What counts as a historical Jesus?

[Piggy]

Well said, IanS. I think it's about time we get what we asked for, or that the HJ side admit they don't really have any evidence. At least the mythicists and 50/50-ists admit as much.

My last response to you....

You ARE getting the evidence you asked for.

If the attention required to examine and comprehend it is beyond your ability to maintain focus, I can't help that.

Good night, and good luck.

 

[Belz...]

You ARE getting the evidence you asked for.

Then all I can say is that this is not anything that I would call evidence. I see plenty of reasoning and conclusions, but no evidence. Certainly nothing that corroborates Mark's narrative.

 

[IanS]

Another reality-free post.

Worthless vacuous throw-away line. "Reality-free".

My position on HJ hasn't changed at all. Nor have my statements about it.

Your position throughout has been that you entirely support the "scholars" who "all agree" that Jesus was a real figure.

Nor have I "thought better of the idea" of what I'm doing. An examination of the letters to the Corinthians will be next, followed by the letter to the Romans.

Nothing new or useful then.

All of which is "reliable evidence".

It's not reliable evidence of a real Jesus.

So far you have not been able to produce one word of reliable evidence for a real Jesus.

The fact that you don't understand what evidence is, is not my problem.

I understand very well what genuine objective evidence. That comes from me having spent most of my working life in physics research & lecturing to postgraduates.

You, on the other hand appear, to be completely confused about what is evidence of peoples beliefs vs. what is actually objective evidence of a real existing Jesus.

Instead of your constant derogatory personalisation’s, which you have been engaged in for 40 or so pages now, and instead of telling us more of what you believe about the contents of the bible, why are you incapable of producing any evidence at all to show that Jesus was real?

 

[IanS]

My last response to you....

You ARE getting the evidence you asked for..

No, we are not getting from you any evidence that anyone here has asked for.

What on earth do you think constitutes reliable objective "evidence"?

Do you really think it's objective evidence of a real-HJ to tell us that whoever wrote Paul's Letter in about c.200AD, says that Paul had once said that he (Paul) had twice visited Jerusalem and met with Peter, John and James the brother of the Lord?

If you actually think that represents reliable evidence of Jesus, then you need a better education in something more objective than English and Religious Studies.

If the attention required to examine and comprehend it is beyond your ability to maintain focus, I can't help that.

Good night, and good luck.

Remarks like this are just silly, petty, and juvenile. And it’s not doing your credibility any good here at all.

 

[tsig]

My last response to you....

You ARE getting the evidence you asked for.

If the attention required to examine and comprehend it is beyond your ability to maintain focus, I can't help that.

Good night, and good luck.

Is the BoM evidence that Moroni existed?

 

[tsig]

Then all I can say is that this is not anything that I would call evidence. I see plenty of reasoning and conclusions, but no evidence. Certainly nothing that corroborates Mark's narrative.

It's evidence Belz, just not evidence as we know it.

 

[Belz...]

Do you really think it's objective evidence of a real-HJ to tell us that whoever wrote Paul's Letter in about c.200AD, says that Paul had once said that he (Paul) had twice visited Jerusalem and met with Peter, John and James the brother of the Lord?

Exactly. This is all we have from Paul that ties him to Jesus, indirectly, and it's not even that great. I'm not clear that Paul ever says Peter was an actual apostle of Jesus in the sense that he knew him personally, nor is it clear that James is his biological brother. I wouldn't call that solid evidence.

But even if we grant that Paul met these two and that they did know Jesus during his life, what can we determine about that man's life ? Nothing.

We have to go to Mark in order to get a narrative. All the other gospels are based on it, and any other mention is based on them or hearsay from Christians who never met Jesus. Does the mere fact that we have Mark, which is full of inconsistencies, impossibilities and magic, give us any certainty that this is who Jesus was and what he said and did ? I doubt it.

 

[JaysonR]

5) Q Gospel recording the inspired first century teacher's teaching is written.

Just a side note here:

Q document is falling out of favor as a theory as we continue to restore more and more texts and continue to find nothing to suggest that such a document existed, and too, that the texts can be accounted for as copying from each other fine without Q document if you separate the dispersion of the texts around the Mediterranean; for example, if you shoot Mark North and Matthew South, then Luke would pick from each separately and each of the former would grow into their own separate from each other even though Matthew could start off from Mark originally; and then John would rip off Luke.

That's an example of how Q isn't needed.
(actually; Q doc always bothered me as that theory broke a basic rule of comparative research - two variables cannot act only through an unknown medium to reach back to the event which provokes the variables to be; the first two variables are to be directly subject to the conditions of the event, without interim)

 

[Piggy]

Just a side note here:

Q document is falling out of favor as a theory as we continue to restore more and more texts and continue to find nothing to suggest that such a document existed, and too, that the texts can be accounted for as copying from each other fine without Q document if you separate the dispersion of the texts around the Mediterranean; for example, if you shoot Mark North and Matthew South, then Luke would pick from each separately and each of the former would grow into their own separate from each other even though Matthew could start off from Mark originally; and then John would rip off Luke.

That's an example of how Q isn't needed.
(actually; Q doc always bothered me as that theory broke a basic rule of comparative research - two variables cannot act only through an unknown medium to reach back to the event which provokes the variables to be; the first two variables are to be directly subject to the conditions of the event, without interim)

Got some cites for me?

I'm a bit behind on the research, I know, but Q has survived a lot of challenges so far, and I'd need to see an explanation of this new dispensation.

Seems to me that Q is a very elegant solution.

 

[JaysonR]

Not off-hand, no.
I've just collected that over time in reading lots of material as I move through different investigations.

But you can grasp the gist of that (iirc) if you look at the Q Source entry on Wiki (which is pretty fair, as even Princeton cites that entry for its summary).

 

[tsig]

Got some cites for me?

I'm a bit behind on the research, I know, but Q has survived a lot of challenges so far, and I'd need to see an explanation of this new dispensation.

Seems to me that Q is a very elegant solution.

An elegant solution to a non-existent problem.

 

[JaysonR]

I tend to side with tsig on this a bit.
I don't think it makes allot of sense to posit Q before attempting other explanations when there's literally no physical evidence (hermeneutic or exegetic) to indicate there ever being any such document.

A comparison of the texts does not actually cause a conclusion of the Q theory, despite the claim of the theory that such does; there's merging points where there shouldn't be if Q theory were to be right.
Conveniently, Q theory just labels these as "minor agreements" and then states they are minor enough to not matter and moves on.

I disagree; by the standards of comparative research, that is a violation of the formation of comparative theory.
You can't just ignore something that doesn't fit.

 

[maximara]

And ANOTHER comparison with creationists. Stone, I know for a fact that you can make substantive posts. I've seen it. So why do you stoop to that level so often here ?

And to make it clear again: NO ONE is a mythicist, here. At worst, you have Hans who seems to be a 50/50 guy. Is it being a mythicist to say "I'm not sure" ? Is it being a mythicist to say "I'm pretty sure there was a HJ but I think there's no way to know who he was" ? Come on.

Given how common the name "Jesus" (or rather the name presented as Jesus) was and that there were would be Messiahs all over the place the odds are reasonably good there was a Jesus who claimed or was regarded as a Messiah.

The problem is that the Paul (and every other Churchman of the 1st century) is so skimpy on the details that there is nothing to say anything in the Gospel account reflects that Jesus.

 

[JaysonR]

Not only is there that issue; the gospels aren't even showing the same Jesus.
John's is markedly different from Mark's. Matthew's could almost agree with John's and Mark's, but neither really. Luke's is like Mark's but also somewhat like John's, but mostly more like Paul's.

 

[Belz...]

Got some cites for me?

Wait. First he has to post context.

 

[JaysonR]

That made laugh...oh man..I'm saving that. That's a great hostorian joke in general.

 

[tsig]

Wait. First he has to post context.

First mankind discovered fire >insert wall of text here< therefore the only thing that makes sense is Q.

 

[davefoc]

A site devoted to making a case against Q:
http://markgoodacre.org/Q/


From the same site a list of articles critical of the Q hypothesis:

Austin Farrer, "On Dispensing With Q"
D. E. Nineham (ed.), Studies in the Gospels: Essays in Memory of R. H. Lightfoot (Oxford: Blackwell, 1955), pp. 55-88
Michael Goulder, "Is Q a Juggernaut?"
Journal of Biblical Literature 115 (1996), pp. 667-81
Edward C. Hobbs, "A Quarter Century Without Q"
Perkins School of Theology Journal 33/4 (1980), pp. 10-19
Mark Goodacre, "Fatigue in the Synoptics"
New Testament Studies 44 (1998), pp. 45-58
Mark Goodacre, "A Monopoly on Marcan Priority? Fallacies at the Heart of Q"
Society of Biblical Literature Seminar Papers 2000 (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2000), pp. 538-622

 

[JaysonR]

I like that last link; he goes on at length into a bunch of detail that I arrived at personally myself.

For instance, he states almost exactly the same issue that I was referring to:

The argument from Luke's lack of Matthew's modifications of Mark seems to be refuted by a simple glance at the Synopsis.

This material is of course familiar to scholars using the argument about Luke's lack of Matthew's additions to Mark, but the force of this evidence, and the fact that it contradicts one of the standard arguments is not felt. The primary reason for this [21] is that examples of this kind are placed in the special category of "Mark-Q overlap", those passages occurring in all three Synoptics in which Mark is not clearly the middle term, which blur the usually more straightforward distinction between "triple tradition" and "double tradition". The fallacy at the base of this argument for Q is that where Luke (on the assumption of Marcan Priority without Q) prefers the Matthean version of a pericope shared with Mark, this automatically goes into the category "Mark-Q overlap". And where Luke prefers the Marcan version of a pericope shared with Matthew, this is held to demonstrate his lack of knowledge of the Matthean versions of Marcan pericopae

This is what I was stating when I wrote:

A comparison of the texts does not actually cause a conclusion of the Q theory, despite the claim of the theory that such does; there's merging points where there shouldn't be if Q theory were to be right.
Conveniently, Q theory just labels these as "minor agreements" and then states they are minor enough to not matter and moves on.

I disagree; by the standards of comparative research, that is a violation of the formation of comparative theory.
You can't just ignore something that doesn't fit.

 

[davefoc]

A few years ago I posted a list of evidence that I thought supported the existence of an HJ (I posted a smaller one earlier in this thread but that seems like years ago now anyway). I thought I'd update that list with a note about how I see the quality of that evidence relative to how I saw it a few years ago.

1. Paul's epistles - About even.
The epistles strike me even more today as legitimate letters, but I hadn't seriously considered the possibility that the Jesus associates that Paul names weren't really associates of Jesus for the various reasons put forth in this thread. That at least seems like a plausible possibility today for me.

2. Existence of Mark - Down
I was surprised that when I took a close look at Mark how little of it seems like something that could have been factual information about Jesus. Many of the incidents are implausible for various reasons but what was almost as bad is that the incidents described in Mark provide details that seem very unlikely to have made it reliably across the time, distance, language and culture gap that separate the author from the actual events. If the argument is that these stories were based on oral tradition why is the author of Mark the only one to record those oral traditions?

3. Testimonium Flavium - Down
For whatever reasons the arguments against authenticity struck me as much stronger than they had in the past.

4. James the brother of Jesus - Down
About the same as the TF except this time the arguments against authenticity seem to be almost conclusive.

5. Existence of Jewish Christians - Down
I thought the existence of Jewish Christians fairly early on was evidence of some kind of connection between the Jews that had been associates of the HJ and the early stages of Christianity. The problem with this argument is that I was never able to find any reliable link between the Jewish Christian the early church fathers mentioned and the hypothetical Jewish Christians that would have been associates and followers of the HJ. I notice Brainache has mentioned an Eisenman theory that the Ebionites might have been the authors of the DSS and JaysonR did some linguistic analysis on the use of the Greek word for poor to try and get some sort of an idea as to whether Paul might have been referring to a specific group known as the poor. I didn't completely follow his analysis, but the results seemed to have been inconclusive.

6. Possible existence of Q - Down
I thought the theoretical existence of Q was likely to be correct and I thought it might represent an independent information source about the HJ. I think the articles I linked to above make a good enough case that Q probably doesn't exist that I don't see much evidence there for an HJ.

7. Tacitus and Suetonius - no change
I didn't see the writings of either one of these guys as reliable sources for information about an HJ and I don't today either.