Paul wasn't an eyewitness to Jesus' life. His only "encounter" is the supernatural one on the road to Damascus.
We agree on the former - the latter is more problematic. The authentic Pauline epistles make it clear he had a vision (or more than one possibly) - but the Road to Damascus setting is from the later account in
Acts. Ironically I think I am more cautious here.
However, that is besides the point. Paul is abundantly plain in his won writing that a) he believed in a Jesus born in the flesh, a Jew, who was crucified and then believed by his followers to have returned from the dead. He also knew, argued with and was involved in an ongoing theological controversy with the guy's brother and closest disciples. (See Galatians 2). Nonetheless, the kerygma or message taught is consistent from Paul to
Mark, and Mark appears to have predated the collection of Paul's letters by perhaps 40 years, while being some 10-30 years after Paul wrote.
The guys who wrote down the gospels weren't eyewitnesses either. There's textual evidence that they weren't even familiar with the geography of the area, and sections are obviously fiction (in that they tell a story that no one witnessed, like Jesus' agony in the garden).
I'm sure apologists might argue about this, but sure. However, assuming it is so, and i see no reason to believe they are eyewitness accounts, they may well reserve the eyewitness testimony. Those who did know Jesus would have been alive at the time of Mark, and possibly the other gospels, and the Gospels are composed of pericope or oral stories which have been collected, and possibly even proto-gospels. We would have to get heavily involved in Biblical Crit to discuss this, but I will if you are interested.
How is it different--other than the American tall tales being much more recent?
I would give another example. George Washington chopped down a cherry tree, and said "I could not tell a lie". This mythic biographical anecdote was collected quite early, and appears in otherwise relaible biographical histories of GW. Yet that in no way invalidates the historical Washington?
My point though is that if you eliminate all that supernatural stuff, you don't have a person or character that is at all the same as the character described in the gospels.
Why do you need to eliminate all the supernatural stuff? If I eliminated all the supernatural claims from a biography of DD Hume or Uri Geller, sure there would be little left perhaps. That is because to ignore thoe aspects would do a grave injustice to the facts. You don't have to accept that these people had genuine supernatural powers to believe they claimed them, or that their adherents believed wholeheartedly they had? The elements of healers, exorcists, nature miracles etc are all part of the actual stock of common belief and practice in the period in question. They seem extremely odd to our eyes, but no more than modern medicine or statistical analysis or electricity plants would to Jesus' contemporaries.
Even what's left is rife with problems. Was Jesus born in a manger in Bethlehem or a house in Nazareth? (We have two Nativity stories in the synoptics, and they can't possibly both be right.) What was his grandfather's name (or rather, Joseph's father's name)?
That's interesting. Can you give references and i'll have a look!
If the only proof of existence we had on these characters were accounts written long after their death that emphasized all these supernatural claims, I would doubt their historical existence as well. These cases are markedly different from the Jesus thing because we have an abundance of plain evidence for their existence.
Yes, but that is because they lived in an age of mass communications. If you review my first post you will see the evidential case for a Historical Jesus as accepted by historians, this being what the thread is about after all, is as per common sense in terms of the historical evidence for an 1st century character. And there are plenty of people from the era whose lives have all kinds of supernatural events associated with them, just as there are people today who do so. The question is whether the supernatural claims are true, not whether or not these people actually existed.
My point is, "convincing evidence" for what? If there was a historical Jesus, he was certainly nothing like the character described in the gospels.
You make an extraordinarily dangerous assumption here - namely that the Gospels depict a consistent figure. John's Gospel has a Jesus who keeps explaining he is God, and is significantly different ot the other three (synoptic ) gospels. It is a theological exposition. What people often fail to realize is that Matthew, Luke and Mark are all equally theological, and provide different "spins" on Jesus' personality and meaning. Yet behind all lies commonalities, biographical data which is by historians considered relatively sound.
This is why scholars differentiate between the Historical Jesus, the guy who lived in 1st century Judea, was crucified and was believed to have returned from the grave and live on, and the Christ of Faith, the figure Christians accept as divine and our saviour.
If the real Paul Bunyan was a 6' tall lumberjack who actually couldn't fell huge trees with a single swing of his axe, would you say there is such a thing as "historical Paul Bunyan"? Also, what if both of these characters were composites? (At least some of the sayings attributed to Jesus predate the time period. Do you think every Jesus story necessarily originated with the same "historical Jesus"? Might there not have been more than one?)
Bunyan is a fun case - he was long believed to date from a 1904 newspaper article, but it seems that actually his stories predate that by twenty years or so in oral form. However no one who ever knew Paul Bunyan testified to his existence, and he was clearly a composite of lumberjack folklore who made it through imaginative newspaper articles in the earlier 20th century, and in that sense as real as Bugs Bunny. I think there si plenty of scope for a quest for the historical Bunyan - trying to unearth who created the legend, and what the initial sources were.
Could there have been more than one HJ? Quite possibly. GA Wells is arguing for a composite. I think it relatively unlikely, thinking more likely there was one historical character whose biography we can trace, but that gained additional material over time.
Still I like the bUnyan anology - I'll write more on that later.
cj x
