What counts as a historical Jesus?

[JaysonR]

No, my view, is that it is probable that the only possibly valid and independent attestation in the Gospels to an HJ is from Mark. I believe that the information about the HJ in the other Gospels is either dependent on Mark or just fictional creations of the authors.

Ah, gotchya. Works for me!

 

[davefoc]

I'm sorry, Dave, but you are wrong.

You think this only because you haven't bothered to inform yourself about the topic but somehow believe you are qualified to comment on it as though you had.

Don't get me wrong, I don't have a doctorate in this field, but I have studied it at the undergraduate and graduate level, and I continue to follow the research as well as I can.

Which means that I have "made a concerted objective effort to find reliable evidence to support the existence of an HJ" and you have not. (Have you read all the sources I cite in my core bibliography?)

I'm sorry to have to pull rank on you, but really, you've left me no choice.

There are no "facts which are inconvenient" for HJ theory. There is crank speculation, but that's not "facts".

You certainly have not put any such "facts" on the table.

Who are you even claiming to cite who deserves to be listened to? Are you citing any degreed scholars publishing in the field of ANE studies? Or are you relying on pop paperbacks, homemade websites, and YouTube videos?

I mean, seriously, you're free to believe whatever you want, but don't even think about telling me that you've made some effort to understand the issue which I haven't made. Because I know that's not true.

Sorry to be blunt, but that's just the way it is.

No problem, thanks for your candid view. And since we're being candid here, your post is a perfect example of the evidence free nature of a lot of your posts.

I made specific claims about what I think is the low reliability of the attestations to the HJ in the Gospels. Instead of informing me about how uninformed I am, you might have taken the time to inform us all of what you think constitutes reliable attestation to the HJ outside of Paul, in the Gospels, in the NT in general or from anybody in the first century AD.

 

[Piggy]

I have a question. Let's say in 20 years the consensus changes completely and the experts now agree that there probably wasn't a real Jesus and that the alternatives are no longer to be taken seriously...

...what would you, Piggy and Stone say about that ?

I dunno….

What if Santa Claus gave you a ride around the world on his sleigh?

What would you say about that?

In other words, we can only deal with the field as it is. You can take ANY position and ask "What if tomorrow it were disproven?"

What if in 20 years it were proven the earth was flat, not round? What would you say then?

Such questions are meaningless.

 

[Piggy]

No problem, thanks for your candid view. And since we're being candid here, your post is a perfect example of the evidence free nature of a lot of your posts.

I made specific claims about what I think is the low reliability of the attestations to the HJ in the Gospels. Instead of informing me about how uninformed I am, you might have taken the time to inform us all of what you think constitutes reliable attestation to the HJ outside of Paul, in the Gospels, in the NT in general or from anybody in the first century AD.

Nice dodge.

Don't even think about calling me on the carpet for "informing you about how uninformed you are" when you were the one to try to claim that you have made an objective effort to understand HJ theory, but somehow neither I nor the ENTIRE FIELD OF ANE SCHOLARSHIP has done so.

You needed to be corrected, and you were corrected. If that seems arrogant to you, I can't help that. From where I sit, it is astoundingly arrogant for you to claim that you are in a better position to judge this matter than people who've bothered to study it, including those who make a career or it.

As for your objections, I've already addressed those issues before. Why do you want me to repeat what I've said?

Your demand for evidence "outside of" the best evidence we could ever hope to have is just silly.

 

[Belz...]

I would be forced to accept the consensus unless I could prove the opposite of the consensus by the same standards in which the consensus was reached.

I had this happen to me already once; pretty heavily.
I was a Higgs Boson doubter; a very strong doubter of that theory.

Yeah but they actually detected the damn thing.

So it really is just following the consensus.

 

[Belz...]

I dunno….

What if Santa Claus gave you a ride around the world on his sleigh?

Wow. That's a very dishonest answer. I never once invoke anything magical or wildly improbable. I am trying to discern the nature of your conclusions.

But, if you are unable to even consider my question and what it would imply, then I guess your current opinion on the subject is not evidence-based. so i'll write you down as "would just blindly follow the consensus", then.

 

[davefoc]

Nice dodge.

Don't even think about calling me on the carpet for "informing you about how uninformed you are" when you were the one to try to claim that you have made an objective effort to understand HJ theory, but somehow neither I nor the ENTIRE FIELD OF ANE SCHOLARSHIP has done so.

...

I'll give you the last word on this if you want it. I think the subject of whether it is reasonable to hold a different view from experts has been beat to death in these HJ threads.

The reliability of experts is not something that we can judge in a vacuum. Most of us that participate in these threads are more skeptical than the average person and we are looking for information to help us judge whether a particular set of experts is reliable or not.

Despite your protestations, this is a field where the evidence is thin and as a result the experts have many different opinions. You make quite a bit out of the idea that these experts at least agree on something. But the thing they agree on is the thing that allows them to continue to make a living creating endless speculation about what the nature of the HJ is.

In that kind of environment, I think, if one is trying to divine the truth about something one needs to examine the claims of the experts and compare them and to make a personal judgment about how solid their reasoning seems to be.

In this case, I tend to side with the experts, both those that favor the HJ hypothesis and those that don't who have written extensively about how unreliable the evidence for an HJ is. I trust them. They seem credible to me. I even lean to believing that an HJ existed. What I haven't seen is a methodology to extract the kind of certainty from the evidence that you claim is there. You claim to have presented evidence in support of your strong view that the HJ hypothesis is correct and yet in post after post you said the evidence was coming and now you say that it has come and you aren't going to repeat it.

That is fine. Frankly, I find it interesting that you and I should perceive the world so differently. I saw no point in long narratives about what the HJ was like or what his associates were like that didn't either acknowledge that it was speculation or that provided an evidential basis for the claims. You obviously do and somewhere in those narratives you apparently have found the basis for your truth. That is fine. For better or worse my mind just doesn't work that way.

 

[eight bits]

Jayson

[qoute] I would agree to this possibility if there was a single entry in Suetonius' material that shows an entry of a name without context such that we are left to simply not know who Suetonius is talking about.[/quote]
Well, then we differ.

Just to be clear that some of your other comments presumably weren't directed to me or to anything I posted: I didn't say that Suetonius just copied. I said he was bounded above by his sources. I didn't discussed what those sources were, and in particular, I did not say that the sources were restricted to Senate records,

I believe that I have already pointed out that I find your analytic framework of the matter to rest on a false dichotomy. Evidently we disgaree about that, too.

I agree that Solomon should be considered, and I did consider it in the previous post where I addressed why Solomon does not fit the description

Yes, and you will notice that what you quoted from my post acknowledges this. The fist line under "The Letter" says, "But there was, reputedly, and as you acknowledge, a "Wise King" of the entire Jewish homeland..." (empahsis added).

I have already stated in the post you quoted why I think that Solomon is the most likely reference. We disagree, fine, but I did consider and acknowledge your post before poting my views. My opinion about the identity of the "Wise King" was formed sometime in the past, before I knew your view about Solomon. Your arguments did not change my mind.

Even if I knew for a fact that Jesus was intended, I still don't know the date. You have allowed as late as 117. We know that there was widespread Gentile Christianity by then. There is no reason to suppose any direct witness to Jesus independent of the Gospels. Matthew's blood libel is unlikely, in my view, to be a historical truth, and it is the blood libel that Mara writes about if the "Wise King" is Jesus.

Solomon was not murdered, however; not even euphemistically.

Neither was Jesus, Jason. Solomon was under severe pressure at the end of his reign for both political and religious reasons. Those are the conditions under which he died. Just as a partisan of Jesus is free to say that Jesus was murdered, a partisan of Solomon is free to say that he was murdered.

Jesus fits the description perfectly fine without difficulty.

I disagree. He isn't even close, in my opinion. The "fit" is all the things he wasn't he could be in the rhetoric of his partisans. But even that can't change that the Jews had lost their kingdom long before Jesus was born, not after he died. All that happened after Jesus died is that they failed to retake it.

Unlike Solomon, Jayson, where the Jews lost it.

Solomon was not accounted for as angering anyone with new laws

I think you would do well to refresh your recollection of why the ten tribes seceded.

Solomon is not a tragic figure that fits the tangent, or descriptions

Solomon was the last of his line to reign in a United Monarchy (except for the brief interval before his son lost it). He started out wise, and drove his kingdom apart from his mismanagement and flirtation with idolatry, contrary to direct warnings from God (supposedly). What do you call tragic?

And, um, what was tragic about Jesus? From Paul on ,the party line is that his sacrifice was a triumph, that he accomplished the mission, and that he was inconvenienced by death for a short-count "three days." He didn't die like anybody else dies. He got his ticket punched. WTF is tragic about that?

There were dozens of people in the Boston bombing who were more severely inconvenienced.

 

[JaysonR]

Yeah but they actually detected the damn thing.

So it really is just following the consensus.

Right, I'm aware of the difference between Humanities and Science.
Humanities doesn't really get to "detect" anything.
Archaeology does, but they rarely get to detect anything really cool, and almost never involved with specific persons...actually...almost never; it's usually some Historian who takes the Archaeologists findings and discerns the value of it.
Most archaeologists are like data groomers; their primary focus is in finding physical material, unearthing it, preserving it (temporarily for transport), dating it and cataloging it.

Some Archaeologists (usually celebrity archaeologists) cross over into also being Historians, or weigh in on the debates among Historians, but the average archaeologists won't ever do something like that.


My point was that while we can be well aware that they detected the Higgs Boson, for me...someone who is very familiar with electronics and electricity, but not all that versed in physics too deeply beyond what I can read and find (and that my old friend is a neurophysicist [was previously physicist] on his post-doctorate...so I cheat and just ask him to translate for me)...so, when they say that they detected it...I honestly just take their word for it.

I don't know enough to claim that they didn't, or that their methods were errant, or any of the stuff I see folks attempt to claim about the matter (pun intended ).

In the same light; I am always willing to change my position to the academic consensus on most any given subject.
If I hold an opposing view, then I will always be humble about it and make plenty of disclaimers that I cannot prove my case (usually), but have reasons to doubt the position of the field in question.

I'm more than willing to personally appeal to authority.
Btw, I tend to think that is really only a fallacy when we're talking about philosophy and politics; not History and Science.

That's my opinion though, and I respect other folk's position of not accepting authority as the grounds for proof of any given phenomena.
And that's why you don't see me resting on the consensus as proof to convince anyone of anything.

In fact, I can't convince anyone on matters of historicity for most anything in ancient history.
I mean; I know I've mentioned it, but it's a reasonable point...if you wanted to argue that Hippocrates didn't actually exist and that his students in his school made him up, I would have a hell of time proving to you that he did actually exist.

Any citation of him wouldn't be really verifiable, and there's nothing stopping anyone from claiming that any entry of him was an added note for those who wanted to make Hippocrates exist, and I wouldn't be able to supply any physical evidence of him.


I understand that this doesn't prove Jesus' case; I only mean to convey that the entire field of ancient history is about 80% guess work and only about 20% tangible evidence.

Ergo that phrase I mentioned about how history is the lie agreed upon (as Napoleon stated).
Or more softly put; History is the best guess that is agreed upon.

There's no way to force you, or anyone else, to agree with the academic communities educated guess work.

 

[Belz...]

I'll give you the last word on this if you want it. I think the subject of whether it is reasonable to hold a different view from experts has been beat to death in these HJ threads.

The reliability of experts is not something that we can judge in a vacuum. Most of us that participate in these threads are more skeptical than the average person and we are looking for information to help us judge whether a particular set of experts is reliable or not.

Right. And since we've been compared to truthers and creationists, I think it's important to point out that, contrary to them, we're not questioning a large selection of scientific fields in their entirety. We are asking for evidence that leads to the claim in this thread and elsewhere, not only that HJ is more likely, but that it is certain. It's a very specific question about a very specific part of the topic.

But then Piggy goes into super-history mode and starts talking about context far wider than we need, perhaps setting himself up, intentionally or not, to get the impression that this larger context is what we have issue with. It's not.

But it's not like history is science, either, as you said.

You claim to have presented evidence in support of your strong view that the HJ hypothesis is correct and yet in post after post you said the evidence was coming and now you say that it has come and you aren't going to repeat it.

Are you surprised ?

 

[Belz...]

There's no way to force you, or anyone else, to agree with the academic communities educated guess work.

For the record, I agree with them. I just don't agree with them blindly, and in this particular instance I would like some convincing evidence. Just like I did when I didn't believe in relativity, and some layman explanations proved me wrong.

The problem is that, as I said before, if we were simply talking about likelihood, I guess only Hans would disagree. But now we're talking about certainty, so it requires a hell of a lot more evidence. Piggy has so far presented a case for likelihood only, and if he would just come out and say he shouldn't have said "certain", we'd be done here.

 

[JaysonR]

Eight Bits;
I understand that you read what I wrote; it's just that your reasons for fitting Solomon to the label aren't convincing me that it fits.

Jesus was euphemistically often referred to in culture as having been murdered.
If anything, I would be more willing to entertain the idea of this being a forged introduction by some Orthodox Christian who believes the position of Jews Murdering Jesus, than I would believe it to earnestly reference Solomon as having been murdered and hated by the Hebrew temperament of this time period.

Solomon was turned into a holy legend rather quickly, so I'm not really sure where this fits.

I think we may be at an impasse as your reasons aren't convincing to me, and my reasons aren't convincing to you, and there's no real solid way that I can see to clear the disagreement in this reference since the only matters of discussion are the ones we have gone over and just simply disagreed on.

I can accept that.
If I find anything useful on the matter, I'll make sure to bring it up.
Equally, if you do, please also make note for followup.
I'm not at all opposed to changing my perspective, but I don't see the Solomon link as very likely considering the context of the descriptions in the citation.

 

[JaysonR]

For the record, I agree with them. I just don't agree with them blindly, and in this particular instance I would like some convincing evidence. Just like I did when I didn't believe in relativity, and some layman explanations proved me wrong.

The problem is that, as I said before, if we were simply talking about likelihood, I guess only Hans would disagree. But now we're talking about certainty, so it requires a hell of a lot more evidence. Piggy has so far presented a case for likelihood only, and if he would just come out and say he shouldn't have said "certain", we'd be done here.

I can't give you certainty, outside of Historical Certainty, which isn't the same thing.

As far as I know; no one can give you a simple certainty on the matter.
I think if we were to ask an expert in this matter within the field, their response to that question might be a bit like Dawkins in this moment (which he later explained was a reaction because the question that was asked was erroneous in its premise and takes a wealth of time to explain the details of):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaKryi3605g

 

[Stone]

One of the reasons that I don't find your approach persuasive is that you go so far out of your way to avoid acknowledging facts which are inconvenient for the story you are pitching.

Anybody that has made a concerted objective effort to find reliable evidence to support the existence of an HJ realizes there just aren't a lot of solid data points to hang one's hat on. There is not a single contemporary attestation to the HJ that exists today.

Whether we take the Josephus reference to James as that of an eyewitness or not, it is still emphatically that of one contemporary's attestation, Josephus's, to another contemporary: James.

Stone

 

[pakeha]

...What I'm saying is that he clearly appears to be an end-timer. And a megalomaniac.

But since the "scammer" idea has been studied and rejected, and since the evidence does not point in that direction, then until and unless someone comes up with a real hypothesis -- something more than "boy, that sounds dodgy to my 21st century ears" -- I see no need to discuss it. ...

I can understand your point of view and would understand it even better if you'd post up links to those studies you mentioned.

Well, what would you do with manuscripts in ancient Arameac and post-classical Greek? I mean literally, what would you do? I'm sure they have fascimiles available though and publications of transcripts, so you probably could see these texts without too much hassle. I'm just wondering in my small mind that what the hell would you do with them...

I mean we are talking about an established academic discipline - is it such an offence against some random internet nicks dignity to remark that if you have contradictory intrepretations you should go through peer review and publication to get any credence to them? I'm awfully sorry if I hurt feelings though...

No feelings hurt, llwyd.
Do any of those document relate to the discussion here, that of the existence of an historical Jesus?
Which ones?

 

[Stone]

I think it's because, usually, we trust the experts because we can at least check some of the evidence ourselves.

O.K., tell us all da evadence for evolution. Clearly, yous' is above jus' acceptin' evolution jus' because dere's some experts' consensus out there. My no, you're clearly made of better stuff than to jus' buy into a consensus from specialists. What a dirty word: specialists. Instead, as you say here, you "check some of the evidence" yourself. Dat's right. Whoop-de-do.

So fine, tell us all the evidence yourself. We no need no book larnin' to know the answer. We can jus' look at the evidence. Right? So what's all this evidence for evolution, so we no need no highfalutin' posts talking about books -- horrors -- and wastin' our time with research. That's just duckin' anserin' the question, isn't it? O.K., no more book larnin'. That's a waste of time. Give us all the evidence double quick.

You hop to it mister, or yous' is jus' a science and research apologis'.

Hey, we're waitin'. We ain' got all day. Gimme.

Stone

 

[Belz...]

Whether we take the Josephus reference to James as that of an eyewitness or not, it is still emphatically that of one contemporary's attestation, Josephus's, to another contemporary: James.

Stone

Yes, but only if the whole passage is genuine. Seems weird that Josephus would make no mention of Jesus at all except that offhand bit.

 

[Belz...]

I can't give you certainty, outside of Historical Certainty, which isn't the same thing.

Seems to me like "historical certainty" is what we'd call "speculation" in other fields.

 

[Belz...]

O.K., tell us all da evadence for evolution. Clearly, yous' is above jus' acceptin' evolution jus' because dere's some experts' consensus out there. My no, you're clearly made of better stuff than to jus' buy into a consensus from specialists. What a dirty word: specialists. Instead, as you say here, you "check some of the evidence" yourself. Dat's right. Whoop-de-do.

So fine, tell us all the evidence yourself. We no need no book larnin' to know the answer. We can jus' look at the evidence. Right? So what's all this evidence for evolution, so we no need no highfalutin' posts talking about books -- horrors -- and wastin' our time with research. That's just duckin' anserin' the question, isn't it? O.K., no more book larnin'. That's a waste of time. Give us all the evidence double quick.

You hop to it mister, or yous' is jus' a science and research apologis'.

Hey, we're waitin'. We ain' got all day. Gimme.

Stone

I don't have a clue what you're saying, but please learn to spellcheck.

You're also off-topic. And if you think that it would be hard for people who claim to be learned about evolution to present tangible evidence for it, like it apparently is for this particular topic, here, then all I can say is that your devotion to this consensus is blinding you to reality.

 

[JaysonR]

Seems to me like "historical certainty" is what we'd call "speculation" in other fields.

Yes.
That's what I've been attempting to convey; that history is not a hard science.
This is why it's classed as a Humanities field and not a Science field; the exception being the confused classification of Archaeology...and that's why I described the relationship between Humanities and Science as a divorce, as there are social contentions between the two (mostly in jest, but sometimes in insult).

History is mostly pieced together in similar fashion to how Paleontologists piece together what a species of animal looked like that no longer exists; educated guess work, basically.

This is why I have pressed that there's no way to empirically prove most any historicity of any event or specific person in ancient history; for instance, this is why I gave the example of the Battle of Kadesh, where we have literally zero empirical evidence to support that the battle ever took place.
We have conflicting writings from Egypt and Hatti, and that's it.

In the field I am interested in majoring in, Social Anthropology, most of the work is guess work based on inference from physical evidence that does not indicate any specific thing in itself, but offers referential contextual material to place things into a position.
There's no real way for an Anthropologist to empirically prove a social movement of an ancient civilization; all that can be achieved is an assembly of an idea that attempts to satisfy the scattered circumstantial material that we do have left in the Archaeological record (size of cities, types of structures, artisan work) and the various inscriptions and texts (if texts are available, and those texts will be scattered between really torn up "original" documents to copy's of the originals [more common than the previous] survived in some other early manuscript, or mentioned in passing through citation in some similar manuscript).

The assembled position (which uses all of the above material in its consideration) is then presented as satisfying reason, not evidence.

If the reason fails because the reasons used are shown to not satisfy all loose ends, or at least the majority of loose ends by product of reason, then the proposition is called into contest.


This is probably why History attracts amateurs who liken themselves to experts that draft grand conspiracies all over the place (case in point: Ancient Aliens, America Unearthed, etc... and that's just public examples; the internet is full of such material; like the "lost" history of the "Aryan" species).