What counts as a historical Jesus?

[Belz...]

Seriously--without your contributions, your allegations, your arrogations, and your deeply sensitive humor, this thread would not be what it is. Thank you so much.

Seriously, man, stop that.

 

[tsig]

Start posting something that evidences some familiarity with the scholarship, then.

That's all you have to do, and we'll have a fine discussion.

I'd like to post something at your level of scholarship but I'm afraid I'd run afoul of the MA.

 

[SpuriusMaximus]

Let me get this straight.

You admit you don't know the first thing about the actual scholarship in this area.

Yet you accuse someone who has studied this stuff of accepting the research merely on faith, despite the fact that you know nothing at all about either the research or his experience with it.

You don't bother to find out anything about the field before chiming in on this thread, then claim that the absence of primary researchers on the thread is somehow evidence of someone else's gullibility rather than your own cluelessness.

Do I have that right?

Yeah, I do.

No, you still don't get logic.

The truth of the matter is that it doesn't matter. If something has evidence and makes logical sense, that's that. The rules of the burden of proof don't change based on whether the interlocutor has read the same books or not. Either there is some solid evidence that supports the conclusion to the high degree of certainty that you keep postulating, and then you should be able to point out ANY, or there isn't.

There is no pre-requisite that anyone studied anything before you can, for example, point out at least ONE use of "son of man" in Aramaic or Hebrew anywhere. It's not like such a document only exists if the others believe in it too. Either it exists and you can show at least one instance of it, or it just doesn't exist.

(And note that I've been extremely lenient and generous with that request for evidence. Actually your claim that a historical Jesus used that title for himself or that it was already the common meaning of the term would require a much more difficult standard of evidence to support. Far from being some unreasonable crank request, settling for just at least one use anywhere around that time is already setting the bar as generously low as it can possibly get. It's setting it so low that technically it wouldn't even support your claim yet, but it would at least be a start.)

The pretense that oh noes, you can't criticize domain X unless you're thoroughly familiar with it is plain old bogus and quite trivially so.

If that were true, then you couldn't disbelieve the scholars in domains like homeopathy, acupuncture, chiropractic, astrology, spiritism, HTML Feng-Shui (those sharp brackets disrupt chi flow through the page, apparently), crystal power, etc, unless you have an academic degree in any of those domains and published in their journals. After all, homeopathy too has been studied for... what?... over 200 years? And it has professors and journals, and make no mistake, it has absolute consensus that more dilute is better. There is not a single professor of homeopathy, nor any respectable author published in one of their journals, that doubts that.

But in reality it doesn't matter. I don't have to study every single book on dowsing or homeopathy to know it doesn't work. I just have to ask THEM -- precisely because presumably they know more and it's an easier task for them -- to show the evidence. That's it. If they can show evidence that it works, it works. If all they can offer is the same as you do, namely just quoting someone's claim and insisting I can't disagree with the authority, then it doesn't work.

 

[tsig]

No, you still don't get logic.

The truth of the matter is that it doesn't matter. If something has evidence and makes logical sense, that's that. The rules of the burden of proof don't change based on whether the interlocutor has read the same books or not. Either there is some solid evidence that supports the conclusion to the high degree of certainty that you keep postulating, and then you should be able to point out ANY, or there isn't.

There is no pre-requisite that anyone studied anything before you can, for example, point out at least ONE use of "son of man" in Aramaic or Hebrew anywhere. It's not like such a document only exists if the others believe in it too. Either it exists and you can show at least one instance of it, or it just doesn't exist.

(And note that I've been extremely lenient and generous with that request for evidence. Actually your claim that a historical Jesus used that title for himself or that it was already the common meaning of the term would require a much more difficult standard of evidence to support. Far from being some unreasonable crank request, settling for just at least one use anywhere around that time is already setting the bar as generously low as it can possibly get. It's setting it so low that technically it wouldn't even support your claim yet, but it would at least be a start.)

The pretense that oh noes, you can't criticize domain X unless you're thoroughly familiar with it is plain old bogus and quite trivially so.

If that were true, then you couldn't disbelieve the scholars in domains like homeopathy, acupuncture, chiropractic, astrology, spiritism, HTML Feng-Shui (those sharp brackets disrupt chi flow through the page, apparently), crystal power, etc, unless you have an academic degree in any of those domains and published in their journals. After all, homeopathy too has been studied for... what?... over 200 years? And it has professors and journals, and make no mistake, it has absolute consensus that more dilute is better. There is not a single professor of homeopathy, nor any respectable author published in one of their journals, that doubts that.

But in reality it doesn't matter. I don't have to study every single book on dowsing or homeopathy to know it doesn't work. I just have to ask THEM -- precisely because presumably they know more and it's an easier task for them -- to show the evidence. That's it. If they can show evidence that it works, it works. If all they can offer is the same as you do, namely just quoting someone's claim and insisting I can't disagree with the authority, then it doesn't work.

It strikes me that Piggy is using the 'sophisticated theology' defense where you can't criticize a religion unless you understand and can refute their sophisticated arguments however in Piggy's case it's even worse because you have to study and agree with all the established scholars there is an HJ before you can deny the HJ.

 

[SpuriusMaximus]

Pretty much, though that's not what bothers me the most. What I find sadder is that, even more than just the sophisticated theology defense, it's become a combination of

A) Bulverism: "a logical fallacy in which, rather than proving that an argument in favour of an opinion is wrong, a person instead assumes that the opinion is wrong, and then goes on to explain why the other person held it. It is essentially a circumstantial ad hominem argument."

Or as C.S.Lewis puts it, "You must show that a man is wrong before you start explaining why he is wrong. The modern method is to assume without discussion that he is wrong and then distract his attention from this (the only real issue) by busily explaining how he became so silly."

We've seen several pages so far of just explaining how others read crank literature and what's wrong with their head and whatnot, while not showing a shred of evidence to show that they are actually wrong.

B) Argumentum Ad Baculum: agree with me OR ELSE

Example: "If you don't want to be called a crank, and don't want to be compared to other cranks, then don't use crank tactics, such as dismissing a global scholarly consensus with appeals to "argument from authority"" (Piggy, message #1674)

Translation: agree with my redefinition of logic or here's the bad consequences. And really that seems to be the whole point of the comparisons to Holocaust deniers and whatnot: attach some bogus stigma to disagreeing with him.

 

[Piggy]

Forgive me, but that sounds like an unskeptical thing to say. Again I'll ask for the book of Mormon: is there reason to even ask for evidence aside from it ? Of course there is. Smith, like Paul, is making claims, but we have no corroborating evidence that any of that is true. It doesn't help that Paul peppers his works with miracles.

You have to consider the context and genre.

There's good reason to doubt Smith when he says that he went and talked to angels who dictated to him.

In fact, using standard scholarly methods, researchers have determined that the language in those alleged transcriptions is simply the standard language of the time and place with overtones borrowed from Bible translations available then.

Which means, yeah, it's a fraud.

And that's the thing -- these same objective critical methods have been used on ALL the known manuscript copies of Paul's letters in existence.

What he says with regard to the missionary travels is perfectly consistent with what we would expect to be the case. There's no reason to doubt it. You see, there IS corroborating evidence, but it's in the larger body of research which tells us what the norms were for that day.

And if we do doubt it, then we're forced to claim that the entire letters are frauds and were never sent to anyone.

But NOBODY has EVER come up with any plausible scenario in which that would be the case. Ever. It's a non-hypothesis.

What we've got are letters from Paul to various church groups, providing introductions, sending greetings, answering questions, asking for money, settling disputes, imploring people to behave better, and so forth.

NOBODY DOUBTS THIS!

And that's after well over a century of meticulous scrutiny.

The conclusion that Paul's letters are what they seem to be, it's simply not open for armchair challenges at this point. If you want to challenge that conclusion, you're going to need to get DEEP in the weeds of manuscript study.

So since there are no legitimate challenges to the mainstream scholarship which you can point to, there is no controversy to discuss here.

If you want me to prove to you that the mainstream scholarship is correct, then you'll have to excuse me while I write a 400 page book for you.

But I don't need to, because if you want to challenge the current scholarship, YOU have to tell ME why I should listen to your ideas, not the other way around.

If you come up with a scenario in which it is even plausible to think that Paul was lying about the fact that missionaries traveled among the various church groups, then write it up -- but before posting it, send it to the Journal of Biblical Literature, because they'll be VERY interested.

 

[Piggy]

I see the mods are moving some of my posts over to the dungheap, so I just want to apologize for creating that unnecessary work, and to the folks I slung the barbs at.

Mea maxima culpa.

Those posts didn't further the discussion at all, and simply dragged down the thread.

My apologies.

 

[Piggy]

Since both are products of the human imagination the only difference is the church letter purports to have authority from god.

I see no reason to treat one different than the other.

Then this discussion is pointless.

Seriously, if you're not going to lift a single braincell, we can go around forever.

"Both are products of the human imagination" -- that's your reason for treating them the same?

That's a non-standard.

It makes no difference how Paul felt about his relationship to God when it comes to evaluating the bits of his letters which show that missionaries traveled among the various church groups.

If you can't see that... no, if you REFUSE to see that... then no reasonable discussion is to be had here.

Seriously.

If you're going to stick your head in the sand and deny that the sun's shining, I'm not going to try to argue with you about it.

 

[Piggy]

This entire post is along the line of what I would call a plausibility argument. I might not be an historian, but...

But what?

But you're going to argue with their conclusions anyway?

 

[Piggy]

It is absolutely possible to put together a reasonable scenario that explains all the facts available to us that includes an HJ. It is possible to make reasoned guesses about what part of the NT is reliable and what is not. However, where I disagree is that something in this process results in the basis for a solid conclusion that an HJ existed.

The evidence for an HJ looks very tenuous to me. It primarily depends on the writings of Paul. After that the evidence thins out significantly and might include Mark, Q, James and the possibility that there is a legitimate reference to an HJ in Josephus. What in that group provides evidence that doesn't have plausible alternative explanations to explain it?

Mark - Inspired by stories of the risen Messiah wafting through the God-fearer community and a knowledge of the characters in Paul's letters.
Q - May not have existed, but even if it did what does it prove except that writing Jesus fiction took hold early
James - Theoretically the work of Jewish Christians but hard to tell and even if it was were these Jewish Christians one's from the hypothetical Palestinian Jesus sect or were these one's displaced in time, distance and language from any hypothetical Jesus.
Josephus - discussed endlessly in these threads. I used to hold out more hope that the James reference was legitimate than I do now. Somebody in this thread linked to an article that put forth an argument that resonated with me that even the James reference is unlikely to be legitimate.

You're looking at this all wrong, I'm afraid. You're doing the soda straw thing, which might also lead you to believe there was no moon landing.

My challenge to you: Describe to me a "no historical Jesus" scenario that fits everything.

Do that, and I'll listen to your objections.

But as for the above, Mark never makes reference to Paul or echoes his letters, so there's no reason to think he was familiar with them.

If you doubt the existence of the Q source(s), you're going to have to provide some alternate explanation for the synoptic text parallels, which nobody has ever done.

We're not depending on James or Josephus.

So none of that matters.

Seriously, folks, y'all really need to think twice before lobbing bombs at the scholarship without bothering to know what it is.

That gets old.

 

[Piggy]

If Piggy acknowledged that his life on this forum would be a lot easier, whacking everyone else in the shins with a club is bound to raise their hackles.

Yet he insists his opinion is the only opinion and anything else is not just mistaken but a crank opinion.

Go read the scholarship and come talk to me.

The reason you think this stuff is "my opinion" is simply because you don't bother to familiarize yourself with the current research.

And folks who come onto a skeptical forum and start challenging well established research without even knowing what it is... they deserve to get their shins barked.

 

[Belz...]

But NOBODY has EVER come up with any plausible scenario in which that would be the case. Ever. It's a non-hypothesis.

Which doesn't prove anything, by the way. It's akin to the "well, where did the universe come from, then ?" from theists. Just because I or anyone else don't have the answer doesn't make the other guy right.

Go read the scholarship and come talk to me.

Whenever you summarize the scholarship, it sounds, to me, like appeals to incredulity, authority and ignorance. In this thread, anyway, I haven't seen a serious effort by you to make you case, and I think that's unfortunate because I happen to think you can make a case.

 

[Piggy]

Post #1509 has practical problems:

"Born in Galilee some time before year 0, Jewish, raised in Nazareth, which was just a small cluster of huts, really." This brings up the whole Jesus of where? issue I pointed before. The now defunct pro-HJ site Jesus Police pointed out the flaws with assuming 'Nazarene' meant a place In fact they point out that Matthew and Luke call Nazareth a city, not a village, not a collection of guys living in cave but a full fledged city. They also point out:

"A Nazarene was someone who lived an ascetic life, known as much for what they did (a lot of praying) as for what they didn’t do (eat animals, sacrifice animals, shave, cut their hair, drink fermented beverages). Nazarenes were originally called Nazorenes, and they were a prominent sect in northern Palestine, and according to Epipanius, were also known as Mandaeans. They derived their name from the word “Nasrani” which referred to a school of small fish. The metaphor to the early Christians is obvious, as is their early symbol, the fish. Famous examples of Nazarenes included John the Baptist, the warrior Samson and the prophet Samuel."

This brings us to the "When Herod had John the Baptist beheaded, it must have been a terrible blow to Jesus, who would have viewed John as a prophet of God, and likely had no great love for Herod in the first place."

This is only true if John the Baptist was executed before Jesus' crucifixion. The problem is this both of these are a range: 28 – 36 CE for John's beheading and 30–36 for Jesus' crucifixion.

Luke 3:1-4 says John the Baptist "came into all the country about Jordan, preaching the baptism of repentance for the remission of sins" "in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar" (ie 29 CE)

So if we go with the 28 CE death date for John the Baptist we have Jesus being baptized by a reanimated corpse. Uh, oops.

If we go with the Wikipedia's dates (funny how they changed after I pointed out that gaff but the sources being referenced didn't) you have the earliest date for John's beheading (31 CE) being AFTER the one for Jesus' crucifixion (30 CE) double oops.

Never mind there are clues in in Josephus that John the Baptist was executed no earlier than the twentieth year of the reign of Tiberius or 34 CE but you have people saying Jesus was crucified 30-33 ie BEFORE John's beheading. Triple opps.

Throw in the range for Paul's conversion (31–36 CE) along with the claim that he had persecuted Christians ie followers of the crucified and risen Jesus long enough to become infamous in THREE provinces (ie for years) and you have very good odds that Paul converted BEFORE Jesus was crucified perhaps even before John the Baptist was executed! It's a Grand Slam of Opps.

It's going, going, it is gone. The logical ball is out of the park! The Christ Mythers win the Pennant! The Christ Mythers win the Pennant! (sorry I just couldn't resist the baseball tie in)

I'm sorry, but none of those are objections. None of that is a problem.

Why, for example, are you quoting Luke, who is notoriously unreliable? Do you think that scholars are not aware of all this? Or do you think that they believe Luke's writing is factual history?

By the time we get to the gospels, we're dealing with apotheosis literature. These are tales about the legendary Jesus, not the historical one.

And the farther away you get, the taller the tales grow. Just look at the Jesus from the Gospel According to John -- he's unrecognizable when compared to Paul's Jesus.

What you don't seem to understand is that this process is EXACTLY WHAT HISTORIANS EXPECT to happen if Jesus were a real living man.

What you're doing is something like pointing to celebrity gossip about Lindsey Lohan, pouting out wrong stories and contradictory stories, then saying "See, Lindsey Lohan never existed!"

The only response to that is, "Huh?"

Also, you seem to think that we can tell nothing about anything from false statements. But these are just as rich a source of information as true ones.

As for Matthew's reference to being called a Nazrene, I've already dealt with that. The fact that he went fishing for such a weak prooftext and shoehorned it in, indicates that Jesus's origins in Nazareth needed some explaining, and that was the best Matthew could do.

Is it a strained prooftext. Of course! How could it not be?

Now, as for John's execution, that's true. That may not have been a radicalizing moment. But it fits better with the trajectory of Jesus's life, as we know it, than the alternative. But sure, perhaps it didn't happen that way.

However, nobody really doubts that John baptized Jesus who later went on to form his own mission and following.

On the other hand, your game with Paul's conversion dates doesn't work, because there are no Christians to persecute before the crucifixion.

 

[Piggy]

Just a note to all the armchair mythicists....

Pointing out the existence of false stories and contradictions in the Biblical texts and other texts DOES NOT PROVE OR EVEN PROVIDE A SHRED OF EVIDENCE that there was no historical Jesus.

So please don't simply say "Look, contradictions, falsehoods!" and think you're somehow supporting the mythicist position.

You're not.

 

[Piggy]

Yet at the time Jesus supposedly lived everybody seems to be in a Napoleon Bunny-Partest mode: "Hey, here is another Christ. That's the twelfth one today." Not a single person writes anything down even though some of Jesus followers included people who COULD write. Instead they sit around until Paul starts sending out letter to everybody and then decide 'hey I think we should write down this stuff' and that is assuming the Gospels were written in the 1st century (which there is NO proof of).

Write what down for whom?

Why would a bunch of Galileans who thought the world was about to end write anything down?

And just because only Paul's letters have been preserved, this does not mean that nobody else wrote anything.

There is no missing documentation whose absence support mythicism. Period.

 

[Piggy]

Here's my problem:

Yeah, I don't have much knowledge in this field. I find it interesting and I have some basic familiarity with it, but I'm going to have to rely on the evidence and arguments presented to me because I don't want to get a degree in this field.

So coming to threads like this I expect to have some interesting posts to read, so you'll understand that since most of your posts consist of "trust me, there is no controversy. Jesus existed. End of story." (and "you just don't know enough about this subject") I don't find that particularily convincing. In any other topic knowledgeable people literally swarm us with links and references, but not this one. In this special case we have to take alledged experts at their words.

Do you not see how unconvincing this is to laypeople ? You said a few posts ago that you didn't do a good job of explaining.... and then didn't explain further.

I don't care how unconvincing it is.

There is simply NO WAY that I -- or anyone else -- can provide you with all the evidence on this forum, or any such forum, when it takes careful and thorough examination of many ancient manuscripts, in the context of the discoveries of archaeology and other disciplines, to establish the significance of even a single passage, or even a single word in some cases.

And the larger conclusions are based on analysis of a host of such specifics.

That is why these threads demand a modicum of RESPECT FOR THE SCHOLARSHIP.

When people simply say "I don't know what the scholarship says, but let me tell you why I think it's wrong", that's a dead end.

Arguments from ignorance are infinite.

As long as people gobble up the online armchair speculators and the 2 or 3 outlying mythicists with degrees who post their debunked ideas on YouTube, and refuse to read the mainstream stuff, then use the wrong-headed ideas of the former to attack the latter, there's nothing I can do about that.

Sorry.

I mean, how am I going to explain to you why we can trust Paul's letters regarding the travels of missionaries among the churches, if you don't bother to read Paul's letters, and at least a little scholarship to explain the historical context?

Instead, I get comparisons to works that have nothing to do with that type of writing, and I'm supposed to explain that fact, which anybody could find out for themselves just by reading the letters they're opining on?

No.

I cannot sit here and explain to everyone more than a century of highly detailed scholarship on the Ancient Near East.

You're asking for the impossible.

So what I'm asking is that there be some respect for the research, and an understanding that if anyone is going to doubt the mainstream scholarship, they need to PROPOSE A PLAUSIBLE CHALLENGE TO IT, not just sit back and say "Well, what if that's not true?"

In short, if you want a better discussion, ask better questions.

 

[Piggy]

In my view, however, if the name of the character we are discussing was "Mithra" instead of "Jesus", nobody would claim that we are pretty sure he existed based on one uncorroborated source and four magical gospels made 75 years later and probably based on that one source. But "Jesus" is a lot of people's personal god, so I'm a bit suspicious that he may get a pass, here.

If someone claimed that Mithra was a holy man they knew who was executed by the state just a few years ago, that would be a bizarre claim indeed.

Which is why nobody ever made it.

On the other hand, claiming that your group was formed by a local holy man called Jesus, who nobody ever heard of before, that's a different kettle of fish.

The question here is not whether people came to believe incredible things about Jesus. We know they did.

The question is simply "Who founded the Jesus movement".

Mainstream scholarship has determined that it was a man named Jesus, as we would expect.

NOBODY, HOWEVER, HAS EVER COME UP WITH A COHERENT THEORY THAT EXPLAINS WHY THESE PEOPLE SAID THEY WERE FOLLOWERS OF A MAN NAMED JESUS, WHICH LACKS A HISTORICAL JESUS.

Nobody.

Ever.

 

[Piggy]

It strikes me that Piggy is using the 'sophisticated theology' defense where you can't criticize a religion unless you understand and can refute their sophisticated arguments however in Piggy's case it's even worse because you have to study and agree with all the established scholars there is an HJ before you can deny the HJ.

What does this have to do with "criticizing a religion"?

You do realize, don't you, that the Christian faithful DISAGREE with the HJ scholarship?

And no, this stuff isn't that sophisticated. I'm not saying you can't comprehend it.

What I am saying, tho, is that if you simply don't bother to read the research, you're not in any position to say that it's wrong.

And you know, there are popular books that will help explain the mainstream research. If you don't even bother to read THOSE, then how on earth do you presume that you're in a position to take potshots at it?

 

[Craig B]

... NOBODY, HOWEVER, HAS EVER COME UP WITH A COHERENT THEORY THAT EXPLAINS WHY THESE PEOPLE SAID THEY WERE FOLLOWERS OF A MAN NAMED JESUS, WHICH LACKS A HISTORICAL JESUS.

Nobody.

Ever.

You don't accept as coherent, then, IanS' proposal

that Paul is preaching the same message found in the books of Enoch and Proverbs, where Paul associates Jesus with the notion of God’s “Wisdom” presented as a “hypostasised personified figure”

 

[Piggy]

Which doesn't prove anything, by the way. It's akin to the "well, where did the universe come from, then ?" from theists. Just because I or anyone else don't have the answer doesn't make the other guy right.

No, its' not the same.

You're saying, "What if Paul were lying about all that", and I point out that this would mean the letters are a fraud, and point out that there is no research in existence to support that conclusion, and that it doesn't even make sense.

In other words, the objection doesn't exist. No such controversy exists.

After decades of scholarship, historians agree that the confirmed letters are authentic, and the copies are pretty good, although there are known problems.

These are accepted as genuine letters from Paul to the churches.

If you want to challenge that, then go ahead, but it better be good.

Because it's not enough for you to say "Well, I think he could be lying".

If you think he's lying, then you need to challenge the scholarship with some convincing evidence.

And please don't counter with "Well, I don't know that this is the accepted scholarship" because that's your fault, not mine.

Whenever you summarize the scholarship, it sounds, to me, like appeals to incredulity, authority and ignorance. In this thread, anyway, I haven't seen a serious effort by you to make you case, and I think that's unfortunate because I happen to think you can make a case.

A case for what?

I don't have to make any case for non-controversies.

Could the letters which scholars accept as genuine actually be hoaxes after all?!!

If you're going to ask that, then I'm going to ask you to provide a scenario for this claim which deserves some attention.

"Well, COULD they?!!!" isn't such a scenario.

Remember, it's the CHALLENGES to the established body of knowledge that must be explained and defended.