What counts as a historical Jesus?

[IanS]

... for a start, Paul's letters and the gospels are in any case describing Jesus as a fictional character of past legend. Eg, the only way people can now try to make a real historical Jesus from that biblical writing is to discard all the numerous miracles, visions, voices from god etc. ... but that's inventing a new modern-day Jesus who was never the legendary figure who Paul, Mark, Mathew, Luke and John had once written about.

No they are most certainly not! They are describing Jesus as a person of their own time who really existed as a physical human being in the recent past.

Well first of all, Paul and the gospel writers were not actually writing about Jesus from anything they personally knew, because they all thought Jesus was dead by the time they saw him in visions etc. So Paul and the rest were actually writing about what they believed as a “legend” of an earlier messiah (Jesus) who none of them actually ever knew.

But directly on the point above - Paul and the gospel writers most certainly were writing about a fictional figure (whether they realised it or not), because the messiah who they described was an impossible supernatural figure. The only reason that Paul (for example) may have thought Jesus was a real individual was because he believed what others had told him about Jesus (he only ever knew Jesus as a risen vision of the supernatural), but the problem with that is … Paul clearly could not tell fact from fiction, and neither could any of the gospel authors.

No, it is attempting to discern if there is a probable reality under the layer of evidently mythical accretions. We have been through this with King Midas of Lydia. The sources make him a mythical figure with a golden touch. He wasn't. Scholars "invented a new modern-day Midas" without a golden touch - and his tomb has been found. He really existed. As to the golden touch .. it was in Lydia in his day that gold coins were first used; clearly the source of the myth.

Have we also found the tomb of Jesus, then? What physical evidence has been found to confirm Jesus was a real figure?

The problem with trying to discard all the constant miracles, all the visions, and transportation to heaven etc. etc., is that when all that is removed you are left with a Jesus messiah who fulfils none of the expectations of a Son of God, and who would not have been worth anyone of the time ever writing about. And that’s apart from the fact that all of those authors (whoever they actually were) were only ever writing about a messiah none of them had ever met, seen or heard, who was believed to be a figure of the past, and where their knowledge of him came only from their belief in stories that other unknown people had once told about a legendary messiah who was now dead!

Because they were writing about what they believed was a real figure, and telling exaggerated stories about him.

They may well have believed the stories about Jesus. They would certainly have believed that miracles and visions of god, angels, demons etc., occurred regularly every day. In fact at that time people did not merely “believe” in miracles, they were completely certain that miracles were an unquestioned fact. So when they heard stories of a miraculous messiah of the past, they could easily accept it as unquestioned fact.

But now, in the 21st century, most people know that all those miracles and visions etc are fiction (“mythical” if you prefer that word).

It’s not just an "exaggeration" to believe that Jesus had once walked on water, raised the dead, and appeared to 500 people at once after he was dead for three days and floating away to heaven etc. That’s not merely “exaggeration”, that’s myth! And remember that it was also a legendary “myth” … none of them knew anything about Jesus except as a matter of earlier legend.

What appears to be happening with all those stories from the beliefs of Paul and the gospel authors, is that they were following the practices revealed from 200 years earlier in the Dead Seas Scrolls, and deliberately interpreting their visions and religious imaginings as real events being communicated to them direct from god.

 

[IanS]

In all probability he was not real. But the Jews, and particularly the Christians, didn't write of him as a person who lived in the recent past.

In the case of Jesus - how did Paul or the gospel writers know when Jesus had lived and died?

What is the evidence from anything in any of their writing where they give a date for the lifetime of Jesus?

Or is it actually the case that we have subsequently guessed when Jesus lived, eg from thinking Pauls' vision must have been only a few days after Jesus had died? Is that the assumption?

 

[Craig B]

In the case of Jesus - how did Paul or the gospel writers know when Jesus had lived and died?

What is the evidence from anything in any of their writing where they give a date for the lifetime of Jesus?

Or is it actually the case that we have subsequently guessed when Jesus lived, eg from thinking Pauls' vision must have been only a few days after Jesus had died? Is that the assumption?

I said they believed he had lived in the recent past. Your middle sentence is baffling. The gospels agree that he was executed by Pilate. Their authors knew that Pilate had governed Judaea in the recent past.

 

[Craig B]

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

By coincidence, this work was yesterday released by Gutenberg at http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/42984. I agree with Piggy that it is very dated, but it is an enjoyable read, and many of the facts and arguments contained in it are still interesting, if not convincing.

 

[Piggy]

The jews/christians also believed Moses was a real figure and this didn't make him real.

There's actually a good argument for a historical Moses, too.

That's not something I would have believed myself until I studied the history of the production of the first several books of the Hebrew Bible. (Which is essentially a propaganda war among feuding factions of priestly theocrats.)

But once you do that, you realize that Moses may well have been a kind of Hebrew Hammurabi of his day.

Not saying he was, but there is an argument to be made, at least. "Mythical Moses" is not a certainty.

Would be an interesting thread, but not one I could contribute to at the moment, unfortunately.

 

[gambling_cruiser]

If you remove all the imossible nonsense from Moses curriculum then might some guy named Moses have lived sometime.

 

[tsig]

If you remove all the imossible nonsense from Moses curriculum then might some guy named Moses have lived sometime.

If you take away all that creating the world and drowning everyone Yahweh might have been a minor tribal god.

 

[Belz...]

If you take away the impossible stuff, Darth Vader might be real.

 

[Craig B]

If you take away the impossible stuff, Darth Vader might be real.

If you take away the impossible stuff, King Midas might be real. Voltaire deals with this question in his commentary on Pascal. I can't find the passage, alas. Pascal argues that the Trojan War is a fiction because the sources we have for it include a vast amount of manifestly mythical material. Voltaire rebuts this by saying: the dove with the bottle of holy oil, and the angel with the holy banner the Oriflamme, who allegedly turned up from Heaven at the coronation of Clovis, do not mean that that king never really ruled France.

So to create a modern holy-doveless Clovis or a modern golden-touchless Midas is not necessarily to create a fantasy. It may reveal a reality underlying centuries of mythical distortion of a historical event.

 

[Belz...]

What I mean is that you cannot determine what a historical character may be like by stripping away only the impossible stuff. Lots of possible but untrue things may also have been added.

 

[tsig]

What I mean is that you cannot determine what a historical character may be like by stripping away only the impossible stuff. Lots of possible but untrue things may also have been added.

Yep. Let's strip out all the untrue stuff, now how do we tell what's the untrue stuff.

 

[Craig B]

What I mean is that you cannot determine what a historical character may be like by stripping away only the impossible stuff. Lots of possible but untrue things may also have been added.

I absolutely agree. I have used that very argument against the authenticity of the "edited" TF.

What I am arguing against here, however, is the notion that because our sources give us a mythologised account of something, then to attempt to demythologise it is merely to produce a modernised fantasy which has no support even in the original sources, and therefore cannot possibly contain any historical reality.

 

[Piggy]

If you remove all the imossible nonsense from Moses curriculum then might some guy named Moses have lived sometime.

Actually, it's very important to understand that this is NOT how it works.

I cannot stress this enough.

There's this fallacy that historians deduce "what really happened" by identifying the "made up bits" and subtracting them to see what's left. That's not even remotely accurate.

As I've said before, the false things people say and write are just as important as the accurate things in helping us to understand history. One example I've given before is Nazi propaganda. It's important to know why the Nazis told the particular lies that they did, and about whom, and to whom, and to what end.

The first several books of the Hebrew Bible are the result of centuries of propaganda wars among competing factions of theocratic priests and kings, and in some sections it really is as though someone took commentaries on the Bush administration by Bill O'Reilly and Keith Olbermann and spliced them together.

But you don't want to toss that out! Even if our ancient Hebrew O'Reillys and Olbermanns are totally biased, their biases tell us a lot about the world they lived in! And of course the fact that they've been merged tells us something about the culture that bothered to do such a thing.

If you really want to understand how ancient texts like these are studied, you have to ditch the notion that history is what's left over when you throw out the false bits.

 

[IanS]

I said they believed he had lived in the recent past. Your middle sentence is baffling. The gospels agree that he was executed by Pilate. Their authors knew that Pilate had governed Judaea in the recent past.

Yes, the gospel writers thought they knew the dates for when Pilate was supposed to be the Roman official in Judea. But they did not know of their own eye-witness experience that Jesus had ever been executed by anyone.


Indeed, if it was actually known that Pilate had executed Jesus, then none of the authors who have written over the past century or more to say they think Jesus may have actually been mythical, would ever have had any doubts about the existence of Jesus (if Pilate had executed Jesus, then Jesus must have existed!).

But there is a problem with how the name of Pilate has made it’s way into the Jesus story. Namely this - iirc (from memory), Paul's genuine Letters do not mention Pilate. There is one mention of the name Pilate in a Pauline Letter, but I think that appears in one of the "fake" letters believed to have been written much later in the 2nd century.

The gospel authors do name Pilate. But none of those authors were ever eye-witnesses to anything Jesus ever did, and they themselves could not have known that Pilate executed anyone.

Instead, what seems to have happened, is that the gospel authors have assumed the involvement of Pilate by reading Paul’s account of his vision of the dead Jesus, and assuming that Paul’s vision must have been on the third day after the crucifixition.

That appears to follow because iirc, in that particular passage Paul says that Jesus rose from the dead according to scripture on the third day. However, Paul does not say that his vision was actually on that third day. In fact, iirc, Paul did not get any information about the crucifixion from any mortal man, but as always with Paul, he believed it was true according to scripture (ie, according to his own interpretation of OT prophecies).

So the suspicion here is that the later authors of the gospels, had taken their knowledge of the crucifixion from Paul, worked out that Paul’s vision must have been around 30 to 36 AD, and then decided that was a time when Pilate was the governor in Judea.

 

[Stone]

Why are so few of you addressing Jayson's point that contemporary fiction as a genre wasn't even around until the 500s? If a 1st-century text exists that describes a sequence of events involving a contemporary figure like Pilate, then that sequence of events is going to be more historic than not, regardless of hagiographic embellishments.

Stone

 

[Belz...]

"...Then Obama flew in the sky, landed on the tallest cloud in the heavens, and said 'yo, people ! Y'all so small. Like ants !'"

If we remove the impossible parts, we end up with the genuine part of the event, right ? And since he's a contemporary of my post, that makes it more historic than not.

I'm pretty sure this isn't what Stone was going for, but it sure sounded like it.

 

[Piggy]

Why are so few of you addressing Jayson's point that contemporary fiction as a genre wasn't even around until the 500s? If a 1st-century text exists that describes a sequence of events involving a contemporary figure like Pilate, then that sequence of events is going to be more historic than not, regardless of hagiographic embellishments.

Stone

We also have to keep in mind that these texts were never used as fiction. They were used devotionally, not recreationally. They were created, copied, distributed, and used among faith groups.

 

[Craig B]

Yes, the gospel writers thought they knew the dates for when Pilate was supposed to be the Roman official in Judea. But they did not know of their own eye-witness experience that Jesus had ever been executed by anyone.

That's a different statement from your earlier one which i was responding to:

What is the evidence from anything in any of their writing where they give a date for the lifetime of Jesus?

You are "moving the goalposts".

Indeed, if it was actually known that Pilate had executed Jesus, then none of the authors who have written over the past century or more to say they think Jesus may have actually been mythical, would ever have had any doubts about the existence of Jesus (if Pilate had executed Jesus, then Jesus must have existed!).

That is a quite bizarre argument. Are you sure you mean it?

But there is a problem with how the name of Pilate has made it’s way into the Jesus story. Namely this - iirc (from memory), Paul's genuine Letters do not mention Pilate. There is one mention of the name Pilate in a Pauline Letter, but I think that appears in one of the "fake" letters believed to have been written much later in the 2nd century.

Source please.

... So the suspicion here is that the later authors of the gospels, had taken their knowledge of the crucifixion from Paul, worked out that Paul’s vision must have been around 30 to 36 AD, and then decided that was a time when Pilate was the governor in Judea.

You "suspect" this? I think you need to let us have more evidence, and I would be grateful if you could provide it.

 

[Piggy]

I absolutely agree. I have used that very argument against the authenticity of the "edited" TF.

What I am arguing against here, however, is the notion that because our sources give us a mythologised account of something, then to attempt to demythologise it is merely to produce a modernised fantasy which has no support even in the original sources, and therefore cannot possibly contain any historical reality.

Yes. In fact, HJ research began in the 1700s with failed attempts to cobble together a "true" life of Jesus by stripping away the miraculous bits and assembling the rest into some kind of biography.

What enlightenment scholars came to realize is that there was no single Jesus to be found. Each community -- the Paulines, the Markians, the Mattheans, the Lukians, the Johanines, and the various pseudo-Paulines -- had their own version of Jesus.

That is what led in the 1800s to an improved approach, something much more in line with modern scholarship, which was an effort to understand what it was that these various groups believed about Jesus, and to ask why they believed these things, and then to attempt to see where those visions converged looking back toward the point of origin, the original followers of the rabbi Jesus.

In other words, the question became: Who must Jesus have been, and what must he have done and preached and believed, in order for these particular groups to have emerged and to have come to believe what they believed about him?

It was a difficult job, and was a very cloudy sort of subject until around the middle of the 20th century, when discoveries of additional manuscripts and improved methods of archaeology shed much needed light on the process.

 

[JaysonR]

This is assuming that these "essential components in the Synoptic theology" actually predated Paul and weren't worked in later. Remember no one makes any sizable reference to the Gospels is c180 CE and the first attempt at putting together a bible was c140 CE

Yes; I do take this assumption.

I do not take the assumed position that Paul invented Christianity completely and fooled a bunch of people into perpetuating his creation.

There's more left in textual evidence that we have yet to finish cleaning up and translating; and it's going to take a long time to get through all of the texts that we have to, so perhaps one day we'll get more textual information.