Historical Jesus

[theheno]

But why do you ask Elagabalus?

 

[dejudge]

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.

You may be suffering from amnesia.

Jesus cult Christians spent hundreds of trying to convince people that their Son of a Ghost Savior existed in the flesh.

Examine On the Flesh of Christ

Let us examine our Lord's bodily substance, for about His spiritual nature all are agreed.

It is His flesh that is in question.
Its verity and quality are the points in dispute.

Did it ever exist?

What did Marcion teach??

Marcion's Savior was without birth and without body.

Marcion's Savior was not an historical figure.

In other words, no human Jesus existed in the teachings of the Christians called Marcionites.

Examine On the Flesh of Christ attributed to Tertullian.

Tertullian's On the Flesh of Christ

Marcion, in order that he might deny the flesh of Christ, denied also His nativity, or else he denied His flesh in order that he might deny His nativity...

Up to at least the 5th century, Jesus cult writers were still arguing against the teachings of the Marcionites that the Savior did not exist in the flesh.

There were multiple Christian cults without a human Jesus.

In addition, it was not even necessary for an HJ to have a Christian cult.

 

[Jerrymander]

You may be suffering from amnesia.

Jesus cult Christians spent hundreds of trying to convince people that their Son of a Ghost Savior existed in the flesh.

Examine On the Flesh of Christ


What did Marcion teach??

Marcion's Savior was without birth and without body.

Marcion's Savior was not an historical figure.

In other words, no human Jesus existed in the teachings of the Christians called Marcionites.

Examine On the Flesh of Christ attributed to Tertullian.

Tertullian's On the Flesh of Christ

Up to at least the 5th century, Jesus cult writers were still arguing against the teachings of the Marcionites that the Savior did not exist in the flesh.

There were multiple Christian cults without a human Jesus.

In addition, it was not even necessary for an HJ to have a Christian cult.

Nope, Marcion believed that Jesus was a spirit that appeared human to mortals but still walked the earth. No dispute on his historicity. Try again.

 

[dejudge]

Nope, Marcion believed that Jesus was a spirit that appeared human to mortals but still walked the earth. No dispute on his historicity. Try again.

What nonsense you post!! You believe a spirit without birth actually walked the earth!!

 

[Brainache]

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

What a surprise!

 

[Roger Ramjets]

What nonsense you post!! You believe a spirit without birth actually walked the earth!!

Cite?

 

[dejudge]

Cite?

You believe women can become pregnant 'mysteriously'.

Yes, an angel appearing to tell Joseph that his wife was raped by the Holy Ghost is a mind-boggling absurdity, but a young woman becoming 'mysteriously' pregnant isn't. So the only thing absurd about the claim is that the father was a ghost, ie. the mythical part. The historical part is quite plausible.

This is the 21st century.

It is not biologically plausible that women become 'mysteriously' pregnant.

 

[Elagabalus]

But why do you ask Elagabalus?

You might run afoul of the mods by having two accounts.

 

[abaddon]

A theist you say. That would be my understanding of a faux atheist, but I have no idea what would make you think people like Ian, dejudge and kapyong are really theists. Really only abbadon can tell us what he meant by faux atheists here

You could at least attempt to get my name spelled correctly. That nickname is deliberately chosen. Abaddon is the Angel of the Abyss, the gatekeeper of hell and appears in Rev. 9:11. It amuses me that most theists do not get the reference because they have not read their own magic book. I have read it more than once. Cover to cover, not only is it a load of superstitious bollocks, it cannot even agree with itself.

Otherwise, the HJ deniers are generally former christians who not only became atheists, but moved on into anti-theism and a virulent form of that.

I became an atheist getting on for 40 years ago and no reason has ever been presented to me to change that view.

If bible god were to be presented in all it's glory right in front of me, I would have to accept it's existence, believe in it if you will. I wouldn't worship it, I would feel it a moral imperative to kill it.

As for the "faux-atheists" it seems to me that some believers simply swing from one extreme belief to another extreme belief. They are still believers, they have merely swapped one fervently held position for a different fervently held position. But they remain just as passionately devoted either way. Many of the posts here are difficult to distinguish from the very same rants that the god-botherers wheel out. One can look and point at the swivel eyed loons that claim some magic god. One can also look at the swivel eyed loons on the other side of that. But the anti-theists don't have that introspection. They are not coming at this out of thought, they are coming at the matter out of reaction.

Speaking of which, I am an atheist and believe in no deities whatsoever. Deities earn my indifference, not difficult. If some champion rocks up with actual evidence, fair enough. Has not happened yet, nor for thousands of years. I suppose it could happen, but not holding my breath for that.

Moving on to my current position.
A HJ is plausible. It could be some bloke. Or a mash-up of a bunch of disparate blokes. Or no bloke at all. Does it make any real difference? Not in the slightest. All it means is that I consider it likely that there is some origin for the fable.

Then there is Paul/Saul. Real or not? I tend towards real with a bucket of embellishments and various ad hoc addenda tacked on.

Frankly, I am astonished at the vitriol and invective flying around over such a trivial matter. But some atheists are on the opposite end of the belief spectrum, I suppose. One can only hope that they grow up.

 

[abaddon]

You believe women can become pregnant 'mysteriously'.



This is the 21st century.

It is not biologically plausible that women become 'mysteriously' pregnant.

Are you simply not reading what people write and making up your own reality, where others write whatever it is in your imagination?

I suggest you carefully read what roger actually posted and try to ignore the script in your head.

 

[IanS]

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

Yes, religious people today still do believe in miracles and a heavenly God etc. I described/mentioned that myself just a few posts back. But there is a huge difference between education now vs what it was in biblical times …

… today almost all of those miracle-believing Christians (and Muslims, and believers in all other religions) have had some school education in science and some exposure to it in the news media etc., from which they have learned that such miracles are almost certainly just superstitious fiction. But in biblical times there was none of that education … the best explanation people could imagine for most of the things around them was that a god or gods had been responsible for all of the working of events on Earth and in the skies.

The point is that Paul and the others that he names as leaders of the faith, were complete fanatics about their religion and with no other life & no other education or understanding at all. And since long before Paul, everyone in that region had been searching the prophecies of OT scripture (and probably also searching other writing that they regarded as scripture, such as the Ascent of Isaiah) for an understanding of God's true message about the coming of a promised saviour who would rescue the fortunates of the people of Israel.

I think that if we check through the OT (which would be a mamouth task taking years) we will find references to all of the statements in Pauls letters where he talks about such things as “the WORD becoming Flesh” etc. That is – if you look in the OT (and in the Ascent of Isaiah etc.), then you do find all the sort of beliefs that Paul was preaching about what may seem to us now as a confusion over whether the Christ was, or would be, a human man, or whether he would be a heavenly scion of God who in some form and in some way descended to the Earth in order to show God's example to the faithful of how they must gather around Gods words because the promised day of final judgement was now close at hand …

… that was essentially Pauls message after his revelation/vision … but I think we can find all of that in the OT or other scripture that Paul believed as the word of God … and we have been through all of that hundreds of times before in all these HJ threads where all of those beliefs and prophecies were identified in the OT scriptures …

… as I pointed out above, even without us all taking months here of posting several hours a day, we know already that authors like Carrier, Avalos, Wells, Ellegard have been through all of those statements in Pauls letters where they might sound as if Paul thought Jesus was an ordinary human man on the Earth, and shown where Paul had got all that from in his beliefs about what was said hundreds of years before in the OT …

… IOW, I'm just pointing out that when Gdon produces a list of quotes from Paul where it can sound as if he might be talking about Jesus as a human man, none of that is new to us or new to authors like Carrier and the rest … they are all very well aware of such sentences in Paul's letters, and they have also shown where Paul got all of that from as his interpretation of the far more ancient writing in the OT.

 

[GDon]

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.

Yep, I was locked out of my old account, and the mods kindly restored it, so I was able to recover my avatar of he-man Jesus breaking from the cross ("THIS... IS... CALVARY!"). I also found that I had had dejudge and IanS in my Ignore list...

You did kind of worry me though. I thought, "Do I really sound like Spin???"

 

[IanS]

I don't have the knowledge to agree or disagree with dejudge here. Is he correct about the highlighted?

I don't know if you are aware of this, but - keep firmly in mind that when anyone here talks about non-biblical sources such as Tacitus and Josephus, saying that their writing dates from around 90AD to 110AD or thereabouts, we do not actually have any such writing from any of those people that is anywhere near to 100AD ...

... the earliest existing manuscripts that we have from writers like Tacitus and Josephus (for example), apparently date no earlier than the 11th century ... ie a whopping 1000 years later than the dates that all biblical scholars and HJ posters like to emphasise/quote.

As evidence of the very little that those writers included about Jesus, that gap of a 1000 years is completely deadly! It means that what we have is the product of 1000 years of constant Christian copying and recopying (apparently it was Christians who made the copies), where the copyists were known to have made quite frequent alterations, additions and deletions …

... anything coming even 100 years after the events is really not reliable as a source of evidence about a Jesus that those authors certainly never knew (they were not even born at the time!), but a gap of 1000 years is just utterly ridiculous as a claim of valid evidence.

 

[theheno]

You could at least attempt to get my name spelled correctly. That nickname is deliberately chosen. Abaddon is the Angel of the Abyss, the gatekeeper of hell and appears in Rev. 9:11. It amuses me that most theists do not get the reference because they have not read their own magic book. I have read it more than once. Cover to cover, not only is it a load of superstitious bollocks, it cannot even agree with itself.

Otherwise, the HJ deniers are generally former christians who not only became atheists, but moved on into anti-theism and a virulent form of that.

I became an atheist getting on for 40 years ago and no reason has ever been presented to me to change that view.

If bible god were to be presented in all it's glory right in front of me, I would have to accept it's existence, believe in it if you will. I wouldn't worship it, I would feel it a moral imperative to kill it.

As for the "faux-atheists" it seems to me that some believers simply swing from one extreme belief to another extreme belief. They are still believers, they have merely swapped one fervently held position for a different fervently held position. But they remain just as passionately devoted either way. Many of the posts here are difficult to distinguish from the very same rants that the god-botherers wheel out. One can look and point at the swivel eyed loons that claim some magic god. One can also look at the swivel eyed loons on the other side of that. But the anti-theists don't have that introspection. They are not coming at this out of thought, they are coming at the matter out of reaction.

Speaking of which, I am an atheist and believe in no deities whatsoever. Deities earn my indifference, not difficult. If some champion rocks up with actual evidence, fair enough. Has not happened yet, nor for thousands of years. I suppose it could happen, but not holding my breath for that.

Moving on to my current position.
A HJ is plausible. It could be some bloke. Or a mash-up of a bunch of disparate blokes. Or no bloke at all. Does it make any real difference? Not in the slightest. All it means is that I consider it likely that there is some origin for the fable.

Then there is Paul/Saul. Real or not? I tend towards real with a bucket of embellishments and various ad hoc addenda tacked on.

Frankly, I am astonished at the vitriol and invective flying around over such a trivial matter. But some atheists are on the opposite end of the belief spectrum, I suppose. One can only hope that they grow up.

The one true atheist huh

 

[IanS]

The one true atheist huh

I'd just like to add that when abaddon says that most HJ deniers are former Christians, I don't know where he gets that from, and really it just sounds like some sort of attempt at a "wind-up".

Afaik, in the USA almost everyone is either a Christian believer (often very devoutly), or else they are lapsed Christians ... and that occurs simply because the USA is such a religious Christian nation.

But that's not the case throughout a lot of Europe. The UK for example (where I am) is not very religious at all. And I am certainly not a former Christian or a former believer in any religion ... I've never believed in any gods or miracles etc.

But I just mention all of that, (a) as an objection to people saying that mythicists are often just disgruntled former Christians, and (b) to say there is clearly a big divide in most of these HJ threads between what people from the USA say about a HJ and about evidence from the bible vs. how non-believers from the UK and various other parts of the EU (mainly not the Roman Catholic countries) view the reliability of the bible as a source of any credible about Jesus beliefs.

 

[Jerrymander]

What nonsense you post!! You believe a spirit without birth actually walked the earth!!

No I said Marcion believed that. Which is a fact.

 

[HansMustermann]

It might be overdoing it to say there were lots & lots of wandering Jesus-like preachy dudes. Josephus described about five or six wandering preachy dudes individually, only one or two of which seem particularly jesusy. Is there another sentence, adjacent to those descriptions, saying something like "there were really about eighty of these guys, but here's just a sample, the handful with the biggest followings or most unique stories".

Regardless of their number, the fact that they existed is enough to make it dishonest to claim there's "no evidence" of a historical Jesus after having been informed of them. Inadequate evidence in your judgement, OK, but not none. And to go along with that pretense that the evidence doesn't exist, they also keep pretending the posts about it right here don't exist:

I don't think that anyone from the MJ camp ever claimed that there were no street preachers, or even wannabe prophets. In fact, we know from both the OT itself and for example also from Josephus, that predicting the future was quite popular, even with the danger of being executed for a false prophecy.

The question is rather whether you can actually identify one of them as the historical Jesus. Including whether there's any indication that there is an actual unbroken chain of information from any of those to the gospel writers. Because it's not actually recording historical data if at some point in between someone just makes it up, is it?

Just being loosely inspired by the existence of street preachers is not it. I mean, we actually know that Iron Man is inspired by Howard Hughes. Unlike the gospels, we have the author's word for it. But I don't think many people would say that therefore Howard Hughes is the historical Tony Stark. Not the least because really the common parts are just background info. Hughes didn't really do much that is key identifying features for Stark.

Additionally, in Jesus's case we still have the issue of: WHICH Jesus? It's mainstream consensus for more than a century now that no more than 30% or so of what Jesus says in the gospels can reasonably be said by the same person. Because they reflect wildly different and incompatible world views. And each scholar cherrypicks a different 30%.

The resulting problem is that the Jesus in the Gospels HAS to be a composite of AT LEAST 4 very different people. And there is no evidence to support which of them is the real Slim Shady. Or if any of them was even a real person, or just was an author insert, saying what the author wished Jesus had said.

Just going, "oh, well, it may have been informed by the existence of street preachers" is not going to tell you if any of them is the real one.

Nor for that matter solve the problem that the composite character almost certainly didn't exist historically. One or more of the characters that got mashed up in it may or may not have been real. And really that is what all scholars, including Ehrman, claim when they say they've reconstructed a historical Jesus. They cherrypicked a set of 30% that could theoretically have been said by the same person, and then that's their HJ. And never mind even that none have any evidence that that is the right guess, as opposed to the equally plausible set that another equally qualified scholar picked. But one of the components in a composite character is not the same as the composite, any more than a steering wheel is the same as a car.

But in any case, claiming that a much bigger claim (identifying a historical Jesus) is settled by only defending a much smaller and weaker claim (there were street preachers in Judaea) is quite literally the definition of the Motte-and-bailey Fallacy.

 

[HansMustermann]

I'd just like to add that when abaddon says that most HJ deniers are former Christians, I don't know where he gets that from, and really it just sounds like some sort of attempt at a "wind-up".

Afaik, in the USA almost everyone is either a Christian believer (often very devoutly), or else they are lapsed Christians ... and that occurs simply because the USA is such a religious Christian nation.

But that's not the case throughout a lot of Europe. The UK for example (where I am) is not very religious at all. And I am certainly not a former Christian or a former believer in any religion ... I've never believed in any gods or miracles etc.

But I just mention all of that, (a) as an objection to people saying that mythicists are often just disgruntled former Christians, and (b) to say there is clearly a big divide in most of these HJ threads between what people from the USA say about a HJ and about evidence from the bible vs. how non-believers from the UK and various other parts of the EU (mainly not the Roman Catholic countries) view the reliability of the bible as a source of any credible about Jesus beliefs.

Personally I'd say it's irrelevant anyway. Getting over a belief doesn't mean it was irrational to get over it.

I for example used to believe in almost everything from ancient aliens to spiritism and telepathy and prophetic dreams and whatnot. Mom was the rare kind of woowooist who didn't even stick to one kind of woowoo, but lapped it all up. And when you're a kid, you tend to believe mom, even when it's about telepathy. I mean, hell, I believed that she's somehow in permanent telepathic contact with me and knows what I'm up to. Which would have been pure genius as a way to get a kid to behave, if not for the fact that, far as I can tell, she actually believes it. As in, STILL believes it.

Anyway, the fact that I once believed in telepathy and got over it, doesn't mean I'm wrong to start from the null hypothesis when dealing with telepathy claims.

Same thing with the bible, really. Just that someone believed it at some point, and then got over it, doesn't make it wrong to start from a position of scepticism when dealing with Bible-based claims.

 

[Gord_in_Toronto]

You could at least attempt to get my name spelled correctly. That nickname is deliberately chosen. Abaddon is the Angel of the Abyss, the gatekeeper of hell and appears in Rev. 9:11. It amuses me that most theists do not get the reference because they have not read their own magic book. I have read it more than once. Cover to cover, not only is it a load of superstitious bollocks, it cannot even agree with itself.

Otherwise, the HJ deniers are generally former christians who not only became atheists, but moved on into anti-theism and a virulent form of that.

I became an atheist getting on for 40 years ago and no reason has ever been presented to me to change that view.

If bible god were to be presented in all it's glory right in front of me, I would have to accept it's existence, believe in it if you will. I wouldn't worship it, I would feel it a moral imperative to kill it.

As for the "faux-atheists" it seems to me that some believers simply swing from one extreme belief to another extreme belief. They are still believers, they have merely swapped one fervently held position for a different fervently held position. But they remain just as passionately devoted either way. Many of the posts here are difficult to distinguish from the very same rants that the god-botherers wheel out. One can look and point at the swivel eyed loons that claim some magic god. One can also look at the swivel eyed loons on the other side of that. But the anti-theists don't have that introspection. They are not coming at this out of thought, they are coming at the matter out of reaction.

Speaking of which, I am an atheist and believe in no deities whatsoever. Deities earn my indifference, not difficult. If some champion rocks up with actual evidence, fair enough. Has not happened yet, nor for thousands of years. I suppose it could happen, but not holding my breath for that.

Moving on to my current position.
A HJ is plausible. It could be some bloke. Or a mash-up of a bunch of disparate blokes. Or no bloke at all. Does it make any real difference? Not in the slightest. All it means is that I consider it likely that there is some origin for the fable.

Then there is Paul/Saul. Real or not? I tend towards real with a bucket of embellishments and various ad hoc addenda tacked on.

Frankly, I am astonished at the vitriol and invective flying around over such a trivial matter. But some atheists are on the opposite end of the belief spectrum, I suppose. One can only hope that they grow up.

A big Thumbs Up on most of your post. The number of people who have been killed in arguments such as the "reality" of the Holy Trinity is beyond imagination. I mean who really gives a flying ****?

However, if God showed up to me, my first assumption would be that I had lost my mind.

Of course this might just be from my perspective that I have been an Atheist for 18 years more than you.

 

[dejudge]

.

Nor for that matter solve the problem that the composite character almost certainly didn't exist historically. One or more of the characters that got mashed up in it may or may not have been real. And really that is what all scholars, including Ehrman, claim when they say they've reconstructed a historical Jesus. They cherrypicked a set of 30% that could theoretically have been said by the same person, and then that's their HJ. And never mind even that none have any evidence that that is the right guess, as opposed to the equally plausible set that another equally qualified scholar picked. But one of the components in a composite character is not the same as the composite, any more than a steering wheel is the same as a car....

Ehrman's argument for his HJ is very specific.

He argues that Jesus of Nazareth did certainly exist.

His book is entitled "Did Jesus Exist? The Historical Argument For Jesus of Nazareth"

In the introduction of the book, it is stated "The reality is whatever you may think about Jesus, he certainly did exist". That is what this book will set to demonstrate."

Now, how did Ehrman arrive at such a certainty of an HJ?

Ehrman claims the Gospels are really credible independent historical sources and that he believes Paul whenever he says that he is not lying.

Ehrman used the Christian Bible as historical evidence to prove that Jesus of Nazareth did certainly exist.

In effect, Ehrman's argument is Jesus of Nazareth did certainly exist because it is so stated in the Bible.