and the one with the dappled horses toward the south.”
7 When the powerful horses went out, they were straining to go throughout the earth. And he said, “Go throughout the earth!” So they went throughout the earth.
8 Then he called to me, “Look, those going toward the north country have given my Spirit[c] rest in the land of the north.”
A Crown for Joshua 9
9 The word of the Lord came to me: 10 “Take silver and gold from the exiles Heldai, Tobijah and Jedaiah, who have arrived from Babylon. Go the same day to the house of Josiah son of Zephaniah. 11 Take the silver and gold and make a crown, and set it on the head of the high priest, Joshua son of Jozadak.[d] 12 Tell him this is what the Lord Almighty says: ‘Here is the man whose name is the Branch, and he will branch out from his place and build the temple of the Lord. 13 It is he who will build the temple of the Lord, and he will be clothed with majesty and will sit and rule on his throne. And he[e] will be a priest on his throne. And there will be harmony between the two.’ 14 The crown will be given to Heldai,[f] Tobijah, Jedaiah and Hen[g] son of Zephaniah as a memorial in the temple of the Lord. 15 Those who are far away will come and help to build the temple of the Lord, and you will know that the Lord Almighty has sent me to you. This will happen if you diligently obey the Lord your God.”
Footnotes:
a. Zechariah 6:5 Or winds
b. Zechariah 6:6 Or horses after them
c. Zechariah 6:8 Or spirit
d. Zechariah 6:11 Hebrew Jehozadak, a variant of Jozadak
e. Zechariah 6:13 Or there
f. Zechariah 6:14 Syriac; Hebrew Helem
g. Zechariah 6:14 Or and the gracious one, the
In the first section Zech.6, you can see how fanciful and unrealistically prophetic all of this is supposed to be - it is not a historical account being given by the writer of Zechariah. It is more in the form of highly fanciful completely unrealistic prophecy about the supernatural actions of God.
OK, so Zech.6 is setting the context for the relevant passage which Carrier then tries to interpret from Zech. 9-15.
The very first line there Zech.9, tells you that this is all something that the writer personally obtained from "the Lord"! (whoever the Lord actually was, or what the original Hebrew word (translated) was ever supposed to be ... Yahweh?, or Elyon?, or Christ?, or...?). That tells you straight away that nothing here is a real a event or fact, it's religious dream-like imaginary prophecy.
It then says in 11. "11 Take the silver and gold and make a crown, and set it on the head of the high priest, Joshua son of Jozadak.[d]". This is apparently supposed to be a real person, i.e. a priest from around 500 BC named Joshua son of Jozadak. Though I don't suppose anyone truly knows whether any of these old testament figures really were living real people ... for example, afaik a great deal is said in the OT about people named Moses, Abraham, Solomon, king David, but where afaik most modern bible scholars now think that such figures (figures of central importance to the legendary OT history of the Jews), were quite possibly never anything more than fictional figures of mythic legend. So, I don't think it should surprise anyone to find out that people described as important high priests in 500 BC were not in fact ever real people. But leaving that caution aside for a moment -
- the very next sentence is Zech.12 which is the sentence mainly in dispute here, or rather which you are claiming is certainly wrong in Carrier's interpretation/argument, and here is what that sentence 12 is translated (rightly or wrongly!?) to say -
"12 Tell him this is what the Lord Almighty says: ‘Here is the man whose name is the Branch, and he will branch out from his place and build the temple of the Lord."
Now you would have to ask Carrier to explain further precisely why he thinks that sentience in particular (Carrier is actually trying to look more broadly at that sentence 12 in conjunction with that entire section of Zechariah from at least Zech.6 to 15, as I have quoted it above in the entirety, and he is further interpreting that with things that he says were written 500 years later by Philo, as well as being filtered through certain passages from Daniel and Isaiah), BUT ... what I see there in Zech.12 which may be Carrier's reasoning, is that 12 says that the Lord Almighty says that this crowned priest named Joshua, is "THE man" who is THE Branch" ... i.e. as if to say that Joshua ben Jozadek is now revealed by "the Lord Almighty" to be the one who's name is really "Branch" or "Rising" ... IOW, this is the "incorporeal being" or "Logos" in Philo's interpretation of that same passage, about which Philo writes -
Carrier, OHJ page 200, quoting Philo On the Confusion of Tongues 63.
" "Behold, the man named Rising!" is a very good novel appellation indeed, if you consider it as spoken of a man who is compounded of body and soul. But if you look upon it as applied to that incorporeal being who is none other than the divine image, you will then agree that the name of "Rising" has been given to him with great felicity. For the father of the Universe has caused him to rise up as the eldest so, whom, in another passage he calls the firstborn. And he who is thus born, imitates the ways of his father".
So what I think Carrier is saying is - Philo believes that Joshua ben Jozadak in Zech.12, is according to Philo "none other than the divinine image" and "incorporeal being", who elsewhere in Philo is afaik usually refered to as the "Logos" or " demiurge", ie quite simply because the writer of Zechariah, i.e. the prophet Zechariah, says that the Lord Almighty has, or will, put a crown on this "man's head" and reveal him to be the true Logos or demiurge, who is of course (as the demiurge or Logos is generally described, and as it was afaik generally understood and meant by Philo) a "pre-existent" celestial being, who is the supernatural scion of God
Do I believe all of that (the above explanation) is true & correct in the sense of saying that Carrier is therefore right to say this passage in Zechariah does reveal a pre-existent being named Joshua as the Christ believed 500 years later by Philo and by Paul? No, that's not what I am saying above ... what I have said above is to give an explanation of what may have been Carrier's reasoning when he tried to make sense of that particular passage in Zech.12 and it's context from Zech.9-15, and in the content of what is apparently much clearer in the writing of Philo as Philo's belief that the passage in Zech was indeed saying that a high priest of 500 BC or earlier named Joshua be Jozadak, had been revealed by the "Lord Almighty" to actually be the true Logos or demiurge or whatever strange religious adjective you want to use or that Philo used, that was by all religious definition (as Philo's says) necessarily a "pre-existent" celestial being.
What I am saying is - that (the above explanation), may be what Carrier has in mind when he claims that the passage does name a pre-existent celestial son of God as a figure named Joshua.
And in case other readers here are not following this, or in case they think that I am the only person who thinks Carrier may have a valid point here re. the actual meaning of Zech.12 and/or what Philo thought was the actual true meaning of that passage in Zechariah, here is a link to a discussion board from 3 years ago with some enlightening posts (eg in the exchanges between James F McGrath and Michael Macrossan) ... and where readers here might also note that GDon himself puts in an appearance posting in that discussion (albeit to introduce something quite off topic about Euhemerism) -
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/explor...rriers-treatment-of-the-historical-jesus.html
As for the rest of your post - I have not read the the rest of it, because this is already taking up several hours a day of my time, but I expect the above explanation probably covers a great deal of the rest of what you have had to say anyway.
All of which is rather beside the central issue here, which is the question of why nobody arguing here for a HJ has ever been able to post any evidence at all of anyone ever confirming that they had met a human Jesus. And if you cannot do that, then you actually do not have any evidence of a human Jesus ... instead what you have is only evidence of un-evidenced religious belief in an unknown Jesus.
So what had any of that to do with 16.5 accusing me of saying something that "erred" about a Great Fire?
Please quote where I “erred” in making claims about a “Great Fire”
If 16.5 wrote that you erred about a great fire, but you are saying you didn't err about a great fire, I suggest you take that up with 16.5.
Yes
Yes, 'propose'
I didn't propose that 'Jesus is Serapis'.
I proposed that Jesus is a 'developed' God, like Serapis [previously] was.
Please don't misrepresent me.
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GDon
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Yes, correct. It is plainly some kind of vision about the high priest, Jesus son of Jehozadak.
That's right. Supposedly a real person, a priest who lived around 500 BCE.
IanS, that is a very good summary of Carrier's position.
The problem with that position is that the plain reading of Zech 6 shows a vision about a man called Jesus son of Jehozadak who was involved in the construction of the Second Temple around 500 BCE. And this is most definitely a man, not a celestial being.
Carrier thinks Philo is referring to that man when Philo appears to quote from Zech 6.12. Now if you look at Philo, he was talking about "the man from the East" who was "the image of God". But that man is clearly the Platonic Adam, who was made in the image of God and who was put in a Garden in the East. While Philo appears to quote Zech 6.12, he makes no reference to anything in the contents of Zech 6, neither to the person of Jesus nor the situation. It is a quote without context, like me quoting "To be or not to be" in some context -- people would understand I was quoting Shakespeare, but no-one would think of looking at the passages in Shakespeare to try to determine what I meant.
Still, Carrier's reading of what Philo might have meant is possible, in the way that many things are possible. But it is unlikely. It is in fact not necessary. Carrier appears to be creating his own facts to fit his theory: in other words, creating apologetics.
The answer is that nobody has any evidence at all of anyone ever confirming that they had met a human Jesus. For you, that is critical. For others, not so much. I think that is understood by all now.
Okay.
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Perhaps you have not been in this thread for very long (?), but I must have explained this at least 150 times here already -
- in any general situation at all (not necessarily anything to do with Jesus), you might not need an eye witness at all. You might for example have all sorts of other evidence. For example in legal cases, a jury might hear testimony offering all sorts of other things as evidence, e.g. they might hear about DNA tests, blood matching, firearms ballistics residues, they might hear about official paperwork that showed the defendant was elsewhere at the time of the crime, etc.
But in the case of Jesus there is apparently no such alternative evidence. No physical evidence of any sort, and no independent official records of any sort. Nothing except for what was written in the bible.
So what sort of evidence is the bible? It's not eye witness testimony, although for a very long time the church had always given everyone the impression that it certainly was all eye-witness evidence from personal disciples of Jesus. Instead the bible only consists of testimony from entirely anonymous writers who reported their beliefs about a Jesus figure who none of them had ever known.
That is very specifically just evidence of peoples religious beliefs. It's not evidence of Jesus himself being known to any of those writers. It's just evidence showing what they believed. But nor do any of those writers name anyone who had given them any of their stories of Jesus. So no eye-witness informants are named or even claimed there either. It's just un-evidenced religious belief.
But we do now know for sure that one of their sources, if not there only source, was ancient OT prophecy. But of course that was never a real witness of any kind, that would just be fictional superstitious religious myth creation.
Perhaps in the future some genuine evidence will be found. And in the past a huge amount of such evidence has been claimed. E.g. the Turin Shroud, the Bone Box of James etc. But it has all turned out to be religious fraud.
So what evidence do you have? Just the evidence of religious biblical belief? Is that it? Is that all??
The Bible is nothing but "a collection of myths and fables" according to your own statement.
It is virtually impossible for you to present any historical data for Jehozadak from the same myths and fables WITHOUT external corroboratice historical sources.
Myth characters do not have to be described as "celestial".
Cain and Abel were non-celestial myth/fiction characters in the Bible.
GDon
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Nitpick: Not quite true. Pretty much from the start, the church has taught that the Gospels of Mark and Luke were not by personal disciples of Jesus.
This is Papias, writing around 130 CE: http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/papias.html
Mark having become the interpreter of Peter, wrote down accurately whatsoever he remembered. It was not, however, in exact order that he related the sayings or deeds of Christ. For he neither heard the Lord nor accompanied Him. But afterwards, as I said, he accompanied Peter...
Papias also writes how he knew people who knew people who knew Jesus:
But I shall not be unwilling to put down, along with my interpretations, whatsoever instructions I received with care at any time from the elders, and stored up with care in my memory, assuring you at the same time of their truth. For I did not, like the multitude, take pleasure in those who spoke much, but in those who taught the truth; nor in those who related strange commandments, but in those who rehearsed the commandments given by the Lord to faith, and proceeding from truth itself. If, then, any one who had attended on the elders came, I asked minutely after their sayings,--what Andrew or Peter said, or what was said by Philip, or by Thomas, or by James, or by John, or by Matthew, or by any other of the Lord's disciples: which things Aristion and the presbyter John, the disciples of the Lord, say. For I imagined that what was to be got from books was not so profitable to me as what came from the living and abiding voice.
Papias lived at a time when apparently oral transmission was preferred over written, since words on a page were "dead".
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The Big Dog
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See that little arrow next to my quote? That takes you back to my post where I explain this in detail. Strange how you missed that, hmm?
For him and for anyone who values evidence and reasoning based upon logic and rationality and reality.
But of course it is quite obvious that reason and evidence based upon logic and rationality and reality do not hold that much sway with people who opt to worship as their sky daddy a mere human being tortuously wrangled and extruded out of what is nothing but a collection of myths and fairy tales.
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The writing itself might constitute evidence of something. But it is not evidence of Jesus as a living person known to that writer!
It’s evidence only of what that writer claims to have believed about Jesus for some reason that the writer never explains ... except that iirc, all those gospel writers said, as Paul had repeatedly said, that they had found their belief confirmed in scripture. And as Randel Helms has shown, all the gospel writers, and especially the most important two, g-Mark and g-Mathew, were certainly using OT scriptural prophecies as a source.
So when you say that the biblical writing can “still constitute evidence towards the historicity of that Jesus”, what you really mean is that such writing is evidence of a sort about something, but what it certainly is not is evidence actually of Jesus himself being known as a human person by any of them ... it’s evidence of un-evidenced beliefs in an unknown Jesus.
The rest of your post is very directly accepting and agreeing with exactly what I have said to you about the fact that nowhere in any of that biblical writing is there anyone who claims to have met a human Jesus.
Except that is for your final remark in which you tried to claim that you have all of biblical scholars on your side and that I have nobody except perhaps a few sceptics like Richard Carrier. That is clearly you making a backhanded compliment to yourself. Here is the quote of your final remark -
But the problem with that remark, which is just you trying to be dismissive whilst congratulating yourself for believing what bible scholars and the church tells you, is that in all the above you have just been forced by very clear logic to agree with virtually everything I have said about your complete lack of evidence for a human Jesus ever known to anyone.
So if you and 10,000 biblical scholars all wish to claim how certain you are upon such total lack of any such evidence at all (evidence of a human Jesus, that is ... not evidence of something else entirely, such as merely evidence of religious beliefs drawn from the OT), then as I said before that is entirely your choice, but belief like that, in the absence of genuine evidence, is what is actually called faith (in this case it’s religious faith).
But if you actually believe that in the bible there is some other genuine evidence of Jesus as a living person, then by all means quote whatever that evidence is from the bible ... but be sure that it is not just a quote of the authors un-evidenced belief in a figure they had never known, because that would only be evidence of their religious beliefs (un-evidenced beliefs in the supernatural, in fact).
So ... what evidence do you produce from the bible then?
You now have evidence that myths and legends may contain authentic material. The Iliad does. It also contains untrue statements.
Why do people keep saying straw man? Does the straw man whisper propaganda in Chinese, djudge?
Let's count up again, and see how we're doing.
ETA No, I missed "genuine evidence of Jesus as a living person". So that's six. Not at all bad.
Sorry yet again. I'm losing the plot, because I also missed "evidence of a human Jesus, that is ..." which brings you up to equal your highest score, seven. So, very well done!
Five. You're slipping a bit.
ETA No, I missed "genuine evidence of Jesus as a living person". So that's six. Not at all bad.
Sorry yet again. I'm losing the plot, because I also missed "evidence of a human Jesus, that is ..." which brings you up to equal your highest score, seven. So, very well done!
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Do you have any idea at all that the claims by Papias have been rejected by Scholars?
You should have known that virtually all Scholars reject the claim that gMark was written by Mark and reject almost account of Jesus in gMark.
gMark is not history and is either a forgery or false attribution.
In addition, the fragments of Papias are in a far worse condition than gMark.
All the apologetic writings which mentioned Papias are dated hundreds of years AFTER Papias supposedly lived.
Essentially, the fragments of Papias are a collection of myths and fables which are completely useless to argue for an historical Jesus.
Seriously... so all the Greek and Roman writings (not to mention Sumerians, Babylonians, Egyptians, Canaanites/Hebrews and Persians) indicate no appreciation for the written word? So was the library of Alexandria just for show?
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Porpoise of Life
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Very well then, it was not my intention to misrepresent you.
I do notice you did not answer my question: where are your primary sources? You know, the ones you've been requesting from the HJ side, and then dismiss because they are of dubious provenance, medieval copies, or not first hand accounts.
If this is truly your standard, you must have better evidence than pointing out similarities between mystery religions.
There is no such thing as "historical truth" as you just called it. Or as other HJ posters here have often said or tried to imply, something called "historical evidence" or a special type or special standard of "truth" or "evidence" that is peculiar to biblical studies.
Evidence for anything, or the "truth" of anything, means the same thing in all subjects. "Fact" (i.e. "truth"), is "fact", whatever subject is under discussion.
What you, and all other HJ posters here seem to be claiming, is that in studies of ancient history, inc. studies about the bible as a source of writing about Jesus, we are forced to accept as "evidence" information which is, as one HJ poster of the past here (i.e. name “JaysonR”) put it himself, of a "truly awful standard" (though he still wanted to use that “truly awful standard” of evidence anyway)
It may indeed be the case that biblical scholars, whilst searching the gospels and letters for "evidence" to show Jesus was human person, are forced to use only very poor, dubious, self-contradictory, and otherwise weak sources of anonymous non-contemporary written material of doubtful provenance. "Forced" to rely upon material such as that, because they would say that is all that exists, it's all they have.
But in that case their source material is simply not good enough!
"Not good enough for what?", you should ask. And the answer is that such hopelessly flawed source material is not good enough to produce an opinion which says that Jesus was thereby found to have been more likely than not a real person (or as Bart Ehrman and "practically every properly trained scholar on the planet" would have it, good enough from such awful source material to conclude absolute "certainty").
At best with material as flawed as that, e.g. the gospels as very late anonymously written, un-evidenced beliefs in the supernatural that were using the OT as a source, with no eye-witnesses of any kind and no other evidence of any kind except for those same un-evidenced religious supernatural beliefs in an unknown messiah (unknown to anyone who ever wrote any mention of him at all), at very best you could never objectively conclude from such writing anything more than to say that Jesus might have been a real person, even if there is actually no reliable evidence of him as a real person.
But "might have been" and "possibly could have been", are not what we are disputing here. Anything “might" have been the case. Anything “might possibly be true”.
And few if any sceptics here have been so unguarded as to claim it is literally impossible for anyone to have existed as Jesus in some sense or other.
So we are not trying to decide what “might have been”, or what could have “possibly been”. We are asking whether such appallingly flawed evidence is good enough to claim probability greater than 50%, i.e. such that HJ people here are saying they believe he probably did exist.
And what I am saying is that you need something vastly better than the, frankly completely inadmissible gospel writing, to come anywhere remotely near 50%.
At the very least you need a number of properly credible eye-witness accounts with details that can be independently checked. And from there you need to show, at least, that the eye-witness claims were quite likely to be true.
But here you don’t even have any such eye-witness claims at all. So nothing like that can be checked in any way at all. In fact, in this case, you do not even have any idea of who the unknown biblical writers were, nor any suggestion from them of any names of anyone at all who claimed to have been an eye-witness source to anything at all. And frankly that is a complete a non-starter as far as credible evidence is concerned. That is not even credible to be called “evidence” (which is precisely why it would be ruled out of any consideration at all in any legal case).
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Then why were you replying to me about a Great Fire? Since that was a 100% spurious untrue remark from 16.5 and where I already replied to him about that ... why were you quoting that same reply back to me if you wanted to criticise me for something completely unconnected with what 16.5 said about a Great Fire?
The Big Dog
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