What counts as a historical Jesus?

[IanS]

You're missing the point. Since Origen feels free to say that Josephus does not accept Jesus the teacher as the Christ, you have to account for how come Origen happens to know anything about Josephus's attitude to Jesus at all * ...................... Well?

Stone

Which copy of Origen are you using? Which copy of Josephus are you using?

Who actually wrote those copies that you are using? It was not Origen or Josephus!

At what date were your copies actually written? How long after Josephus, Origen, Jesus or "James" etc. had all died?

In the anonymously written copies of Origen and Josephus that you are relying upon, who gave any of that information to those anonymous authors?

How reliable and truthful were those anonymous sources who gave their stories to the anonymous copyists writers of Origen and Josephus?


Incidentally we could ask exactly the same questions of Piggy about his reliance on the letters of Paul and the Gospel authors ...

... who actually wrote those copies of Paul's Letters? Who gave those anonymous authors the stories of Paul, Jesus and James etc? How reliable and truthful were those anonymous people who gave the anonymous writers those stories? How long after the supposed death of Paul, Jesus, James and any claimed "disciples", were these anonymous writers with their unknown anonymous sources, writing the copies that Piggy is relying upon?

 

[Stone]

I don't understand your logic.

Origen could not find anywhere in Josephus a statement that Josephus acknowledged Jesus as the Messiah. He did NOT find a statement in Josephus to the effect that "I, Josephus, do not believe that Jesus was the Christ". He does not mention that he found any statement in Josephus about Jesus at all. Origen was concerned about that, because as a Christian he was interested in attestations that Jesus was the messiah. No such statement could he find. So he tells us that Josephus had no such belief.

ETA Also, Origen referred to Jesus because in his copy of Josephus there was evidently a story that Jerusalem has been destroyed in punishment for the murder of James. Origen believed that this was Jesus' brother James, so he was thinking about Jesus, and opines that is was more probably Jesus' than James's death that provoked the divine wrath. But, he then tells tells us, Josephus didn't acknowledge Jesus as the messiah. It is quite evident that Origen had in front of him no Josephan text about Jesus at all.

Then why bother to say at all that Josephus didn't view Jesus as a Christ? I gather that you're suggesting that Origen is inferring from absence. I frankly doubt he is. (Only mythers do that. ;-) ) I just don't see Origen saying that Josephus did not view Jesus as a Christ without Josephus explicitly saying so. We will have to agree to disagree on this. Moreover, it's odd that Origen would actually bother to say twice (http://webcache.googleusercontent.c...com/anaorigjos.html+&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us) that Josephus did not view Jesus as a Christ unless there was an explicit Josephus indication to that effect. Maybe it's not impossible, but it would still be very odd and highly unlikely. The more likely option is that something in Josephus explicitly indicated as much to Origen.

Stone

 

[Stone]

Which copy of Origen are you using? Which copy of Josephus are you using?

Who actually wrote those copies that you are using? It was not Origen or Josephus!

At what date were your copies actually written? How long after Josephus, Origen, Jesus or "James" etc. had all died?

In the anonymously written copies of Origen and Josephus that you are relying upon, who gave any of that information to those anonymous authors?

How reliable and truthful were those anonymous sources who gave their stories to the anonymous copyists writers of Origen and Josephus?


Incidentally we could ask exactly the same questions of Piggy about his reliance on the letters of Paul and the Gospel authors ...

... who actually wrote those copies of Paul's Letters? Who gave those anonymous authors the stories of Paul, Jesus and James etc? How reliable and truthful were those anonymous people who gave the anonymous writers those stories? How long after the supposed death of Paul, Jesus, James and any claimed "disciples", were these anonymous writers with their unknown anonymous sources, writing the copies that Piggy is relying upon?

You've just invalidated Hippocrates and Leukippos the Atomist and Boadicca and virtually 80% of the known figures in ancient history. Physical mss of testimonies on their lives are often centuries after both they and their chroniclers lived. Welcome to ancient history -- virtually all of ancient history.

When are you guys going to seriously address just how much ancient history you're now ready to dump? Bleating "Oh, but these others aren't important" doesn't cut it. If you don't take this question seriously, then nothing you say about Jesus or his times carries any integrity whatsoever. All your knee-jerk myther blathering is simply your bile speaking and nothing else. You're just wasting people's time.

Stone

 

[Craig B]

Moreover, it's odd that Origen would actually bother to say twice (http://webcache.googleusercontent.c...com/anaorigjos.html+&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us) that Josephus did not view Jesus as a Christ unless there was an explicit Josephus indication to that effect. Maybe it's not impossible, but it would still be very odd and highly unlikely. The more likely option is that something in Josephus explicitly indicated as much to Origen.

Stone

Can we find a single citation from an alleged reference to Jesus by Josephus in any pre-Eusebian commentator? I don't think there is such a thing. I may be wrong. Do you know of one? And it's not as if the early Christians had lots of Jesus notices in other works to choose from. They had nothing at all.

And I am not a mythicist.

 

[IanS]

You've just invalidated Hippocrates and Leukippos the Atomist and Boadicca and virtually 80% of the known figures in ancient history. Physical mss of testimonies on their lives are often centuries after both they and their chroniclers lived. Welcome to ancient history -- virtually all of ancient history.

When are you guys going to seriously address just how much ancient history you're now ready to dump? Bleating "Oh, but these others aren't important" doesn't cut it. If you don't take this question seriously, then nothing you say about Jesus or his times carries any integrity whatsoever. All your knee-jerk myther blathering is simply your bile speaking and nothing else. You're just wasting people's time.

Stone

Not at all.

If the evidence of other historical figures is as hopelessly bad as that of Jesus, and if any of those other figures were even remotely as important as, and demanding of really reliable solid evidence as Jesus is, then all those other historical figures would similarly have to be regarded as, at best, highly doubtful to say the least.

 

[davefoc]

Which copy of Origen are you using? Which copy of Josephus are you using?

Who actually wrote those copies that you are using? It was not Origen or Josephus!

At what date were your copies actually written? How long after Josephus, Origen, Jesus or "James" etc. had all died?

In the anonymously written copies of Origen and Josephus that you are relying upon, who gave any of that information to those anonymous authors?

How reliable and truthful were those anonymous sources who gave their stories to the anonymous copyists writers of Origen and Josephus?


Incidentally we could ask exactly the same questions of Piggy about his reliance on the letters of Paul and the Gospel authors ...

... who actually wrote those copies of Paul's Letters? Who gave those anonymous authors the stories of Paul, Jesus and James etc? How reliable and truthful were those anonymous people who gave the anonymous writers those stories? How long after the supposed death of Paul, Jesus, James and any claimed "disciples", were these anonymous writers with their unknown anonymous sources, writing the copies that Piggy is relying upon?

IanS,
This has obviously been a theme of many of your posts in this thread. Stone provided an answer above which I thought was on the reasonable side.

I think your banging away on this theme might be on the reasonable side as a response to somebody that was both claiming that the existence of an HJ was almost certain and was using the Gospels and Paul to create a detailed narrative about the life of the HJ.

Even Piggy and Stone aren't doing that exactly in this thread. They are acknowledging (although not always with the clarity that I would like) that Paul's epistles and the Gospels are unreliable sources of history and that there have been various interpolations and deletions to these documents.

The main problem with these documents though is probably not that they have been copied so as to not preserve the original exactly. The main problem is probably that they were unreliable from the start. The authors had no direct knowledge of what they wrote, they were clearly making stuff up and they had a huge agenda to create a story that promoted a religion.

A secondary problem, is that even if some magic way existed to retrieve the originals what originals would you be interested in? Paul may have compiled his letters and edited them years after they were sent. So do you want the originals that Paul sent or the originals that he put into some sort of Pauline anthology? Similarly, the Gospels may have been created by various holy rollers whose first cut at Gospel writing was oral preaching and their story evolved over the years until they got around to writing the first version which they might have continued to edit for awhile.

The point here is that you are right, nothing in the modern NT is exactly as the original author wrote it, but that is probably a small problem compared to the overall unreliability of these documents as a source of history (ETA: which was there from the start).

 

[IanS]

The point here is that you are right, nothing in the modern NT is exactly as the original author wrote it, but that is probably a small problem compared to the overall unreliability of these documents as a source of history.

Well the reason I am banging on about it, is because we do not even need to speculate on the above (see highlight). Because the fact of the matter is, at the very least, the copies which Stone and Piggy are relying upon, are not in any measure reliable anyway!

 

[Acleron]

You've just invalidated Hippocrates and Leukippos the Atomist and Boadicca and virtually 80% of the known figures in ancient history. Physical mss of testimonies on their lives are often centuries after both they and their chroniclers lived. Welcome to ancient history -- virtually all of ancient history.

When are you guys going to seriously address just how much ancient history you're now ready to dump? Bleating "Oh, but these others aren't important" doesn't cut it. If you don't take this question seriously, then nothing you say about Jesus or his times carries any integrity whatsoever. All your knee-jerk myther blathering is simply your bile speaking and nothing else. You're just wasting people's time.

Stone

If there is as little evidence for those characters and that evidence is provided through intermediates with as much vested interest as we see for an HJ then I do seriously question their existence.

The conversion of speculation to hard fact that we have seen so far is very worrying. There appears to be a total lack of ability to discuss the topic of history with caveats that maintain that a lot of it is uncertain.

There is an inherent error which can be expressed in probability terms in each speculative opinion. By using such an opinion to form a second opinion the errors multiply, literally. Soon, these opinions are totally misinformed, regardless of the consensus of those involved or the insults to those who question those opinions or how they have been formed.

 

[Piggy]

You've just invalidated Hippocrates and Leukippos the Atomist and Boadicca and virtually 80% of the known figures in ancient history. Physical mss of testimonies on their lives are often centuries after both they and their chroniclers lived. Welcome to ancient history -- virtually all of ancient history.

When are you guys going to seriously address just how much ancient history you're now ready to dump? Bleating "Oh, but these others aren't important" doesn't cut it. If you don't take this question seriously, then nothing you say about Jesus or his times carries any integrity whatsoever. All your knee-jerk myther blathering is simply your bile speaking and nothing else. You're just wasting people's time.

Stone

It's interesting that instead of actually offering any serious objections -- because he can't, of course -- Ian moves into "just asking questions" mode.

That's the thing with mythicists... they disdain the research and therefore don't read it, then launch into all sorts of questions to which they would already have answers if they bothered to read the research, and pretend that these questions are serious.

When it's explained that such issues as the authentication of Paul's letters are extremely complex and require several fields of study working together, and therefore nobody can give it to them in a forum post, they interpret that as "dodging".

It can get frustrating.

Of course, as we progress with Paul's letters and the gospels, we'll see how these writings leave us little choice but to accept a historical Jesus, despite the often strange beliefs of the people who wrote them -- and I only say "little" rather than "none" because we can't entirely rule out a scenario in which someone does come up with a no-Jesus scenario that makes sense.

But let's be honest, nobody's holding their breath for that.

One thing the mythicists really have to get over is their "Bible bad" reflex which causes them to believe that the writings of Jesus's followers are of no value in understanding who he really was.

 

[Piggy]

There is an inherent error which can be expressed in probability terms in each speculative opinion. By using such an opinion to form a second opinion the errors multiply, literally. Soon, these opinions are totally misinformed, regardless of the consensus of those involved or the insults to those who question those opinions or how they have been formed.

Then you can't possibly support mythicism, which relies at every juncture on accepting possible scenarios which are LESS likely than those upon which HJ theory is based.

And in fact, you're leaving out a key part of the process -- continually checking the evolving scenario against the facts.

When you do that, you prevent the process of analysis from leaving the ground and floating off into the air (as mythicism clearly does).

The strongest evidence for HJ theory is that it WORKS. It explains an enormous variety of questions in one swat.

Mythicism fails to do that, and in fact compounds the problems.

 

[Belz...]

Then why bother to say at all that Josephus didn't view Jesus as a Christ?

Well, it's not incompatible with Josephus making absolutely no mention of Jesus, though it does make one think that either the chap. 20 bit was already there (added or original) or that there was some other passage we're missing, as we've said before.

 

[Belz...]

Then you can't possibly support mythicism, which relies at every juncture on accepting possible scenarios which are LESS likely than those upon which HJ theory is based.

Nobody here is supporting mythicism, Piggy. We're pretty much agnostics, here. It's the certainty you alluded to earlier that's the cause of the current discussion.

 

[Brainache]

Well, it's not incompatible with Josephus making absolutely no mention of Jesus, though it does make one think that either the chap. 20 bit was already there (added or original) or that there was some other passage we're missing, as we've said before.

Well, there is the part of Josephus where he says that the Jews waiting for the Messiah were wrong because Vespasian was the great leader referred to in scripture.

So maybe Origen saw that and concluded (as you would), that Josephus was calling Vespasian "The Christ", not Jesus.

 

[tsig]

It's interesting that instead of actually offering any serious objections -- because he can't, of course -- Ian moves into "just asking questions" mode.

That's the thing with mythicists... they disdain the research and therefore don't read it, then launch into all sorts of questions to which they would already have answers if they bothered to read the research, and pretend that these questions are serious.

When it's explained that such issues as the authentication of Paul's letters are extremely complex and require several fields of study working together, and therefore nobody can give it to them in a forum post, they interpret that as "dodging".

It can get frustrating.

Of course, as we progress with Paul's letters and the gospels, we'll see how these writings leave us little choice but to accept a historical Jesus, despite the often strange beliefs of the people who wrote them -- and I only say "little" rather than "none" because we can't entirely rule out a scenario in which someone does come up with a no-Jesus scenario that makes sense.

But let's be honest, nobody's holding their breath for that.

One thing the mythicists really have to get over is their "Bible bad" reflex which causes them to believe that the writings of Jesus's followers are of no value in understanding who he really was.

Of course, as we progress with the books Old Testament, we'll see how these writings leave us little choice but to accept a historical Flood, despite the often strange beliefs of the people who wrote them.

 

[JaysonR]

Jayson

Generally: "The Bible" is an anthology influenced by an unobserved social processs that made certain things available to the anthologists, while other things were made unavailable. It is perfectly fine for someone to comment on the success rate of the combined mechanisms in producing accurate accounts of ancient events.

Indeed; that wasn't my intended address.
I was addressing a different matter, but it's also not that large of an issue worth much discussion, I don't think.

It depends on what you mean by "conclusion," If you mean a categorical finding, then you must have noted that I have made no categorical finding. I have said in other posts I estimate it as about 60-40 favoring historicity. It must be perfectly obvious from the sheer number of posts I have made in this thread that one argument is not the entire basis even of that non-categorical interim estimate.

I'm not sure I understand well, but my point was benign.
It wasn't intended to be about you, but instead a general point.
I agree that asking "why wouldn't" or "why would" are not good conclusions.
They are useful in examining anthropology in general as tools to working on the culture and motive habits of a people in review of a specific instance, but I would agree that those kinds of questions are not reasonable to rest upon as a conclusion to make a case from.
If someone, not you, were to ask such as proof of something, then I (personally) would consider the proposition (whatever it is) to be unfinished and not concluded.

FInally, just a methodological note. You say that you aren't interested in how important this man is. Fair enough, but the importance of the man is the basis upon which the sample of size one was drawn for examination. There is no reason to expect that a sample drawn for a reason would be representative of the population from which it is drawn. This sample was selected because of its atypicality. All arguments from what is typical of the population from which it was taken need enhanced scrutiny.

In fact, the sample was not drawn or taken at all. A "population" of allegedly analogous cases was constructed around it. Then, hypotheses were developed on the unsampled non-population. Those hypotheses are then "tested," if at all, on the same data which was used to develop them.

That is ridiculously bad inferential practice. Perhaps it is expedient ("You won't get anywhere..."), but it is utterly unreliable as a procedure for resolving uncertainty. It is fine for developing hypotheses, but furnishes no basis for evaluating the prospects that the hypotheses actually are true.

I don't think I follow very well here.
Are you saying that if a figure is important to our culture that there needs to be a larger sample size of material from previous cultures to judge their historicity from?

 

[Belz...]

Well, there is the part of Josephus where he says that the Jews waiting for the Messiah were wrong because Vespasian was the great leader referred to in scripture.

So maybe Origen saw that and concluded (as you would), that Josephus was calling Vespasian "The Christ", not Jesus.

Indeed, good catch.

 

[The Norseman]

There is an inherent error which can be expressed in probability terms in each speculative opinion. By using such an opinion to form a second opinion the errors multiply, literally. Soon, these opinions are totally misinformed, regardless of the consensus of those involved or the insults to those who question those opinions or how they have been formed.

Exactly, a point sadly being deliberately ignored by those proponents of an historical Yeshua.

 

[davefoc]

Well the reason I am banging on about it, is because we do not even need to speculate on the above (see highlight). Because the fact of the matter is, at the very least, the copies which Stone and Piggy are relying upon, are not in any measure reliable anyway!

Everybody accepts that they are unreliable, the issue is what part of them is reliable enough to sustain a belief that an HJ existed. It doesn't advance the discussion to just state as fact that which is contested. Piggy believes there is some aspect of the NT which is reliable based on textural analysis, internal comparison, comparison with known facts based on extra-biblical sources, the consensus of experts that he believes exists and perhaps other factors. The issue being discussed is just how reliable Piggy's analysis and evidence is.

 

[The Norseman]

Then you can't possibly support mythicism, which relies at every juncture on accepting possible scenarios which are LESS likely than those upon which HJ theory is based.

Okay, then show us the numbers. Everyone loves to use the words "more likely" and "less likely" but then have no rational basis upon which they rest the likelihood.

Or you can just acknowledge that these are purely guesses, because, as I've already said, if even one fact that is "more likely" actually didn't happen, then everything built upon that fact fails. In other words, to reach 'c', then 'a' and 'b' are assumed to be correct. If one is not, then the rest cascade into failure.

The issue is that NOBODY KNOWS which is correct and which is not; therefore, to say that "it is likely" that Yeshua is historical simply fails due to the complicated nature of the incomplete issues surrounding the story.

 

[Belz...]

... less likely, more likely. These are useful when you're trying to guess what's your best option. But you still have to be honest and say you don't really know.

To be fair, however, Piggy does say that the MJ theory makes no sense, not just isn't likely.