What counts as a historical Jesus?

[tsig]

Two articles by an atheist on HJ versus MJ --

http://webcache.googleusercontent.c...ld-cocked-scholars/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

http://www.rjosephhoffmann.com/2013/01/05/the-historically-inconvenient-jesus/

Stone

From the link:

Except mosquitoes are tough to ignore, and some carry Dengue and Malaria. If the last two years has proved anything, it is that the spawn of the new atheist movement, like Alex Forrest in Fatal Attraction, will not be ignored. Insult works. Spew works. Faitheist baiting works. What works works.


Insults and snark.

 

[Craig B]

There was also Judas of Galilee, quite famous at the time for founding the "fourth sect" of Judaism, you know, Zealots. I bet his "house" was on a very "straight way"...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judas_of_Galilee

Yes, and of course he's mentioned in Acts 5.

36 Some time ago Theudas appeared, claiming to be somebody, and about four hundred men rallied to him. He was killed, all his followers were dispersed, and it all came to nothing. 37 After him, Judas the Galilean appeared in the days of the census and led a band of people in revolt. He too was killed, and all his followers were scattered.

That's Biblical chronology for you! The census was in 6 AD, whle Theudas' revolt took place in 45 AD.

 

[Acleron]

Two articles by an atheist on HJ versus MJ --

http://webcache.googleusercontent.c...ld-cocked-scholars/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

http://www.rjosephhoffmann.com/2013/01/05/the-historically-inconvenient-jesus/

Stone

What is striking from Hoffman's article is the labelling of all who argue against the consensus as misguided, amateurs, shrieking new-atheists. The straw man is erected that they are all mythicists. The argument is seriously put forward that because he accepts other figures without firm evidence that we should accept HJ. After accepting the gospels are extremely poor evidence of history we should still accept their conclusions of HJ.

All this with the promise that evidence will be provided later.

Anybody else recognise this behaviour elsewhere?

 

[IanS]

I apologize for the confusion, but that isn't what I was attempting to convey.

What I was saying is that we have a gap in social anthropology accounting for a new form of literature during this period whereby fictional characters were written about as existing physically alongside the community during the lifetime of the readers.

The absolutely wrote fictional accounts of religious natures, but so far, I haven't seen any anthropologist examine the condition of a new literary style of the time whereby writings were made of individuals perported to live along side the community who would then read the material within the same lifetime span as the claimed existence of the individual being addressed.The best that I can do as a comparison is that we write fiction this way today all the time.
A show like Fringe pretends characters exist in our world during our lifetime and we understand them to be fictional characters.

There's, so far as I know, no such anthropological account of such behavior of either culture regarding this sort of style of writing within this period.

If such did occur, man...I would be thrilled!
I personally don't care one bit whether Jesus did or didn't exist, and in fact, it would be far more exciting for me if he didn't as then there would be a new literary trend to examine culturally that is so far unaccounted for.


As to Paul, I don't know whether or not Paul believed or didn't believe that Jesus did or did not exist when he wrote.

Jayson ... this is descending into highly obscurantist language. Look for example at the highlighted passage ... what on earth does that passage mean? It's absolutely stuffed full of un-stated "if's, but’s and maybe's" etc.

Lets get to point here. Which is (to repeat) - at that time in that very region, there had for centuries already been belief in Greek Mystery religions and envisioned imaginings believed as reality etc. That's clear not just from the very obvious Hellenic influence of the people, but also from the DS-Scrolls (which unlike all the biblical stuff, are actually the original writing from precisely that time and precisely that small region).

And that writing and it's religious beliefs, and in fact the people's entire way of life, was entirely about their belief in imaginary gods.

What you seem to be asking for is other examples precisely like we eventually had in the biblical gospel writing which appeared centuries after the believed God Jesus was thought to have died. But that's not necessary at all. Because you already have that Hellenic religious belief in Mystery gods, who were often dying and rising gods, and you already had the imagining of gods being preached as absolute reality in real settings with real people etc. On top of which, the Jesus stories which evolved from that background over the course of 200-300 years, were also almost all (if not in fact, all) quite clearly taken from the messiah prophecies which had been known to everyone there as part of their everyday beliefs for at least 500 years!

What Paul described for Jesus is very much like that indeed. Inc. his reliance upon the OT prophecies and his visionary imaginings of a dying and rising god.

And yet you are still saying there is no precedent for where a Jesus type story could have come from!??

Come on, get serious lol! All the elements of the 1st century Jesus beliefs were already well known in that precise region to that precise group of fanatical Jewish religious believers, from at least 200 years or more before Paul and Gospels appeared.

And that's without mentioning the fact that the Jesus figure described in the writing of Paul and the Gospel authors, is undoubtedly a fictional figure anyway! The only way you can get a realistic Jesus out of that biblical writing is to discard all the mythical parts which made the Jesus story worth any of them writing about in the first place!

On top of which, none of those writers were describing a messiah which any of them had ever known. They were all describing the legend of a OT prophesised messiah who was believed to have died (and risen!) at some unknown time in the past!

 

[IanS]

I do not intend to convey the idea that it is convincing reason.
I only brought that up as an aid for expectation; that the request for hard evidence is a bit of a aimless request considering that we have such terrible material for many ancient events and figures.

Essentially, I'm saying to not hold breath for that.

Sure. But, we are really not talking about practicing academic ancient history here. We are not actually doing that work here. Nor are we trying to do it. What people here are trying to do is to decide whether or not Jesus existed. And that is more like a factual scientific or objective question, which demands evidence of a far more substantial and objective nature that you seem to be acknowledging as being within the remit of this particular branch of ancient religious history.

Or to put that more simply - if this is the best that ancient history techniques can do in the case of Jesus, then it's a million miles short of what's required.

I won't deny that a bunch of folks that are invested, especially theologians (who, in my opinion, should be discounted on site), for personal motives.

I don't think that summarizes the entirety of the historicity of Jesus, however; that seems rather sweeping to claim and doesn't fit entirely with what I'm familiar with.


I specifically did NOT say it was the "entirety" of everyone who must have ever attempted to research the historicity of Jesus. As I said before - there must be hundreds of thousands of academics of various sorts studying in this field (mostly the "sort" I described before), so it would be amazing if at least a few were not genuine mainstream univ. historians ... though so far in this thread, not a single historian of that kind has been named ... instead all the claimed "expert scholars" have turned out to be people with a lifelong interest in Jesus, Christian religious belief, and qualifications in various branches of religious studies and theology.


There's a bunch of folks in the mix, and yes; there are a bunch of passionate advocates for Jesus - my suggestion regarding those is to look elsewhere rather; like anthropologists - they are generally a pretty good group, though they tend to not pick one individual, so getting good material from this group is less frequent than the Historian group in general.


You won't find me to disagree here; I don't think there's really any satisfactory end for the historicity of Jesus that is purely conclusive.



What I was referring to was that it's not odd for historians to specialize, and that as such; it would not be odd to consider someone specializing on any given figure - if that's Jesus; okie dokie, then their thing is Jesus.

That said, I noted in a different thread that the impact of Jesus' historicity upon history is incredibly tiny, practically none; so I don't think there's a huge amount of historians that flock to the matter as it's historically not that interesting by comparison to allot of other possible tasty bits in history that have allot more exciting tangents and possible results; for instance, there's allot more thrilling work in regard to establishing if anyone (and who) came to the Americas during ancient times or not.


Yep. Well that was my point of course (and it's what I actually said). Namely - most mainstream academic historians, do not afaik, write about or research the history of Jesus and Judeo-Christian studies. Or to put it another way (as I did several times before) - this is very much a niche area of so-called "history", which is actually specifically concerned with Christian religious belief in Jesus.

Hopefully we're getting closer to an understanding?
If I'm not grasping something, I hope to learn what I'm missing, and I'll definitely keep trying to be better at articulating my meanings.

I don't think we have ever been that far apart on what we think about any off this. But the difference seems to be that you are willing to accept what you acknowledge to be all the weaknesses and deficiencies of the methods of ancient historical research in the case of Jesus, and still conclude that the results are good enough to think that Jesus probably existed. Whereas I would regard that sort of historical "evidence", or rather it's conclusions, as so tenuously based and so un-scientific as to be little short of absurd.

 

[tsig]

What is striking from Hoffman's article is the labelling of all who argue against the consensus as misguided, amateurs, shrieking new-atheists. The straw man is erected that they are all mythicists. The argument is seriously put forward that because he accepts other figures without firm evidence that we should accept HJ. After accepting the gospels are extremely poor evidence of history we should still accept their conclusions of HJ.

All this with the promise that evidence will be provided later.

Anybody else recognise this behaviour elsewhere?

Yes, so far the HJer position seems "A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing".

 

[pakeha]

...Piggy

...And you proposed Festinger's work on modern failed-prophecy cults "in order to understand this group." ...

Yes, in fact it was reading about that work which started the red flags about Paul.

That could be quite interesting.
...
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. ...
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.

Thanks for the heads-up, Piggy.

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

Yes.

Anyway, off to read about Corinthians.

 

[eight bits]

Jayson

I don't see an anthropological correlation between the literary culture which produced the texts and Roman state mandate of adherence later on.

Great. The people in the Fourth Century are still telling the stories that were crafted in the First Century. Adherence to a particular provider telling those stories is what they mandated. That may not be an "anthropological" correlation, but it sure as hell is a causal coupling.

There is no reason to suppose monopoly in storytelling would be different than in other products and services. Obviously, monopoly is "good" for the monopolist, but generally decreases production volume of the product. If Coca-cola had a monopoly, then its sales would increase, Pepsi's would cease, and the units of cola drinks produced would decrease overall. State monopoly would not, in itself, ensure continued production of the same product, either. Rather, it helps ensure continuation of the producer - not the same thing at all.

We should see non-Christian bodies of work following suit; a literary cultural change.

We have. Paul, a Jew, wasn't from Palestine or part of the (supposed) original storyteller guild. Gnostics and "Make your own Luke" Marcion followed suit beginning in the Second Century and enjoyed good long runs. Mohammed in the Seventh is still playing at a theater near you. Joseph Smith; say no more. What else are you looking for?

We have no literature within the tradition from the time and place where the story is set. Everything we have is somebody "following suit."

I really only see supporting material anthropologically for the literature being par for the course of these culture's way of writing about actual peoples when they were fanatically admired.

But how many people fell in love with phantasms in that culture? Paul did, and says so. How are lovers in any literate culture to write of their beloved, except as they would write of someone actual, regardless of whether they are actual?

Dante's Beatrice was a real woman (based on a bequest in her father's last will and an unsubstantiated report by Boccaccio that that Beatrice was the Beatrice ... this has a familiar ring to it), whom Dante actually met (twice supposedly), but who was dead by the time we encounter her in his work. In that work, she is portrayed as still conscious, identifiable and situated, providing spiritual information to the writer. (Damn that sounds familiar.)

She is also a millennium closer to us than Jesus. The will survived, and we know enough about Boccaccio to confirm that he could have found out second-hand something about Dante's personal life. He was eight years old when Dante died. He never met Beatrice. He is our only near-witness that she is the Beatrice who counts.

If that written will had been lost, and Boccaccio's own life was a bit more obscure, then is there anything in Dante, even read in concert with Boccaccio's commentary, that would establish and instill confidence that Beatrice was a real woman rather than a phantasm?

Surely not that Dante had the hots for her, and that many readers found what Dante wrote about her to be believable.

 

[pakeha]

...I said this might take weeks, but to me it's just so fascinating, I want to dwell on it probably longer than I should. For all I know, it might be well into summer by the time we get through the gospels.

More later, as I manage to get time.

Thanks again for listening.

Take all the time you need, Piggy!
I'm enthralled by your close-up view of Paul's letters and grateful for the effort you'r putting into this.

 

[Belz...]

What is striking from Hoffman's article is the labelling of all who argue against the consensus as misguided, amateurs, shrieking new-atheists. The straw man is erected that they are all mythicists.

Gee, that sounds familiar.

 

[tkmikkelsen]

Robert Price has also become more open to alternative explanations as well. Are you familiar with Acharya S? Robert Price now endorses her work.

I am not really familiar with the work of D. M. Murdock, other than she is the inspiration for the first part of Zeitgeist, which is not doing any favors for Christ-myth theories.
So far as I know her position is that early Christianity is basically a conspiracy. Robert Price was very critical about her position to begin with, but for some reason has since retracted that criticism.

Richard Carrier generally uses D. M. Murdock as an example of all that is wrong with most Christ-myth theorist.

I will have to read one of her books at some time, but if the depiction that Bart Ehrman makes of her in "Did Jesus Exist?", then her hypothesis is based on a lot of unsubstantiated assumptions and some highly improbable interpretations of events and evidence.

Anyway, I will have to read it for myself to make any informed claim on my own.

 

[pakeha]

Two articles by an atheist on HJ versus MJ --

http://webcache.googleusercontent.c...ld-cocked-scholars/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

http://www.rjosephhoffmann.com/2013/01/05/the-historically-inconvenient-jesus/

Stone

Thanks for the links.
The first was most unpalatable reading- I'm not sure why you'd post a link to the writings of someone with a need to express themselves like that.
But the second was an interesting read, but again, as I read more o the author's entries, he seems to be more about bashing than discussing anything.

Thanks.

 

[Darat]

Thanks for the links.
The first was most unpalatable reading- I'm not sure why you'd post a link to the writings of someone with a need to express themselves like that.
But the second was an interesting read, but again, as I read more o the author's entries, he seems to be more about bashing than discussing anything.

Thanks.

The first one seems a tad er overheated and he is rather contradictory - he criticises one person because he is not a historian but then uses non-history departments as the source of his information:

...snip...

I’ll make a deal with PZ Myers: I don’t try to lecture him on grasshoppers and he doesn’t lecture anybody on Jesus and “bad history.” I can’t quite imagine that the combined religion faculties at Harvard, Claremont and Tuebingen are awaiting further instruction on Bayes Theorem from Richard Carrier or packing up their offices, having been served notice that an associate professor of biology at the Morris campus of the University of Minnesota has discovered that Jesus is just like Robin Hood—and Paul Bunyan.

...snip...

This also seems to support a point IanS has made a few times - and that is the academic field that has apparently come to a well founded consensus about the historicity of Jesus seems to be the religious departments not the history departments.

ETA: He ends by stating there will be follow up essays by some academics he presumably believes to be qualified to determine if Jesus existed or not.

The first name is "Professor Maurice Casey of the University of Nottingham" and according to the university's site he is in "Department of Theology and Religious Studies".

The second name is "Stephanie Fisher" - she appears to be a Phd student studying under Professor Casey, so again not in a history department. I think I have found an old blog (up to 2012) of her's: http://dunedinschool.wordpress.com/2009/11/12/bewithering-is-becoming-bewildering/ I'll leave it to you to make your mind up if she has a vested interest in Jesus being real or not.

So again not historians.

 

[Belz...]

Christians coming to the conclusion that Jesus was real ? Get out !

 

[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.

It's an historical curiosity and I read it as such, of course. But thanks for the caveat!

...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?

"Spouter of Lies"
That would make a good title or chapter heading.

... in the case of religious beliefs at the time of Paul and the gospels, we are probably no longer talking about a purely traditional Hebrew view of the prophesised messiah. Because from several centuries before Paul, the region had become heavily influenced by the culture, religions, and philosophies of Greece. And then much later, from around 80 years before Paul was writing, also influenced by rule and religions from Rome.

That sort of change is also apparently quite clear in the Dead Sea Scrolls from 100-200 years before Paul was writing. By that time, long before Paul, preachers in that region were already talking about a messiah who would be a supernatural apocalyptic Son of God, and it was already widely believed that dreams, visions and imaginings should be interpreted as factual messages from God.

That is quite obviously a similar message to the one that Paul was apparently teaching.

But it is a belief based on an amalgam of Jewish OT teaching, Greek Mystery Religions, Belief in dreams as reality, and belief that the messiah would be apocalyptic and in some sense not merely a mortal man.

So we should not be looking for any examples of mythical gods just in ancient Hebrew OT traditions, but also in Jewish traditions becoming mixed with Greek mystery religions, mystery philosophers, dying and rising gods, and similar Roman gods and beliefs …. all becoming mixed up together.

I have a crazy book I bought in a second-hand bookshop in Athens, now available on-line
http://www.pdfebookds.com/Ancient-Christian-Magic-Coptic-Texts-of-Ritual-Power-PDF6-1151942/

Yes, it appears there was a considerable mix there!

 

[IanS]

I have a crazy book I bought in a second-hand bookshop in Athens, now available on-line
http://www.pdfebookds.com/Ancient-Christian-Magic-Coptic-Texts-of-Ritual-Power-PDF6-1151942/

Yes, it appears there was a considerable mix there!

Yes. In this region we are talking about, ie the wider area around Palestine, Jerusalem and further afield, the population was apparently very largely influenced by Greek culture ever since at least the exploits of Alexander the Great around 300BC, if not in fact since even earlier than that. See for example the short quote below from Wiki and it’s link -


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_of_the_New_Testament

Currently, 1,600 Jewish epitaphs (funerary inscriptions) are extant from ancient Palestine dating from 300 B.C. to 500 A.D. Approximately 70 percent are in Greek, about 12 percent are in Latin, and only 18 percent are in Hebrew or Aramaic. "In Jerusalem itself about 40 percent of the Jewish inscriptions from the first century period (before 70 C.E.) are in Greek. We may assume that most Jewish Jerusalemites who saw the inscriptions in situ were able to read them".[9]

 

[pakeha]

...

The second name is "Stephanie Fisher" - she appears to be a Phd student studying under Professor Casey, so again not in a history department. I think I have found an old blog (up to 2012) of her's: http://dunedinschool.wordpress.com/2009/11/12/bewithering-is-becoming-bewildering/ I'll leave it to you to make your mind up if she has a vested interest in Jesus being real or not.

So again not historians.

Oh, myyy.
Thanks Darat, for taking one for the team.

 

[maximara]

OK, I don’t want to spend a lot more time on this sort of thing, because apart from anything else we are now descending into all sorts of vague and subjective side issues. However …

… what you are saying above just boils down to the fact that extensive reliable evidence often just does not exist for the lives of many figures in ancient history.

But that’s hardly a convincing reason as to why anyone should put much faith in what certain historians say about certain ancient individuals.

However, in the case of Jesus, and the sort of “academic scholars” who study Jesus, we are not talking about mainstream academic historians in general. We are talking about a very specific niche area of academic interest which is heavily bound up with religious academic institutes, theologians and theists, and ancient religious beliefs … this is not by any means just another branch of academic history such as (say) the history of Roman conquests, or the historical investigation of the Egyptian empire.

Moreover, what is being described here as the “historical evidence”, appears to come entirely and completely from the devotional biblical writing itself. And that writing is completely discredited by it’s constant claim of impossible miracles, visions and imaginary beliefs etc. Not to mention that none of it is remotely original, eye-witness, contemporary, or from any known named author whose sources can be checked. That is an utterly hopeless position as “evidence” … it may be, as you say, all that “historians” have to work with, but in that case what they have to work with is very far short of what is required by any objective standards at all.

It doesn't help that on those few things we can check the account falls apart:

1) the birth stories are social political as well as historical train wrecks.

2) The trial has Pontius Pilatus behaving in a matter totally at odds with how other accounts portray him.

3) If Pontius Pilatus is truly dealing with a local issue then why would he involve Herod Antipas and more importantly why are there no records of this unusual action?

3) Based on what the synoptic Gospels say Jesus' ministry seems to have lasted from 29 CE (Luke 3:1; Luke 3:23) to 36 CE (Mark 6:14) or seven years and yet the Testimonium Flavianum is on par with what you would see on a modern cereal box with John the Baptist who was active for a far shorter time getting more space.

 

[JaysonR]

Ians;

Or to put that more simply - if this is the best that ancient history techniques can do in the case of Jesus, then it's a million miles short of what's required.

Yes it is.
That's something that I brought up before.
This is why I personally prefer anthropology to "history" (as in, "historian").
Dealing with historicity all the time is very unfulfilled.

History is, to me, allot like an electron allegorically.
You can know the general range and movement of it reasonably well (anthropology), but if you want to know the specifics of what Caesar did on a given Friday, or if Jesus existed or not, or if Hippocrates existed or not, or how exactly the Battle of Kadesh happened (seriously...this is an actual heated debate)...good luck.

I prefer anthropology because you get to know more than you do studying historicity of anything in ancient history...heck; even in cases of modern history it can be terrible...for instance, the exact historicity of Pearl Harbor in total is not settled.

Historicity reminds me allot of internet forums, actually. It seems like there should only be a finite amount of topics, and that there should only be a finite number of discussions on those topics; yet, somehow the topics seem nearly endless, and the discussions even more endless.


I don't think any forum will really solve the historicity of Jesus.
If some folks can figure out what they believe regarding the matter; great!
But, yeah...I don't think it's very likely to get anywhere when the field practices themselves are not accepted as an axiom; and history rests on that axiom pretty heavily.

Remember: History is a set of lies agreed upon.
Personally, I would switch out "lies" with "opinions", but it serves the same point.

I specifically did NOT say it was the "entirety" of everyone who must have ever attempted to research the historicity of Jesus. As I said before - there must be hundreds of thousands of academics of various sorts studying in this field (mostly the "sort" I described before), so it would be amazing if at least a few were not genuine mainstream univ. historians ... though so far in this thread, not a single historian of that kind has been named ... instead all the claimed "expert scholars" have turned out to be people with a lifelong interest in Jesus, Christian religious belief, and qualifications in various branches of religious studies and theology

I'm sorry; I just didn't see it accounted for, so I made note of it in the list.
I hadn't realized that was already an assumed demographic in your listing.

I would imagine the Jesus obsessed historians are cited because they are the ones writing books that common folk read.
If non-Jesus obsessed historians wrote books on Jesus; that might help get them cited more...but that's somewhat of a paradoxical trap I think.

Yep. Well that was my point of course (and it's what I actually said). Namely - most mainstream academic historians, do not afaik, write about or research the history of Jesus and Judeo-Christian studies. Or to put it another way (as I did several times before) - this is very much a niche area of so-called "history", which is actually specifically concerned with Christian religious belief in Jesus.

Oh, I see what you mean now.
You mean that the regular historian that would weigh in on Jesus would be those who study the anthropological history of early Christian culture.
Fair enough; that's how I usually get drug into these topics, so yeah; I can see that easily.

I don't think we have ever been that far apart on what we think about any off this. But the difference seems to be that you are willing to accept what you acknowledge to be all the weaknesses and deficiencies of the methods of ancient historical research in the case of Jesus, and still conclude that the results are good enough to think that Jesus probably existed. Whereas I would regard that sort of historical "evidence", or rather it's conclusions, as so tenuously based and so un-scientific as to be little short of absurd.

Mostly, I'm willing to defer because I'm more that former group.
My personal opinion on the matter is that I don't have solid proof, nor do I want to really bother spending my life trying to prove a guy who doesn't live today did or didn't live at some point once, but the only thing that causes me to think it's more possible that someone existed whom the legend was based on is because I spend my time in cultural anthropology and I don't see an anthropological wave of new literary format that I would expect if this figure was purely fictional.

 

[JaysonR]

JaysonGreat. The people in the Fourth Century are still telling the stories that were crafted in the First Century. Adherence to a particular provider telling those stories is what they mandated. That may not be an "anthropological" correlation, but it sure as hell is a causal coupling.

There is no reason to suppose monopoly in storytelling would be different than in other products and services. Obviously, monopoly is "good" for the monopolist, but generally decreases production volume of the product. If Coca-cola had a monopoly, then its sales would increase, Pepsi's would cease, and the units of cola drinks produced would decrease overall. State monopoly would not, in itself, ensure continued production of the same product, either. Rather, it helps ensure continuation of the producer - not the same thing at all.

I apologize; this only further confused me.
I have lost the ability to follow the correlation and meaningfulness of this particular tangent in its position to the concept regarding how if the texts were entirely fictional, then it would represent a new literary form.

We have. Paul, a Jew, wasn't from Palestine or part of the (supposed) original storyteller guild. Gnostics and "Make your own Luke" Marcion followed suit beginning in the Second Century and enjoyed good long runs. Mohammed in the Seventh is still playing at a theater near you. Joseph Smith; say no more. What else are you looking for?

I'm looking for a non-Jesus-centric piece of literature that followed the same new format of writing about a fictional figure of any kind that was purported in the story to live among the reading audience, or nearby them, within their lifetime; similar to modern fiction.