What counts as a historical Jesus?

[Piggy]

I'll gather together my scammer alerts and post them all together

That could be quite interesting.

If you haven't yet, you'll definitely want to view the film Marjoe, which is a documentary made by a Christian flim-flam artist of his last tour.

One caution, tho... if you do this, you'll also need to examine the practices of true believers. If you don't, then you risk a lot of false positives.

For example, if you examine the habits of child molesters, you'll find they often volunteer with children. But this doesn't mean that being a little league coach is a sign of pedophelia.

Similarly, you'll find that religious huxters often take up collections at churches, but so do the faithful. Therefore, citing the taking of a collection as a hallmark of fraud is about as useful as citing breathing, which both groups also do.

 

[pakeha]

It was "Not Paul But Jesus" by Jeremy Bentham c 1830. Rattling good read!

Oh, myyy.
You can read this gem online here
http://archive.org/stream/notpaulbutjesus00bentgoog#page/n14/mode/2up

 

[eight bits]

Similarly, you'll find that religious huxters often take up collections at churches, but so do the faithful. Therefore, citing the taking of a collection as a hallmark of fraud is about as useful as citing breathing, which both groups also do.

That's where promising the audience that they will soon be able to fly comes in.

 

[The Norseman]

It doesn't help that for the most part that fate seemed bent on giving the Empire that was Rome a historical lobotomy: The Great Library of Alexandria got burnt three perhaps as much as four times and as the Empire fell apart so did the infrastructure to copying the remaining records.

Then you had the issue of how copies were handled. As James Burke related in the "A Matter of Fact" episode of The Day the Universe Changed Christian copyists had a load of problems finding what they did bother to copy.

There wasn't enough knowledge in any one monastery to separate the works into separate subjects or categories (~12:08). As the result the "library" look more like the floor of some stereotypical bachelor pad then what we considered a library.

Then you have titles on page edges or on the first page of the book. And then the title might not tell you that much.

The example Burke gives, Sermones Bonventurae (Sermons of St Bonaventure) shows just what kind of mess things were. This book could be

Sermons composed by St Bonaventure of Fidenza

Sermons composed by somebody called Bonaventure

Sermons copied by a Bonaventure

Sermons copied by somebody belonging to church of St. Bonaventure

Sermons preached by a Bonaventure

Sermons once owned by a Bonaventure

Sermons once owned by church of St. Bonaventure

Sermons by various people of whom the first or most important was by somebody called Bonaventure--the rest of the book? No clue.

With this kind of filing system you didn't need to actively destroy anything...because you may not even know you have it in the first place.

You continue making insightful posts regarding this subject; thank you!

 

[Piggy]

Oh, myyy.
You can read this gem online here
http://archive.org/stream/notpaulbutjesus00bentgoog#page/n14/mode/2up

Big red flag right off the bat. He refers to the authors of the gospels as the companions and biographers of Jesus. They were neither. He also seems to accept non-Pauline letters as authentic.

What you're looking at is a diatribe... of which there are others of the same ilk... claiming that the gospels represent the true religion of Jesus, and that Paul is a perverter of that doctrine.

This way of thinking has been thoroughly debunked.

I do agree that Paul's efforts as a missionary betray an enormous capacity for self-aggrandizement on Paul's part. But on the whole, this publication is useless. (E.g., the conflicting descriptions of Paul's conversion in Acts cannot be used to impugn Paul, because they were written by someone else many years later.)

That's why it's generally a bad idea to get too involved in material from this time period. It's best to stick to contemporary scholarship. If you dip back even before the analysis of the discoveries at Qumran, Ugarit, and Nag Hammadi, you're skating on hot water, as they say... and this stuff is from over a century before that.

So caveat lector.

 

[Belz...]

If it's true that when historians say that there were many preachers (apocalyptic and other) in that time and that Yeshua was a very popular name, it's more reasonable to suggest that there were more than one preacher that were conflated into a single man.

That's a very real and under-discussed possibility.

Or Paul was scamming big time. Or both. Why not both?

I have the same question. They are not mutually-exclusive.

 

[pakeha]

Big red flag right off the bat. He refers to the authors of the gospels as the companions and biographers of Jesus. They were neither. He also seems to accept non-Pauline letters as authentic.

What you're looking at is a diatribe... of which there are others of the same ilk... claiming that the gospels represent the true religion of Jesus, and that Paul is a perverter of that doctrine.

This way of thinking has been thoroughly debunked.

I do agree that Paul's efforts as a missionary betray an enormous capacity for self-aggrandizement on Paul's part. But on the whole, this publication is useless. (E.g., the conflicting descriptions of Paul's conversion in Acts cannot be used to impugn Paul, because they were written by someone else many years later.)

That's why it's generally a bad idea to get too involved in material from this time period. It's best to stick to contemporary scholarship. If you dip back even before the analysis of the discoveries at Qumran, Ugarit, and Nag Hammadi, you're skating on hot water, as they say... and this stuff is from over a century before that.

So caveat lector.

Of course you're right, Piggy.
But you must admit that book IS a gem.
If for no other reason than to show just how far the academic community has gone since 1823.

 

[Brainache]

And yet he stays in Corinth for some time, and continues to write to all his assemblies, to visit them, and to send his fellow travelers to them.

Keep in mind, he could have said "Oh, yes, indeed, that's a great idea", collected his installment, then vanished. But instead he refuses money and continues to perform manual labor.

The thing is, so far I've seen no "scam theory" here at all.

Nobody has yet articulated any coherent or plausible theory describing what Paul's alleged scam is or how he's pulling it off and, most importantly -- especially if the collection for the poor is the scam -- why he spends so little time on that and so much time on completely unrelated matters.

So far it's just "sounds fishy to me", but that's not a coherent, complete, plausible, evidence-based hypothesis.

As far as I can see, there simply is no "scam" theory to be rebutted.

I guess this is as good a time as any to bring up Eisenman again. He has a theory about Paul as, not so much a "Scam Artist", but more an "Agent Provocateur".

From what I understand (I could be wrong about this, his arguments get pretty obscure), Eisenman makes a link between the "Damascus" where Paul was going on orders from the High Priest, to root out followers of "The Way", with the Qumran Community.

The Damascus Document: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damascus_Document

...
The fragments found by Solomon Schechter in the Ben Ezra Synagogue were original called the Zadokite Fragments, but after the work was found at Qumran, the name was changed because the document has numerous references to Damascus.[1] The way this Damascus is treated in the document makes it possible that it was not a literal reference to Damascus in Syria, but to be understood either geographically for Babylon or Qumran itself. If symbolic, it is probably taking up the Biblical language found in Amos 5:27, "therefore I shall take you into exile beyond Damascus"; Damascus was part of Israel under King David, and the Damascus Document expresses an eschatalogical hope of the restoration of a Davidic monarchy

Here's a translation of the scroll: http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/scrolls/scr4.html#damasc

If we accept this possibility that Paul wasn't being sent hundreds of miles away to Syria, but rather to the large encampment of religious fanatics who claimed to be "The True Israel" making a "Straight path for The Lord" in the wilderness just a few miles down the road from Jerusalem - Then it really doesn't seem too far-fetched.

Paul says he spent three years in Damascus. What's that about? Well, if he wanted to infiltrate the religious community at Qumran and get to know the ring-leaders, he would need to stay "undercover" for several years:

...
Of the examination of initiants.

When a man enters the covenant, minded to act in accordance with all the foregoing ordinances and formally to ally himself to the holy congregation, inquiry is to be made concerning his temper in human relations and his understanding and performance in matters of doctrine. This inquiry is to be conducted jointly by the priests who have undertaken concertedly to uphold God's Covenant and to supervise the execution of all the ordinances which He has commanded, and by a majority of the laity who have likewise undertaken concertedly to return to that Covenant. Every many is then to be registered in a particular rank, one after the other, by the standard of his attitudes and their performance are to be reviewed, however, year by year, some being then promoted by virtue of their (improved) understanding and the integrity of their conduct, and others demoted for their waywardness.

http://www.essene.com/History&Essenes/md.htm

So now this theory has Paul as an undercover agent of the Jewish Authorities weaseling his way into this religious community. If we can believe what it says in the "Manual of Discipline", this community numbered in the thousands. If the population of Jerusalem at the time is 20,000 and there was 2000 people in this community, that's 10%. What chance does one lone agent have against thousands of fanatics? He obviously can't fight them or just arrest them and haul them in for questioning...

So he sews discord. The old, "get them fighting amongst themselves" trick. What if this network of Evangelists and other Churches that Paul glommed onto were off-shoots of this Qumran "Way". They are part of this gang waiting for the Messiah when Paul shows up obviously credentialed (he spent three years at Damascus) and starts preaching about his Jesus as Messiah schtick.

I think Eisenman's theory is that Jesus had been one of the leaders of the Community and that his brother James took over after his death. They believed in strict adherence to The Law of Moses and would have been shocked and outraged by the blasphemy of calling a man "The Son Of God". Paul deliberately chose a Greek religious trope that would appeal to the Hellenised members of the group and outrage the Hebrews. (which might also explain why he said he had to flee Damascus for his life when he started preaching about Jesus)

If his mission was to prevent these people from instigating a revolt against Rome, he failed. If his intention was to create a new religion combining Greek and Hebrew theologies, I'd say he succeeded.

That is a very brief and incomplete outline of what I understand of Eisenman. I'm not advocating this as "It must have happened this way", just - "I don't think it's impossible". And as this thread has demonstrated, "I don't think it's impossible" seems to be about as much as anyone can hope for in the Historical Jesus game.

 

[Craig B]

As always with these "theories", I find it impossible that anywhere other than the real city of Damascus is meant. Paul and Acts correctly name its king (an authentic historical figure), and correctly state that the city had a governor subordinate to the king (who resided elsewhere). The place had walls, down which Paul was lowered in a basket to escape the governor's clutches, and so on. Whether the account of Paul's activities there is true or not, there can be no doubt that the great city, and not some sectarian desert hideaway, is being referred to.

 

[JaysonR]

Jayson
What other religious story has three billion living adherents (2 billion Nicene Christians and 1 billion Muslims)? What other religion with 3 billion living adherents places its origin in historical time and terrestial place, with records (allegedly) of adherence dating from within decades of the supposed events of origin?

Clearly, either I am forgetting one hell of a religion, or you and I differ about what the word unique means.

And, even if the former, then the Jesus story would be one of two with more than three billion adherents, since we run of living people with a third example. So, the point I made stands: we have chosen the example because it is unusual, one of at most two instances of like kind.

Therefore, we are justified in concluding that the story has been unusually successful in attracting adherents. We would therefore expect that it would be unusual for its time and place in some of its features, not typical of them in all respects.

It was a mandated religion by Rome, which owned most of the Western world.
That's the primary reason for the success of Christianity's boom.

There's very little activity in its attraction prior to the Roman state taking it up and forcing it upon their subjects.

We don't see a huge movement before this; we see scattered cells, like many followings of the time.

Of course. If you eliminate originality, then what is left is unoriginal. On what basis do you justify ruling out "a very big and radical change in their literaru culture"? That there are only three billion adherents and only two millenia of persistence - across a merely staggering diversity of other cultures on every inhabited continent?

It is, with all due respect, like evaluating the atomic bomb based on a survey of antecedent American military hardware production, and concluding that it probably didn't happen, because the atomic bomb was "a very big and radical change in their munitions culture."

Something big and radical actually happened, Jason. We need to come to grips with the actual character of that unusual event, rather than pretending that Los Alamos was just another typical gathering of 1940's American scientists with an interest in explosives.

Maybe so; but if that's the case, then we need to identify what that was anthropologically.
So far to date, I haven't seen any evidence of any kind to suggest such a cultural change anthropologically in either the Hellenistic culture or the Hebraic culture.
I've also never read any reports or findings suggesting such literary cultural divergence was taking place; there's no "atomic" or "nuclear" byproduct, or even more "bombs" made to suggest the cultural change of trend, as we have with all trends; the continuation of that product concept forward in form.

If anything, people find the texts to be modeled after other forms of literary styles; not introducing a new form.

Fine. The most successful propaganda story of all time was radically new in its time. So what?

There's no real question whether or not it's propaganda (well...OK...in common speaking anyway...but a social anthropologist might nit pick that "propaganda" as a form and style wasn't invented yet; though that's possibly pedantic in point).

The question is whether or not it was entirely made up or partially made up.
I've not seen anything that suggests a cultural movement that fits with what we would have to design as the course of cultural events for a pure fabrication, but I have seen lots of reports and papers on cultural movements that fit within the construct of an exaggerated propaganda rooted in some individual that they viewed as important; or rather said, the cultural trends of doing so agree with what we do have.

OK, most of us here are not professional historians. We are just people forming beliefs about an uncertain contingency. If history offers us nothing other than its current consensus best estimate of the single leading hypothesis, then that's fine. But since its purpose is not our purpose, then it is both proper and to be expected that we might look to history for what we might learn from how it formed its purpose-driven "conclusion," but decline to adopt that conclusion as our own.

This happens all the time when researching expert opinion in other domains. No biggie, and no offense meant.

Indeed.

 

[Brainache]

As always with these "theories", I find it impossible that anywhere other than the real city of Damascus is meant. Paul and Acts correctly name its king (an authentic historical figure), and correctly state that the city had a governor subordinate to the king (who resided elsewhere). The place had walls, down which Paul was lowered in a basket to escape the governor's clutches, and so on. Whether the account of Paul's activities there is true or not, there can be no doubt that the great city, and not some sectarian desert hideaway, is being referred to.

But isn't that all from Acts? Paul says he stayed "At the house of Judas"(Iscarriot? Oh My!) on "The straight way". The idea is, that later in life Paul let his followers think that his earlier refences to Damascus referred to the Syrian city, rather than have them think he was locked in deadly conflict with the James Gang. Paul is still claiming to be a legitimate part of the organisation that the James Gang is running, so saying: "Jimmy and the Boys tried to lynch me a few times, they really hate my guts!", might have been counter-productive.

According to Acts, the conflict between Paul and James is not too serious and it is solved by Paul agreeing to preach to Gentiles and leave Jews alone. Although Acts also tells us of the time the James Gang set Paul up for a stoning, because Paul wasn't only preaching to Gentiles (or because he was), or something... Either way, some pretty bad blood seems to have existed between them, more than a polite feud over market share.

There is a lot of stuff in the DSS about a "Spouter of Lies" who "preached against the Law in the midst of the congregation", exactly the kind of thing which comes through as said against Paul - in a watered-down version - in Acts and to a lesser extent, the Letter Of James. You can also find Paul in one of his letters (I'm sure we'll get to it, if we haven't already), defending himself against the charge of being a liar. Who was calling Paul a Liar?

 

[Brainache]

Big red flag right off the bat. He refers to the authors of the gospels as the companions and biographers of Jesus. They were neither. He also seems to accept non-Pauline letters as authentic.

What you're looking at is a diatribe... of which there are others of the same ilk... claiming that the gospels represent the true religion of Jesus, and that Paul is a perverter of that doctrine.

This way of thinking has been thoroughly debunked.

I do agree that Paul's efforts as a missionary betray an enormous capacity for self-aggrandizement on Paul's part. But on the whole, this publication is useless. (E.g., the conflicting descriptions of Paul's conversion in Acts cannot be used to impugn Paul, because they were written by someone else many years later.)

That's why it's generally a bad idea to get too involved in material from this time period. It's best to stick to contemporary scholarship. If you dip back even before the analysis of the discoveries at Qumran, Ugarit, and Nag Hammadi, you're skating on hot water, as they say... and this stuff is from over a century before that.

So caveat lector.

Just as an aside, J.D. Crossan's work in "Excavating Jesus..." seems to me to be saying exactly what you just called "thoroughly debunked".

He goes on at great length about Jesus's teachings of "The Kingdom" as having been distorted by Paul's Suffering Messiah.

Is Crossan not mainstream?

 

[Piggy]

Of course you're right, Piggy.
But you must admit that book IS a gem.
If for no other reason than to show just how far the academic community has gone since 1823.

True that.

Sorry, but I didn't get time to continue with 1 Corinthians tonight.

I hope y'all don't mind waiting, because this one is much more interesting and revealing than either of the 2 letters we've looked at so far.

I'll get to it as soon as I can.

 

[Piggy]

I guess this is as good a time as any to bring up Eisenman again. He has a theory about Paul as, not so much a "Scam Artist", but more an "Agent Provocateur".

From what I understand (I could be wrong about this, his arguments get pretty obscure), Eisenman makes a link between the "Damascus" where Paul was going on orders from the High Priest, to root out followers of "The Way", with the Qumran Community.

First, we don't know where Paul was converted. He doesn't say.

Second, Jesus had nothing to do with the Qumranis and they had nothing to do with him. Both the Qumranis and the Jesus school were apocalyptic, but they're different social classes, different structures, different locations, different theologies. They have no direct influence on one another.

 

[Piggy]

Just as an aside, J.D. Crossan's work in "Excavating Jesus..." seems to me to be saying exactly what you just called "thoroughly debunked".

He goes on at great length about Jesus's teachings of "The Kingdom" as having been distorted by Paul's Suffering Messiah.

Is Crossan not mainstream?

Oh, don't get me wrong… Paul's theology is not Jesus's theology.

There's no evidence whatsoever that Jesus had any notion of a "suffering messiah".

As I've explained upthread, that appears to be the invention of his followers in an attempt to explain his death, which they were not expecting (to say the least).

The most likely candidate, however, for the inventor of this theology is Simon the Rock, not Paul.

I agree with Crossan on this.

 

[JaysonR]

I don't read Paul as perverting or warping the contents of what can be discerned in the Gospels.
I see him as more translating the concepts into Hellenistic cultural relevance in manners he most likely thought was the best approximate conveyance.

I do think that there's room to look into the possibility of James having something to do with Paul's arrest in Jerusalem (circumstances surrounding that event are rather suspicious), but I think that if such were the case, that it would be more of an event of a falling out as Paul (in James' perspective at least) may have seen Paul as breaking the political rules that they agreed upon.

That said; I think Paul actually helps in getting a better understanding of the text of the Gospels because if you reverse a few things from Paul's concepts and match them up to the Gospel concepts that are related, then there is a consistent thread of thought being conveyed. What changed was the terminology a bit, and the articulation of the access to the authority of the ideas.


I think the "Paul warped the original message" concept arrives mostly from the heavy amount of leaning upon Paul that the Orthodox traditions use in generating their dogmatic outlines (which are different than Paul's), and that some (over time, but mostly in new "restorationist" movements) who view the Orthodox as errant, and seek to find an "original" form of Christianity in some capacity, believe that Paul was the original errant individual due to the affiliation of the Orthodoxy reliance upon Paul.

I'm not 100% on that, but that's the impression that I get.

 

[The Norseman]

It was a mandated religion by Rome, which owned most of the Western world.
That's the primary reason for the success of Christianity's boom.

There's very little activity in its attraction prior to the Roman state taking it up and forcing it upon their subjects.

We don't see a huge movement before this; we see scattered cells, like many followings of the time.



Maybe so; but if that's the case, then we need to identify what that was anthropologically.
So far to date, I haven't seen any evidence of any kind to suggest such a cultural change anthropologically in either the Hellenistic culture or the Hebraic culture.
I've also never read any reports or findings suggesting such literary cultural divergence was taking place; there's no "atomic" or "nuclear" byproduct, or even more "bombs" made to suggest the cultural change of trend, as we have with all trends; the continuation of that product concept forward in form.

If anything, people find the texts to be modeled after other forms of literary styles; not introducing a new form.


There's no real question whether or not it's propaganda (well...OK...in common speaking anyway...but a social anthropologist might nit pick that "propaganda" as a form and style wasn't invented yet; though that's possibly pedantic in point).

The question is whether or not it was entirely made up or partially made up.
I've not seen anything that suggests a cultural movement that fits with what we would have to design as the course of cultural events for a pure fabrication, but I have seen lots of reports and papers on cultural movements that fit within the construct of an exaggerated propaganda rooted in some individual that they viewed as important; or rather said, the cultural trends of doing so agree with what we do have.


Indeed.

I'm confused that you're talking about a Hellenistic cultural shift. I don't understand how one guy who may have lied about the existence of another guy or how a bunch of guys got mashed together into one guy is anything but a personal thing.

What am I getting wrong? What am I missing?

 

[The Norseman]

This way of thinking has been thoroughly debunked.

Got any links to those behind-the-paywalls studies? How about books with ISBNs or other identifiers so that we may read how this way of thinking has been thoroughly debunked.

 

[JaysonR]

I'm confused that you're talking about a Hellenistic cultural shift. I don't understand how one guy who may have lied about the existence of another guy or how a bunch of guys got mashed together into one guy is anything but a personal thing.

What am I getting wrong? What am I missing?

I don't know if I understand your question well enough to answer it, but I'll try.

I was referring to the texts; there's two cultural possibilities for the starting point of the texts:
A) Hellenistic society
B) Hebraic society

Some doubt that the texts started out in Hebraic culture, so I was permitting room for that rather than hinging on only one perspective; as what I'm stating is that regardless of which culture we look at, the texts (if purely fictional) would be an anomoly from which if it were a new advent, like the Atomic bomb, then we should see a cultural shift in trend; even if only in byproduct.

To my knowledge, there's no such social anthropological identification of such a fictional literature shift as what would be expected.

Instead, we see that the texts borrow their styles from already established literary forms in both cultures (Matthew has Hebraic formatting, Luke has Hellenistic formatting, etc...).

 

[The Norseman]

I don't know if I understand your question well enough to answer it, but I'll try.

I was referring to the texts; there's two cultural possibilities for the starting point of the texts:
A) Hellenistic society
B) Hebraic society

Some doubt that the texts started out in Hebraic culture, so I was permitting room for that rather than hinging on only one perspective; as what I'm stating is that regardless of which culture we look at, the texts (if purely fictional) would be an anomoly from which if it were a new advent, like the Atomic bomb, then we should see a cultural shift in trend; even if only in byproduct.

To my knowledge, there's no such social anthropological identification of such a fictional literature shift as what would be expected.

Instead, we see that the texts borrow their styles from already established literary forms in both cultures (Matthew has Hebraic formatting, Luke has Hellenistic formatting, etc...).

Thank you for your patience in explaining things in this thread!

I still can't see where I went wrong... I'm guessing two or more thoughts collided. I'll go back a ways and re-read.