What counts as a historical Jesus?

[Belz...]

In the HJ research, bloviating is evidence.

Well, we've already seen it happen. We were promised evidence, and instead started getting a history lesson of the area, followed by reasoning from Paul's letters and the historians' conclusions.

And then we were told we actually have been given the evidence, although clearly it wasn't there.

If Piggy is refering to Paul and Mark and the NT works as the evidence, he should've said so in the first place, and avoided all those posts. If said evidence is also what Piggy was refering to when he spoke of "artifacts", then he should also have done so (and indeed, contrary to his claim, it would've been quite feasible.)

As it stands I have not a clue what Piggy considers to be evidence in this case, or Christian artifacts. All I know is that we've been taken through the scenic route, and we're probably already on the way back right now. I wanted to buy souvenirs !

 

[Belz...]

We start with no evidence for an HJ then conclude that an HJ is the best answer.

Actually, it probably is the best answer, but that's not the weak claim we're dealing with, here.

 

[Belz...]

Heck, look at our own modern world and look at all the unsupported (or even refuted) ideas that many people today believe in: The Bermuda Triangle, Homeopathy; Ancient Astronaut; Alien Abductions, New World Order Conspiracy, and the list goes on and on.

Indeed. I talked to someone once who told me she loved visiting haunted houses, to which I replied with my patented eye-roll text equivalent. In the end, I learned she chose to believe in ghosts because it's more exciting that way. Conspiracy theorists are also like that: many of them are aware of how improbable it sounds, but it's much more exciting. It's not hard to believe that people did that thousands of years back.

 

[davefoc]

"Secular articles on the Web"?

Sounds to me like an insinuation that what's published in the peer-reviewed journals is somehow not secular.

That happens to be wrong.

The "secular articles on the Web" are better described as amateur armchair speculation.

So far, I've presented an extensive historical background, relevant findings from archaeology, an overview of the life of the historical Jesus as viewed by modern scholarship, and the first parts of an extensive and detailed overview of the writings of Jesus's followers, and I've been explaining how historians can tell from these writings that these people were followers of a real person, and why the most fundamental planks of mythicism are factually incorrect.

As we go on, it will become clearer and clearer that no proposed mythicist theory holds up, and that all the evidence we have is neatly and concisely explained by a historical Jesus -- who, btw, should be our first guess at why this group claimed to be followers of a crucified apocalyptic Jew.

If that's not good enough for you, then I'll just have to leave you to your websites.

In one of your earlier posts you made an actual argument for the existence of an HJ. You argued that Paul referred to people in his letters that the recipients of his letters must have known the existence of otherwise it wouldn't make sense that Paul would refer to them. This is an actual argument for an HJ.

It wasn't as strong an argument as I thought it was initially because Paul never says that he visited the recipients of his letters together with the people he references nor does he say those people ever visited the recipients of his letter on their own.

So the argument had a kind of circular aspect to it. We know those people exist because Paul says they exist and we know that the recipients of the letters know those people exist because Paul or some unknown and undocumented individual told them they exist and we can therefore conclude those people must have existed.

But even if I didn't think the argument was as strong as you did, it was an argument about the existence of the HJ. I don't see how long speculative posts about what Paul meant are either argument or evidence for the existence of an HJ. You seem to and I will give you there are many things on this earth that I don't understand and maybe you have found a path to truth about this situation that eludes me. For me the situation is simple: Paul seems credible but what other evidence is available to corroborate a conclusion that his letters are referring to an HJ that existed? Right now your entire argument rests on an idea that Paul can be trusted and I don't trust him that much and I don't trust that the people who copied his letters that much or that the Paul story is actual history. Corroboration is the key and without that you are left where the rest of us are: The nature of the HJ is completely a matter of speculation based on guesses that rest on assumptions about what truth exists in unreliable and known to be generally non-factual documents.

I suspect that you might find some of the evidence that you claim supports the existence of an HJ in the Gospels. I think there is none there. They are obvious fiction and even if there are bits and pieces of historical truth in them it isn't possible to decide what that is without corroboration.

You place a great deal of importance about what certain people that you consider scholars or historians think about the HJ. I think Ians has explained in significant detail why this consensus that you hang a great deal of your argument on is not as credible as you think. You reject what Ians and others have had to say about the low credibility and ambiguous nature of this consensus. And your view might be the right one on this. However, I would find it more credible if you could point to scholars that don't make their living teasing out the minutia of the life of an HJ from ambiguous, highly unreliable documents. Instead of regaling us with your reliance on this consensus why don't you pick one or two of these experts that have written detailed analysis about what can be reliably ascertained from the available evidence and tell us what they have to say?

 

[maximara]

Where did we get these "records" ?

For all we know Mark just took Paul and made the whole thing himself based on hearsay.

As James Burke's in the "Matter of Fact" part of his Day the Universe Changed pointed out "records" in a largely illiterate society are hearsay!

Which brings one to the issue of just how illiterate was Roman society?

According to Anthony DiRenzo's "His Master's Voice: Tiro and the Rise of the Roman Secretarial Class" Roman society was very literate.

"Like all Roman children, Tiro was sent to elementary school, the ludus litterarius, to learn reading and writing. his was not an act of generosity but necessity. Rome was the most literate society of the classical world, "a civilization based on the book and the register," and "no one, either free or slave, could afford to be illiterate"" I should mention that Tiro was born a slave 94 BCE.

Now sit down and think about that for a moment: A slave, the lowest rung in Roman society, was taught how to read and write over a hundred years before Jesus supposedly preached in Galilee...and this was a normal thing.
Terry Jones' Medieval Lives showed just how out of wack our perception of the Medieval period is with actual written records...and in many cases those records for the High to Late Middle Ages (c1000 - c1500) are in far better shape then those of ancient Rome.

Which leaves the issue of how well do we really know the society of 1st century Roman controlled Galilee? Is the largely illiterate populace a reality or it is a self supporting fiction created by later generations?


Dupont, Florence. (1989) Daily Life in Ancient Rome Tr. Christopher Woodall. Oxford: Blackwell,

 

[davefoc]

...,

Interesting stuff but does it apply to the Palestinian area for non-Romans?

Somebody else linked to a claim that most of the words on burial inscriptions in the first century Palestinian area were in Greek.

What to make of that?

And, forgive me, because I might have missed something here, but what is the relevance to a discussion about the HJ? It does seem interesting and relevant but I'm not sure what to make of it. Does either claim (the literacy of Romans and the use of Greek on burial inscriptions) suggest something about the nature of a hypothetical HJ or his associates? Does it go to the issue of how likely it was that an HJ would have been written about?

 

[Belz...]

Which leaves the issue of how well do we really know the society of 1st century Roman controlled Galilee? Is the largely illiterate populace a reality or it is a self supporting fiction created by later generations?

I feel that you left out the "conclusion" part of your post. How does this relate to the topic ?

 

[Piggy]

In one of your earlier posts you made an actual argument for the existence of an HJ. You argued that Paul referred to people in his letters that the recipients of his letters must have known the existence of otherwise it wouldn't make sense that Paul would refer to them. This is an actual argument for an HJ.

It wasn't as strong an argument as I thought it was initially because Paul never says that he visited the recipients of his letters together with the people he references nor does he say those people ever visited the recipients of his letter on their own.

This is incorrect. I know I have at least twice mentioned the fact that some in Paul's congregation claimed to "follow Cephas", which makes no sense if Peter had not been to Corinth or if they had not otherwise met Peter.

 

[tsig]

Actually, it probably is the best answer, but that's not the weak claim we're dealing with, here.

Exactly, it's the certainty level claimed by the HJers that stick in the craw. That and the level of hate directed at the "mythicts".

I feel like I've walked int some sort of game and when I ask what the rules are I'm attacked as an aruleist then handed a bunch of books and told that everything in them about the rules is false but if I study who wrote them and why and understand their culture the rules will become obvious.

 

[davefoc]

This is incorrect. I know I have at least twice mentioned the fact that some in Paul's congregation claimed to "follow Cephas", which makes no sense if Peter had not been to Corinth or if they had not otherwise met Peter.

Of Simon, Peter and Cephas which do you believe are the same person? What is the evidence that links Cephas to Peter to an individual that was chosen as an apostle of Jesus? Is there evidence that these three names all apply to the same individual outside of the Gospels?

Why do you believe that Simon/Peter/Cephas had to have visited the Corinthians for him to have followers there?

 

[JaysonR]

Eight Bits;

Sorry for the delay in getting back; I wasn't around for the past couple days.

Reading over your last response, there's only two things to really convey.

The first is that I cannot dismiss the possibility that the Synoptic authors were poorly informed and unknowingly creating errant information off of which they further exaggerated.
I'm very open to this possibility.

I do not consider this to meet the requirements of contemporary fiction.
It would satisfy the claim of historically errant; as happens fairly commonly enough when ancients attempted to create historical accounts.


The second is that what I was stating; and all that I was stating in this tangent; was that it would not line up for an overt action of openly creating the entire figure of Jesus as a fictional character (e.g. Tom Clancy, Michael Crichton, J.K. Rowling, et. al.) for this time period.

I am not stating that the figure therefore is proven to history.
No.
Only that the authors, any of them, would have believed this figure to have been real, and written in apocalyptic form of this figure, creating extreme and grand elaborations of the figure's importance and value; as is the nature of this genre.

And they would have done so assuming this figure to have existed in some form.


The only point I was ever attempting to address was the idea of intentional character creation as we do today in contemporary fiction; something that wasn't done then.
No one wrote, intentionally, of fictional characters asserted to exist in their cultural population and time.


That idea, not any other, would require a rewrite of our current anthropological timeline for literature.



davefoc;
This response to Eight Bit should also clear up some confusion which had caused you to post your inquiry; that I am not stating that this shows a guarantee of existence, and was only addressing a specific tangent regarding overt fictional creation.

 

[davefoc]

...
davefoc;
This response to Eight Bit should also clear up some confusion which had caused you to post your inquiry; that I am not stating that this shows a guarantee of existence, and was only addressing a specific tangent regarding overt fictional creation.

It does and now I understand your point a little better it is an interesting one.

But what of the twelve apostles? Do you think the Gospel authors were basing these on characters on an oral tradition? It looks like the simple explanation is that they just added some characters to their story until they had named twelve guys.

Maybe, I have still missed your point? Maybe making up the names of a few apostles isn't the same thing as making up the character that your whole story is based on? FWIW, it seems unlikely to me that the author of Mark didn't believe there had been an HJ. I think he was exploiting a market for information about the HJ in response to a growing belief in his community that an HJ had existed. He grabbed every related fact he could find and wrote his story around those facts.

 

[JaysonR]

The apostles are both at once clearly two states to the authors: believed to be real, and symbolic.

We don't know the actual number of apostles in hard fact.
There is easily a possibility for disciples, a very common practice of the era and culture, and then for the concept of the disciples to jump to the twelve value.

For instance, and this is just conjecture to show the possibilities in this tangent regarding the disciples, it could have been that the original oral iteration of these tales was that the disciples were of the twelve tribes of Israel, which wouldn't refer to a literal twelve disciples, but sort of like electoral representatives in America.
Meaning, there could only have been five, but those five could have represented the twelve tribes.
This could have evolved into the twelve disciples by the itch to scratch to name each and give each a persona that matches the represented tribe of Israel.

And on and on.

It's very unlikely that if such a figure existed as Jesus, that they would not have a disciple base.
How large that disciple base was is, at this point, practically impossible to establish.


But yes, in creating such figures fictionally; this would not represent the concept of contemporary fiction as these, if fictional, would be believed to have originated upon real people and had been exaggerated into symbolic representation as is the form of apocalyptic writing.
In fact, considering that numbers are special symbols in apocalyptic literature; it's doubtful that the number was specifically twelve.

 

[eight bits]

Piggy

This is incorrect. I know I have at least twice mentioned the fact that some in Paul's congregation claimed to "follow Cephas", which makes no sense if Peter had not been to Corinth or if they had not otherwise met Peter.

Paul also says that some in Paul's congregation claimed to "follow Christ" (same verse as yours, 1 Corinthians 1: 12).

Does that "make no sense" if Christ had not been to Corinth or if they had not otherwise met Christ?

I know - stonewall it, Piggy.

Jason

We seem to be in general agreement about historical errancy and related issues.

On the other,

Only that the authors, any of them, would have believed this figure to have been real, and written in apocalyptic form of this figure, creating extreme and grand elaborations of the figure's importance and value; as is the nature of this genre.

I suspect, but cannot prove, that the authors of Daniel knew that they were making him up. In any case, he is made up. The genre had been invented.

I think the authors of the Gospels had an unprecedented advantage over their predecessors: Paul and other vendors had created a Gentile market for Jesus stories. Even in what little survives of Paul's perfomances, we can see a skeleton that only needs to be filled in, for an auidence at least one generation and several days-to-weeks journey from the action... which was rather neatly destroyed within 5 years of the earliest confidently offered date for Mark, or maybe Jerusalem was already destroyed or under siege when Mark wrote.

No one wrote, intentionally, of fictional characters asserted to exist in their cultural population and time.

I renew my observation that no evangelist set Jesus in his audience's world, a Gentile world where Jerusalem was either under seige or the temple had been destroyed. On the contray, all four Gospels are set in a Palestinian Jewish setting where people come and go in Jeriualem as they please, and the Second Temple stands.

I also renew my observation that in order to write fiction intentionally, the writer must know whether the indicents are fictitious. None of the evangelists was neessarily in a position to know this from their own knowledge.

I am on record that I think it's 60-40 that there was a historical Jesus who counts. But the short end, the 40, reflects my assessment that Mark could easily have created what have from him working from the suggestive bits of Paul's stories about a man Paul knows only from his dreams.

Ah, do you object that in that case Mark would know what he was doing?

Fine, you get the same product if Mark heard how other people had filled in Paul. Now, Mark doesn't know whether they filled in truthfully or not. You're happy (no intentional fiction), I'm happy (the 40 is justified).

Who knows? Maybe you and I have a deal on this.

 

[JaysonR]

I think there's possibly a misunderstanding, I'm not certain, of whether you understand what contemporary fiction implies.

Daniel is not a representation of that genre, as the dating of its writing is after the fact of the figure by a considerable length of time.

The cultural separation that you are offering regarding non-Hebrews and Hebrews is like me writing an account of something in Germany.
If I did so fictionally, knowingly creating such, then this would still be contemporary fiction; the genre doesn't require immediate cultural identity to be such.

An example that isn't contemporary fiction would be (most) science fiction; where a world that is described simply is not this one that we live in, nor this time in which we live.

To set Jesus "in their world" doesn't just mean in the reader's immediate culture; but their world and time as a whole.
For example, "Rising Sun", is contemporary fiction even though it was not set in America, but Japan.


And yes, the authors could have been completely errant; writing of a person who never was, and of basic events that never occurred.
I cannot rule that out completely.

I am only pointing out that these are apocalyptic writings; not contemporary fiction.
As such, that means the authors believed their principle figures were real and elaborated upon them the symbolic narratives and values of their interest.

 

[Brainache]

I don't know how others use the term, but I use the term in two ways, which are not uncommon in this field.

When discussing the content of the texts, we speak of the "traditions" which are active in different communities. So the Markian community expresses no birth tradition, for example. It simply refers to beliefs -- accurate or not -- which have been accepted by a given group which have been handed down to them.

OK. Not the sense I was asking about.

We can also talk of traditions in terms of belief about the texts and groups themselves. For example the tradition that Mark was the author of the Gospel according to Mark, or that Peter founded the church in Rome.

So tradition in these contexts simply refers to beliefs that have been handed down. In some cases, these traditions are accurate (Jesus was crucified by Pilate) and in other cases they're not (Jesus was raised from the dead).

More specifically, I was asking about the traditions of where those guys got their information. Who was the first person that we know of to write "Mark learned his Gospel from the sermons of Peter The Rock", or "Luke was a travelling companion of Paul" - Was it one of those early guys (Justin, Origen, etc), or was it someone like Saint Helena just deciding that must be the case?

I could google it I suppose, but frankly it might take years for me...

 

[Brainache]

I think there's possibly a misunderstanding, I'm not certain, of whether you understand what contemporary fiction implies.

(...)

I am only pointing out that these are apocalyptic writings; not contemporary fiction.
As such, that means the authors believed their principle figures were real and elaborated upon them the symbolic narratives and values of their interest.

Is the central figure of Apocalyptic writing the Hero, or the Vengeful God? Are they both the same?

My brain hurts.

 

[JaysonR]

Is the central figure of Apocalyptic writing the Hero, or the Vengeful God? Are they both the same?

My brain hurts.

The central figure of apocalyptic writing is the messianic or prophetic individual.


Orthodoxy later took an interesting interpretation of apocalyptic literature by unifying the messianic figure with the god identity and created a new genre out of it, not by the authors, but by the readers.

It's a really unique moment in the anthropology of literature as there's really no other moment where the reading body redefines a genre after a certain date by their interpretation of an earlier and already established genre of literature (or, at least, the only instance I'm aware of).

 

[eight bits]

Daniel is not a representation of that genre, as the dating of its writing is after the fact of the figure by a considerable length of time.

What's considerable? The Gospels are set in a city that was destroyed before at least three of the four were written, depicting people practicing a religion, Second Temple Judaism, that no longer existed.

Sounds like a pretty considerable interval to me.

like me writing an account of something in Germany.

In your experience, then, Germans refuse to eat with non-Germans? If a German woman married me (I'm Irish), then her parents would disown her?

No, Jayson. Jews in Palestine and Gentiles outside of Palestine lived in different cultures at the time the Gospels were written. Contemporary Germans and Irish intermingle freely.

I am only pointing out that these are apocalyptic writings...

Targeted to Gentiles. But there was no novelty at all in writing for Gentiles about how Gentiles can participate in the Jewish end of days?

As I trust you can see, we simply disagree, then. Too bad, I thought we could have made that deal. Maybe next time.

 

[Brainache]

The central figure of apocalyptic writing is the messianic or prophetic individual.

This is one of the central Hj arguments, isn't it? The fact that to get the job of Messiah, being a flesh and blood human being is an essential qualification.

Orthodoxy later took an interesting interpretation of apocalyptic literature by unifying the messianic figure with the god identity and created a new genre out of it, not by the authors, but by the readers.

It's a really unique moment in the anthropology of literature as there's really no other moment where the reading body redefines a genre after a certain date by their interpretation of an earlier and already established genre of literature (or, at least, the only instance I'm aware of).

Go tell it to the Greeks...