Okay, so how those early Christians got to the stories that are written down in the Gospels. Well, they had enturbulated thetans. Or, the angel Moroni wrote them on golden plates. They sat around a campfire and told tall stories. Really, there are thousand-and-one ways that people invent stories. And then they got tacked to one mythical Messiah figure.
Yes, there are indeed many ways that people invent stories. So it may well be that they sat around a fire and dreamed this ones up and then tacked them onto "one mythical Messiah figure" But as I keep saying, simply presenting what
may have happened as an alternative to the idea there was a historical Jesus and then sitting back as though you've made an argument doesn't cut it. You now need to argue in detail that your alternative (i) fits with the evidence and (ii) explains the evidence better than the other idea. Over and over again in this discussion mytherists keep making hand waving gestures towards some imagined "maybe" and then ... well, that's it. They go no futher. Coming up with "maybes" is the easy bit - anyone can do that. Backing them with cogent arguments based on detailed analysis of the available evidence is the hard part.
You now need to do this and do it in a way that shows your alternative is more parsimonious than the historical Jesus origin alternative. Take your rather blithe reference to "one mythical Messiah figure". Okay, now show where other such "mythical Messiah figures" can be found in the context of Second Century Judaism. Do you have some examples of "Messiah figures" in the Judaism of this or of any time that were "mythical" in any sense of that word? Because if you don't, your hypothesis is in trouble already.
Glib throw-away lines only work if you avoid backing them up with detailed cogent argument with reference to the sources and other relevant evidence from the period. If you want to make an argument, you need to actually
do so, not just wave your hands.
Could you expand on that? E.g., with one example; or a link?
I can give you several examples. The text of gMark contains some linguistic and grammatical oddities that have long since been noted. In fact, some of them were noted even back in the First Century, since the writers of gLuke and gMatt noticed them when using gMark as one of their sources and they tended to amend them or avoid them in their versions of the same story. And early scribes of gMark also noticed them and many of them did the same, creating variant readings at these points in the text of gMark in many manuscripts.
For example, in Mark 12:4 there is a parable where a vineyard's tenants beat up the servants sent to collect their rent:
"Then he sent another servant to them; they struck this man on the head and treated him shamefully."
The odd bit here is the Greek word translated above as "struck (him) on the head". In the text of gMark it is
ἐκεφαλίωσαν which is a strange word which is found nowhere else in the NT and found nowhere else in any Greek text of the time. It is clearly constructed from the Greek word for "head" (
κεφαλή) and it seems from the context to mean something like "to strike the head", but the word is unique and so sticks out to anyone fluent in Greek.
As I noted, it certainly stuck out for the later writers of gMatt and gLuke, since both avoided using this weird word when they retell this story, even though other linguistic correspondences show they were both using gMark as their source. Many early scribes copying this part of gMark also found it strange and either replaced it with something more familiar or added something to try and make it more explicable.
So why did the writer of gMark use this word, which seems to have been one he made up? It seems to be because he was working from a source of his own and one written in Aramaic. There is a (rare) Aramaic verb
r'shīn which means "to pound, to beat, to grind", usually used in reference to milling grain, but which could be used figuratively in the context of a physical assault. If the writer of gMark did not recognise this word in his Aramaic source, it makes sense that he might mistake it as a verb based on the common Aramaic word for "head" which is
r'sh. Thus his coining of a new word also based on the equivalent Greek word for "head" but which is found nowhere else in Greek.
Another example is found in a strange element in Mark 1:14; one that has often given Christians grief. Here a leper asks Jesus to heal him and Jesus does so, but beforehand the text has Jesus react to the request with anger (
ὀργισθείς - "(he) became angry"), which doesn't seem to make much sense. Again, it didn't make sense to the writers of gMatt and gLuke who used this story in gMark as their source but left this odd element out completely. Some of the early scribes of gMark also couldn't reconcile this "anger" with the rest of the story, and so replaced
ὀργισθείς with a more contextually explicable
σπλαγχνισθεὶς ("[he] had compassion").
So where did the weird "(he) became angry" element come from? Again, from an Aramaic word -
regaz, which had a broad range of meanings from "to be moved, to tremble (with emotion)" through to "to become enraged". The writer of gMark's Aramaic source clearly meant the first meaning, but the gMark author didn't understand the range of meaning and so used a narrower Greek work which only means "to become angry".
These are two examples of strange elements in gMark which are not found in their cognates in gMatt and gLuke and which make sense when we consider the difficulty of translating from a Semitic language like Aramaic into an Indo-European one like Greek. This is part of a mass of material that indicates that at least some of gMark is based on a written Aramaic source that pre-dates this "first" gospel. So the idea that "the writer of Mark just made it all up" doesn't fly - the writer of gMark was working from an earlier source and one which was in the language we'd expect of any historical Jesus and his earliest followers.
And in all his letters, that's bloody all that Paul had to say about a Jesus of flesh and blood. In only two letters, if I'm not mistaken (Galatians and Romans).
Er, no, we have more than that an in other letters as well. Paul says Jesus was born as a human, of a human mother and born a Jew (Galatians 4:4). He repeats that he had a "human nature" and that he was a human descendant of King David (Romans 1:3). He refers to teachings Jesus made during his earthly ministry on divorce (1Cor. 7:10), on preachers (1Cor. 9:14) and on the coming apocalypse (1Thess. 4:15). He mentions that he died and was buried (1Cor. 15:3-4). And he says he had an earthly, physical brother called James who Paul himself had met (Galatians 1:19).
So the glib assertions I often see from mythicist supporters in these discussions that "Paul never refers to an earthly/historical Jesus" is flatly wrong. Doherty has poured out hundreds of thousands of words trying to find ways around these references and to hypothesise how they might actually mean something that still fits with his "sub-lunar celestial Jesus" thesis. No-one with a good grasp of the linguistics and cultural context has been convinced.
You, at least, have conceded that the three or four examples of Paul referring to Jesus is "all that Paul had to say about a Jesus of flesh and blood". As my longer list above shows, this is wrong. But even if it wasn't, you have still been forced to admit that Paul
did refer to a historical, earthly Jesus who had died recently. So the attempts at pretending he was talking about a non-historical celestial, mythic or allegorical Jesus fail right there.
Some people are still surprised that we don't find details of Jesus' life in Paul's letters other than these passing mentions. They insist that if Paul really believed in a historical Jesus then we should have accounts of his birth, references to his home town of Nazareth, a detailed description of his trial and execution etc. Though these claims are more examples of the kind of "argument by mere assertion" that many mythicist supporters substitute for detailed analysis and cogent argument. We "
should" find these things? Says who? Based on what?
The way historians work is to not simply make these glib assertions, but to test them by reference to relevant material. If we want to determine how much an epistle of this type would mention a historical Jesus if its writer believed in one, then we can do so. After all, we have examples of such texts in works like 1Clement, 2Clement or the Epistle of Polycarp to the Philippians. These are late enough in date for even mythicists to have to agree that their writers would have believed in a historical Jesus. So do we find all the biographical elements in them that we are told we "should" find in Paul's letters if he also believed in a historical Jesus? No, we don't. In fact, we find
far fewer such references - virtually none, to be precise. So what is this claim we "should" find lots of biography in Paul's writings based on? Not on analysis of the source materials, that's for sure.
BTW, the "brother" James could well be figuratively,
"Could well be"? Really? There's yet another one of these assertions that I see mythicist fans glibly parroting, yet what is it based on? To back this claim up, you would need to find demonstrable examples of Paul using
τὸν ἀδελφὸν τοῦ κυρίου ("the brother of the Lord") or
οἱ ἀδελφοὶ τοῦ κυρίου ("the brothers of the Lord") figuratively. If you can't do that (and you can't), you'll need to make a solid argument that they mean something figurative in the places where we find them used: Galatians 1:19 and 1Cor 9:5.
The problem here is that in both these passages Paul mentions this "brother of the Lord" and these "brothers of the Lord" in contexts where he also mentions other believers. So clearly there is something that differentiates them from other believers and makes them distinctive and worth mentioning in a way that
separates them from other followers or disciples (eg Cephas). So to try to dismiss these as references to some figurative usages that simply means "a believer" or "a disciple" doesn't work.
This is why both Doherty and Carrier have to go to some lengths to "explain" who this distinct group of believers might be, because they can't get around the fact that these passages
do make them distinct. Both claim that these "brothers of the Lord" must (supposedly) have been some kind of sub-initiatory category or higher level of believer or some other sub-group of believers that made them distinct and worth referring to distinctively. The problem is, they have absolutely zero evidence to back this up. Nowhere in any of the corpus of early Christian writings do we have any hint of such a group - it is simply invented by Doherty and Carrier as an
ad hoc way of getting around the problem of a reference to Jesus' brothers. Their speculation is based on nothing except wishful thinking.
Whereas the interpretation that this group is distinctive and distinguished from others by Paul because they were Jesus' siblings is supported by all kinds of references, both Christian and non-Christian, to brothers of Jesus who became part of the early Jesus sect including one called James who was a leader in Jerusalem. So we're back to Occam's Razor: the mythicists trying to dismiss these references are appealing to an inference to an unknown entity (this imaginary "initiatory sub-grade for which there is zero evidence) while needlessly ignoring a construction from a known entity (the multiply attested siblings of Jesus, including James). It's a contrived
ad hoc construct that simply doesn't stand up to scrutiny.
and I can't find a "friend" reference to Cephas, only that he was an apostle, which doesn't say much.
An apostle with an Aramaic name that in Greek is
Πέτρος and in English is Peter. So we have a reference here to a guy with the same nickname as Jesus' friend from the gospels and Acts. And in the (sanitised) version of this same encounter between Paul and the elders in Jerusalem it's James and Peter who are the ones who interact with him. So what
reason would be have to think this very specific reference to someone with a distinctive nickname in Aramaic was to someone else?
But it's the appearance of Jesus that mattered to him, not the flesh-and-blood one.
The risen Messiah was certainly the focus of his Christology, no doubt. But the fact remains that he was aware of "the flesh-and-blood one" and made clear references to him. So attempts at claiming he didn't know of "the flesh-and-blood one" at all collapse. This pushes the understanding that Jesus was "the flesh-and-blood one" back well before gMark and Paul's disputes with people who believed in this Messiah before his conversion pushes it back still further. Since references in his letters allows us to date that conversion to the 30s AD, that pushes knowledge of this "the flesh-and-blood one" all the way back to just after when the traditions say this Jesus was alive.
Getting the picture? Despite some of the ranting on this thread that would have you believe that all these scholars are simply idiots who base their ideas about a historical Jesus on fantasy and assumptions, the reality is that the conclusion there was such a person is accepted as most likely because it fits the evidence better than the incoherent and usually
ad hoc attempts at alternatives.
That was almost 2,500 words long, so I'm taking a break now. More detailed responses to the replies above to follow soon.
