Historical Jesus

[theheno]

I know if I believed in God and I got a chance to meet his brother, I wouldn't shut up about it

 

[bobdroege7]

Which version mention the scarcely known Jesus who did no miracles and did not resurrect??

Asked and answered. Dude.

The Gospel of Thomas.

Have you read it?

 

[IanS]

No, at least not for Paul. Paul saw Jesus as a Jewish man who only became a supernatural being AFTER his crucifixion and death. For example, Point 11 from the data below (credit to Ben C Smith from whom I stole many of these points):

"[Christ Jesus. . .] who came from the seed of David according to the flesh, who was appointed Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead".

Read in conjunction with other passages, it gives us a good idea how Paul viewed Jesus.

Paul regarded Jesus as a real human being in real human history.

None of that (it's very little) shows that Paul knew of, or even believed, Jesus to be a normal human person.

Firstly AFAIK, it's now the case that most biblical scholars accept that king David probably was not a real person and was only an invention in ancient religious mythology. On which basis, from those biblical scholars themselves, a real human person (claimed as Jesus in this case) could not have been “the seed” from a mythical David.

But also - how did Paul ever get any such belief anyway? AFAIK, he's quite clear that he got that belief from what he thought was said in ancient scripture. He very frequently reminded his audience that what he preaches to them about his Christ belief is “according to scripture” … and he explicitly tells them that “I got it from no Man” and “nor was I taught it by anyone” … his letters are very clear in saying that he (Paul) obtained all those Jesus beliefs from scripture following a divine revelation from God.

The passage you quote, and actually you quote it without giving any proper reference to Paul's letters for those words (can you give genuine quotes please when you attribute things to Paul) talks of Jesus being born “according to the Flesh”, but we have been over statements like that countless times before in these threads - in an interview where Richard Dawkins is asking about this with biblical scholar John Huddleston, Huddleston himself says that it would have been standard religious practice to say any messiah or any very important person was always “born of a woman”, i.e. in the “Flesh” or “of the Flesh”, but with a God as the father … here's the film of that interview -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21NoQuKTB8Q

These passages look at how Paul saw Jesus as a person and when he placed him in history.

1. Paul actually calls Jesus a "man" (anthropos) several times (Rom 5:15, 1 Cor 15:21)
2. Jesus was a Jewish man -- "For I could wish that I myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren, my countrymen according to the flesh, 4 who are Israelites... 5 of whom [are] the fathers and from whom, according to the flesh, Christ [came]..." (Rom 9:3-5)
3. Jesus lived after Adam, since Paul calls him the latter Adam (1 Cor 15.22, 45).
4. Jesus lived after Abraham, since Paul calls him the seed (descendant) of Abraham (Gal 3.16).
5. Jesus lived after Moses, since Paul says that he was the end of the law of Moses (Rom 10.4-5) and Moses' law was added "because of transgressions, till the seed should come to whom the promise was made..." (Gal 3:19).
6. Jesus lived after David, since Paul calls him the seed (descendant) of David (Rom 1.4).
7. Jesus was born of a woman (Gal 4:4)
8. Paul claims to have met with the brother of the Lord, James (Gal 1.19; 1 Cor 9.5).
9. Paul expects that he might see the general resurrection in his own lifetime (1 Cor 15.51). He calls Jesus the firstfruits of that resurrection. Since the firstfruits of the harvest precede the main harvest itself by only a short time, the very metaphor works better with a short time between the resurrection of Jesus and the resurrection of the rest of the dead, implying that the resurrection of Jesus was recent for Paul.
10. Paul writes that God sent forth his son to redeem those under the law in the fullness of time (Gal 4.4). It is easier to suppose that, for Paul, the fullness of time had some direct correspondence to the end of the ages (1 Cor 10.11) than to imagine that the fullness of time came, Jesus died, and then everybody had to wait another long expanse of time for the death to actually apply to humanity.
11. Paul thought that Jesus was only appointed Son of God after his death -- "[Christ Jesus. . .] who came from the seed of David according to the flesh, who was appointed Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead" (Rom 1:3-4)

I'm sorry, but again you are repeating all the same old stuff that everyone here is familiar with, and which we have been over countless times. Do you think the above is all unknown to sceptical authors like Richard Carrier and numerous others?

You are again talking about figures like Abraham and Moses as evidence of Jesus in the “flesh”, but again those are figures (Abraham & Moses) who biblical scholars themselves now agree were probably not ever real people but only figures of ancient religious myth-making.

And your own points even include the statement from Paul saying “ Paul writes that God sent forth his son to redeem those under the law in the fullness of time (Gal 4.4)" … what you have there (and in fact in all your list above) is Paul saying that he knows Jesus was the Son of God!! He is writing about his absolute belief in a figure of Jesus who was the offspring/scion of a mythical God in the heavens. And Paul tells us in his letters why be believed such things … and that was because he was highly religious and a lifelong religious fanatic, who convinced himself that he had messianic visions from God whereby he believed he found it all confirmed as the true meaning in words from ancient scripture.

Some of the points above have been argued against by mythicists, especially Point 8 (James, brother of the Lord). But many of them are independent of each other, building a compelling cumulative case that Paul thought that (a) Jesus was a Jewish man, (b) Jesus was crucified relatively recent to Paul's writings, and (c) Jesus became a supernatural being after crucifixion.

12. For extra bonus(!), Paul arguably believed that Jesus was crucified in Jerusalem. First, Paul says that Christ "crucified" is a stumbling block:

But we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumbling block, and unto the Greeks foolishness (1 Cor 1:23)​

Then, he quotes scriptures to say that the stumbling block was in Zion (Jerusalem):

For they [Israel] stumbled at that stumbling stone. As it is written: "Behold, I lay in Zion a stumbling stone and rock of offense, And whoever believes on Him will not be put to shame" (Rom 9:32-33)​

Next, he quotes scriptures to say that the Deliverer will come out of Zion, in terms of a new covenant. This identifies the "Deliverer" with Jesus:

And so all Israel will be saved, as it is written: "The Deliverer will come out of Zion, And He will turn away ungodliness from Jacob" (Rom 11:26)​

Note that Paul doesn't quote Scriptures exactly here. The OT quote that Paul is working from is "The Redeemer will come TO Zion [not 'out of Zion' as per Paul], to those in Jacob who turn from transgression" (Isaiah 59:20). Paul has altered the wording, suggesting he was working from some constraint. Since the stumbling stone is "Christ crucified" and that stumbling stone was "laid in Zion", it suggests that the crucifixion occurred in Zion.

It's been argued that Paul's "Zion" refers to the Heavenly Jerusalem, though that isn't how it is read in Isaiah. As far as I can tell, it would make no sense for the Jews of Paul's time to believe that demons could freely crucify someone in the Heavenly City of Jerusalem, located in the heavens themselves. So Paul seems to be suggesting that Jerusalem on earth was the location for the crucifixion.

Paul's Jesus in fact matches up well with the Jesus in the Gospel of Mark: Jesus was a Jewish man, the seed of David, with a brother called 'James'. Jesus was proclaimed "Christ", was crucified and then raised after death. Paul arguably wrote around 50 CE. Since the passages above suggest that Jesus' crucifixion was in Paul's recent past, the timing also matches up with gMark's crucifixion under Pilate.

OK, there is no point in me wasting time looking at the rest of what you have written, because you are always writing about contents of Paul's letters for which Paul says that he knows such things because God granted him a divine revelation from which he then understood the meaning of messiah prophecies in “scripture”.

 

[IanS]

Just a part of what you said there reminds me of something I can't really get my head around. Paul after his conversion devotes his life to god, it's all consuming. Imagine having a revelation like that, that u know this is God. Now imagine u actually met the brother of God, his actual brother. I can't imagine that would only be worthy of one sentence, like you wouldn't ask about his upbringing, life etc. That just feels like a real stretch to me

Well it clearly is a stretch to believe that. It's a stretch to believe anything from the bible.

In previous threads HJ supporters/posters tried to explain that by saying that the letter in question, or at least that particular passage of that letter, was not the sort of place/format where Paul would have mentioned what he'd been told by James about his brother Jesus. But Paul supposedly wrote 6 other complete letters, and still no such thing was ever mentioned or explained at all.

As I say, Paul was also very explicit in saying that the gospel of Jesus belief which he preached "came from no Man" and "nor was I taught it by anyone". That seems to me very definitive for why Paul had any beliefs at all about Jesus. So where he did he get his Jesus beliefs if it was "from no Man"? Well he tells us that too, and he is very explicit about it, and says it repeatedly - he got it from scripture after he thought that he had been granted a divine revelation from God! ...

.. well, since that God almost certainly does not exist, then Paul's revelation/vision was almost certainly a religious fantasy ... there was no communication about Jesus from any God. All that happened is that Paul started to believe that he found the true meaning of ancient messiah prophecy in the historical scriptures.

Why did Paul (and others like him) believe these things? Well the answer is quite obvious - Paul was one of many absolutely fanatical religious believers in an age of ignorance when almost everyone did believe as a matter of absolute certainty that God existed and that he had promised to send a saviour Christ to the people of Israel. Paul's entire life was consumed by such belief and such preaching 24/7 from birth to death ... and that was also the case for all the other people Paul names as faithful believers in his letters ... we are talking about hugely gullible religious fanatics who's every waking moment was drowning in superstitious religious belief.

 

[Jerrymander]

In Church History composed in the 4th century the writer had no knowledge of that the passage in Tacitus Annals.

Tertullian, Origen, Justin, Hippolytus, Irenaeus and other supposed 2nd and 3rd century writers knew nothing of Tacitus' Annals.

Why would they mention it, given the derogatory things he said about their faith?

 

[theheno]

Well it clearly is a stretch to believe that. It's a stretch to believe anything from the bible.

In previous threads HJ supporters/posters tried to explain that by saying that the letter in question, or at least that particular passage of that letter, was not the sort of place/format where Paul would have mentioned what he'd been told by James about his brother Jesus. But Paul supposedly wrote 6 other complete letters, and still no such thing was ever mentioned or explained at all.

As I say, Paul was also very explicit in saying that the gospel of Jesus belief which he preached "came from no Man" and "nor was I taught it by anyone". That seems to me very definitive for why Paul had any beliefs at all about Jesus. So where he did he get his Jesus beliefs if it was "from no Man"? Well he tells us that too, and he is very explicit about it, and says it repeatedly - he got it from scripture after he thought that he had been granted a divine revelation from God! ...

.. well, since that God almost certainly does not exist, then Paul's revelation/vision was almost certainly a religious fantasy ... there was no communication about Jesus from any God. All that happened is that Paul started to believe that he found the true meaning of ancient messiah prophecy in the historical scriptures.

Why did Paul (and others like him) believe these things? Well the answer is quite obvious - Paul was one of many absolutely fanatical religious believers in an age of ignorance when almost everyone did believe as a matter of absolute certainty that God existed and that he had promised to send a saviour Christ to the people of Israel. Paul's entire life was consumed by such belief and such preaching 24/7 from birth to death ... and that was also the case for all the other people Paul names as faithful believers in his letters ... we are talking about hugely gullible religious fanatics who's every waking moment was drowning in superstitious religious belief.

I think your description of the past is a bit anachronistic, people now believe in that stuff, them days weren't really that different

 

[theheno]

I think your description of the past is a bit anachronistic, people now believe in that stuff, them days weren't really that different

People are very stupid and they always have been

 

[Delvo]

None of that shows that Paul knew of, or even believed, Jesus to be a normal human person.

Firstly AFAIK, it's now the case that most biblical scholars accept that king David probably was not a real person and was only an invention in ancient religious mythology. On which basis, from those biblical scholars themselves, a real human person (claimed as Jesus in this case) could not have been “the seed” from a mythical David.

Actually, no, the modern consensus is that there probably was a King David, but even if it weren't, what in the world could that possibly have to do with what Paul thought?

You are again talking about figures like Abraham and Moses as evidence of Jesus in the “flesh”, but again those are figures (Abraham & Moses) who biblical scholars themselves now agree were probably not ever real people but only figures of ancient religious myth-making.

And what in the world could a modern consensus of historians/archeologists/whoever possibly have to do with what Paul thought?

in an interview where Richard Dawkins is asking about this with biblical scholar John Huddleston, Huddleston himself says that it would have been standard religious practice to say any messiah or any very important person was always “born of a woman”, i.e. in the “Flesh” or “of the Flesh”, but with a God as the father

...which, since the Messiah was supposed to be a human, means...

Do you think the above is all unknown to sceptical authors like Richard Carrier and numerous others?

what you have there is Paul saying that he knows Jesus was the Son of God!!

Two exclamation points!! What makes the fact you're exclaiming so significant to you as to need such exclamation?? It doesn't contradict Paul's own other belief that Jesus had also been physically real and lived in human form on Earth sometime before Paul's conversion. Even if it did, it still wouldn't mean Jesus hadn't actually been a physically real human living on Earth, with Paul merely misdescribing at least one thing about him.

But also - how did Paul ever get any such belief anyway?

And Paul tells us in his letters why be believed such things... he had messianic visions from God whereby he believed he found it all confirmed as the true meaning in words from ancient scripture... there is no point in me wasting time looking at the rest of what you have written, because you are always writing about contents of Paul's letters for which Paul says that he knows such things because God granted him a divine revelation from which he then understood the meaning of messiah prophecies in “scripture”.

Paul was also very explicit in saying that the gospel of Jesus belief which he preached "came from no Man" and "nor was I taught it by anyone". That seems to me very definitive for why Paul had any beliefs at all about Jesus. So where he did he get his Jesus beliefs if it was "from no Man"? Well he tells us that too, and he is very explicit about it, and says it repeatedly - he got it from scripture after he thought that he had been granted a divine revelation from God!

You keep returning to that, but why? Nobody has said otherwise, and you have made no connection between that and the actual subject. A man can have a vision/hallucination about someone who doesn't exist, and a man can have a vision/hallucination about someone who does. He can also have a vision/hallucination of someone he thinks doesn't exist, or about someone he thinks does, regardless of whether he is correct. The vision/hallucination thing doesn't go against any of the options we have for this subject.

Well it clearly is a stretch to believe that. It's a stretch to believe anything from the bible.

In previous threads HJ supporters/posters tried to explain that by saying that the letter in question, or at least that particular passage of that letter, was not the sort of place/format where Paul would have mentioned what he'd been told by James about his brother Jesus. But Paul supposedly wrote 6 other complete letters, and still no such thing was ever mentioned or explained at all.

All of those letters were of the same type. Anything that has no need to be in one of them has no need to be in the others.

 

[dejudge]

Asked and answered. Dude.

The Gospel of Thomas.

Have you read it?

The Gospel of Thomas is worthless to determine the historicity of the author and his Jesus.

 

[GDon]

Just a part of what you said there reminds me of something I can't really get my head around. Paul after his conversion devotes his life to god, it's all consuming. Imagine having a revelation like that, that u know this is God. Now imagine u actually met the brother of God, his actual brother. I can't imagine that would only be worthy of one sentence, like you wouldn't ask about his upbringing, life etc. That just feels like a real stretch to me

The idea that Jesus was God is a later Christian orthodox idea, and we need to be careful of reading Paul from that light. Paul didn't think that Jesus was God, at least as far as we can tell from his letters. He thought that Jesus was a Jewish man, who through adherence to God's law, was proclaimed the Son of God and raised by God at the resurrection into a spiritual body and taken to heaven, thus signifying the end of the ages, and the beginning of the general resurrection. I've given the references to support this in my post from yesterday.

Once you have a friend in heaven, then that is a connection you can use! At this point Jesus is indeed a supernatural figure, appearing in visions, etc. As Paul wrote:

2 Cor 5:16 So from now on we regard no one according to the flesh. Although we once regarded Christ in this way, we do so no longer.​

But Paul thought that Jesus was the Son of God -- isn't that the same thing as God? No. People who follow God's laws are the sons of God:

Phl 2:15 That ye may be blameless and harmless, the sons of God, without rebuke, in the midst of a crooked and perverse nation, among whom ye shine as lights in the world;

Rom 8:14 For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God [huios].

Rom 8:19 For the earnest expectation of the creature waiteth for the manifestation of the sons of God.​

Anyone coming into this topic needs to first clear their minds of all the Christian claptrap that developed centuries later, and try to understand Paul for Paul, based on the writings of his time. You will pick up a lot of urban myths on forums like these, and they keep popping up no matter how often they are debunked. I'll go through a few now, since it provides context to what Paul wrote and didn't write. Some of these you probably already know, so apologies if I am repeating obvious stuff.

1. "Paul converted to a new religion (Christianity)".

No, Paul was a Jew, and remained a Jew. There was a Christian sect within Judaism certainly, and Paul persecuted that sect before he had his conversion experience of Jesus. But Christianity at that time was still part of Judaism. The sequence of Paul's conversion was this:

Gal 1:13 For ye have heard of my manner of life in time past in the Jews' religion, how that beyond measure I persecuted the church of God, and made havoc of it...

[Paul has his conversion experience]

Gal 1:22 And I was still unknown by face unto the churches of Judaea which were in Christ:
1:23 but they only heard say, He that once persecuted us now preacheth the faith of which he once made havoc​

So Paul persecutes the Christian sect, then converts, and ends up preaching the same things as the Christian sect did. So he had to have had some idea of what the Christian sect believed about Jesus before his conversion experience.

2. "Paul learned nothing about Jesus from any man"

This one is a "zombie-fact" that seems unkillable. But it's simply not true. Paul never claims this. As you can see above, it's reasonable to assume that Paul had some idea about Christian beliefs while he persecuted it. It would be a huge coincidence if he had no idea about their beliefs, but then after conversion he was suddenly preaching the same things as them!

What Paul does claim is that his gospel message was from no man:

Gal 1:11 For I make known to you, brethren, as touching the gospel which was preached by me, that it is not after man.
1:12 For neither did I receive it from man, nor was I taught it, but it came to me through revelation of Jesus Christ.​

What was Paul's gospel message? It was that Christ's death had significance to the "uncircumsized" (i.e. gentiles). Paul claims that he was entrusted by God to preach the gospel to the uncircumcised, while Peter preached the gospel to the circumcised (Gal 2:7)

Now certainly Paul claims that his gospel message about Christ's death being significant for the gentiles is from no man. But at no point does he write that he learned nothing about Jesus from no man. It seems obvious he knew things from before his conversion experience about Jesus when he persecuted the church.

It doesn't matter how many head-shots the above zombie-fact takes, it just won't die!

3. "Jesus was a miracle worker who wanted to start a new religion."

Not according to Paul. Paul attributes no miracles or healings directly to Jesus, not even to the spiritual Jesus. If the earthly Jesus or the mythicists' spiritual Jesus was able to perform healings and wanted to start a new religion, Paul doesn't tell us.

If Paul met the spiritual Jesus, he doesn't give any details. He doesn't tell us what he looked like, where it happened (Acts of the Apostles does, but that's much later), what the spiritual Jesus said, etc. He didn't record experiences about what others who apparently encountered the spiritual Jesus either. Nothing about the earthly Jesus (beyond things that established Jesus as a descendant of David), nothing about the spiritual Jesus.

There is the idea that Jesus must have been such a remarkable person, that his disciples were walking around noting things down. He did remarkable things, he said remarkable things. But we don't know that. I'm not a Christian, so I have no horse in that race. I don't care whether the Gospels are an accurate reflection of real events or not. Even when I called myself a liberal Christian, I never really cared. And I assume we will never really know the truth.

But for Paul, Jesus was the fulfilment of the Jewish religion. Jesus's resurrection was the first-fruits of the general resurrection, when the world ends, the dead rise, and the Kingdom of God is established on earth. Read Paul for Paul: it is all about the significance of Jesus's crucifixion and resurrection, bringing about the end.

So then: why didn't Paul ask James, the brother of Jesus, all about Jesus? I'll go into that in the next item, but let me note that Paul didn't appear to ask James and Peter about the spiritual Jesus either. Some mythicists believe that James and Peter had visions as well: wouldn't Paul have wanted to know?

In fact, mythicists have moved Paul from being a secondary witness to an earthly Jesus, to being a primary witness of the spiritual Jesus (since, from their perspective, there was no earthly Jesus). Wouldn't people have asked Paul about the spiritual Jesus, since he was a primary witness? Wouldn't you expect his letters full of details? But more on that in my next point.

I'll do my 4th point later, as life has impudently decided to interfere with my Internet time. But I do love discussing this stuff! These ancient writings are humanity's heirloom, and understanding them helps us understand ourselves.

 

[Elagabalus]

Stop being wrong.

Before you get too frustrated just know that some posters have a "body of work" shall we say?

http://www.rationalskepticism.org/christianity/historical-jesus-t219-2220.html

New to this thread MJ'ers you might be interested in this link because the man himself, Earl Doherty, shows up on page 100.

 

[theheno]

I'll have to step out of this, I must be too stu to follow it, genuinely that sounds like the greatest pile of nonsense I've ever heard. I'm out out, I've listened to both sides, made up my mind, enjoy your tos and fros

 

[dejudge]

I know if I believed in God and I got a chance to meet his brother, I wouldn't shut up about it

But, If you already saw your resurrected Lord Jesus in the third heaven then seeing his brother would not be a big deal.

Remember, a Pauline writer claimed [with or without a body] he met his resurrected Christ in the third heaven.

2 Corinthians 12:2

I knew a man in Christ above fourteen years ago, (whether in the body, I cannot tell; or whether out of the body, I cannot tell: God knoweth) such an one caught up to the third heaven.

The so-called Pauline Epistles are the very worst to support an HJ argument.

The Pauline character was supposed to be a contemporary of his Jesus yet only managed to see him after the resurrection somewhere in an unknown heaven.

Does anyone know where the third heaven is actually located?

I want to see the resurrected Jesus, too.

 

[dejudge]

The idea that Jesus was God is a later Christian orthodox idea, and we need to be careful of reading Paul from that light. Paul didn't think that Jesus was God, at least as far as we can tell from his letters. He thought that Jesus was a Jewish man, who through adherence to God's law, was proclaimed the Son of God and raised by God at the resurrection into a spiritual body and taken to heaven, thus signifying the end of the ages, and the beginning of the general resurrection. I've given the references to support this in my post from yesterday.

Your claim is baseless.

In the Epistles the Lord Jesus is God's own Son and is found written in Nomina Sacra in the earliest manuscripts P46 dated around 200 CE.

The Pauline resurrected Jesus in the third heaven could not be a human being so please stop wasting time.

2 Corinthians 12:2

I knew a man in Christ above fourteen years ago, (whether in the body, I cannot tell; or whether out of the body, I cannot tell: God knoweth) such an one caught up to the third heaven.

The Pauline writings are worthless for an HJ argument.

 

[Elagabalus]

I'll have to step out of this, I must be too stu to follow it, genuinely that sounds like the greatest pile of nonsense I've ever heard. I'm out out, I've listened to both sides, made up my mind, enjoy your tos and fros

Wait, don't go! There's one more question I've been meaning to ask. Are you and rayheno in any way related?

 

[Elagabalus]

No, I'm definitely not Spin. I'm also known as GakuseiDon.

Just testing you. You knocked me for a loop with that whole 3n thing and no awesome avatar picture. I see that you worked it out with the mods.

 

[Jerrymander]

Another problem for mythicists, how come the earliest Christian apologists never tried to defend Jesus' historicity. We have plenty of writings responding to various Jewish and pagan accusations about Jesus (including that he was the illegitimate son of a Roman solider), but no mention of any opponent of Christianity disputing his existence.

 

[theheno]

Wait, don't go! There's one more question I've been meaning to ask. Are you and rayheno in any way related?

One and the same

 

[theheno]

One and the same

Couldn't remember my password so had to do a new account

 

[theheno]

This is like my secret pleasure, wondering about the beginning of Christianity, no one I know in the real world would care even slightly