What counts as a historical Jesus?

[JaysonR]

Eight Bits;

You know the time it took to establish the Nicene Creed?
That's about how much time difference there is between the narrative and the authorship of Daniel.

It would be like me writing about the founding of Jamestown as my setting for my novel.
That wouldn't be contemporary fiction, at that point.
That would be historical fiction.


You're creating a separation that doesn't exist in the identification of contemporary fiction, in the other aspect that you are raising.
If I lived in 1943, in an Amish community isolated from the world, and wrote a spy novel set in Germany; this would be contemporary fiction.

It would not be contemporary fiction if I wrote about something hundreds and hundreds of years ago, or if I wrote something that was completely of a different world.


Contemporary fiction is defined by a writing style of fiction whereby the world and time are within the generation of the author.
Early 2nd c CE is still within the generational timeline, and within the same world setting itself.
If such were written as intentional fiction, then it would change our current timeline for contemporary fiction to half a thousand years earlier than anthropology currently places it as beginning.


Something can be inaccurate and not be contemporary fiction.
To claim it as contemporary fiction requires a heck of allot more proof than is possible to show.

 

[JaysonR]

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.

If the authorship origin for the narrative can be shown to have authentically been Hebrew, then this would be true.

 

[Brainache]

If the authorship origin for the narrative can be shown to have authentically been Hebrew, then this would be true.

Especially difficult, I would imagine, given the Hellenised nature of 1st Century Jerusalem. ...Two cultures collide; Hebrew God concepts are translated into Greek and transmitted to a new generation of Hellenised Jews, alongside other stories and ideas that come from the Greek language itself.

Give it a few generations and a Jewish/Greek Hybrid Religion appears... It's all about the memes, man!

ETA: I'd also like to point out to interested readers that a lot of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the records of an extremely fanatical sect of 1st century apocalyptic Jews around Jerusalem, were written in Greek, not Hebrew.

 

[cj.23]

I have a hard time taking anything seriously that begins:
This is patent BS. Anybody that starts out a list of evidence for the HJ like this makes it hard for me to take anything else he says seriously.

Go on then. Give me a better attested figure in the literature of the period, not an Emperor or monarch, not using archeological realia as I suggest. I'm sure there may be some, but I'm thinking hard...

cj x

 

[cj.23]

Because if it true, it is true in only the most trivial and misleading way. Only a very tiny percentage of people that lived in the first century to are attested to by name, so since Jesus was attested to by name that makes him better attested to than almost everybody else that lived in the first century.

It's true. I thought you were disputing it's truth, but clearly I was wrong. I suggest you attempt the little experiment i suggested at the beginning of the post.

The issue isn't whether or not the HJ was attested to but rather whether those attestations were reliable enough to sustain a strong belief that the HJ existed.

Yes. I go on to cover that in some depth?

Not only does the argument imply that its conclusion is more important that it is, it implies that people who are skeptical about the strength of evidence for an HJ would be unaware of such a simplistic notion.

Er, where?

ETA: Or it implies that the NT isn't all that unreliable, which seems to be another nonsense argument that the author of that post makes a little farther down in his mostly bogus list of pro-HJ arguments.

In what sense do you mean the NT is not unreliable? I don';t recall making that claim anywhere. In fact I point to authors like Vermes and Dunn, and go to some length to point out ... oh never mind! I suspect this will go nowhere. I am just going to leave it at read what I wrote again -- I dod not say what you seem to think?

cj x

 

[eight bits]

You know the time it took to establish the Nicene Creed?

As it happens, I do.

We disagree. I have acknowledged that, with disappointment, but also with resigned finality.

We agree the Gospels are set in the authors' past and in an exotic locale for the target audience. We disagree whether it is far enough in the past to avoid the description "contemporary," and to a lesser extent on whether spatial exoticism suffices for genre classification. That disagreement is a situation likely to persist.

Patronizing questions peripheral to the topic are unlikely to entice me to pursue a matter which seems to have been already fully aired, without resolution or much reasonable prospect of one.

 

[Brainache]

As it happens, I do.

We disagree. I have acknowledged that, with disappointment, but also with resigned finality.

We agree the Gospels are set in the authors' past and in an exotic locale for the target audience. We disagree whether it is far enough in the past to avoid the description "contemporary," and to a lesser extent on whether spatial exoticism suffices for genre classification. That disagreement is a situation likely to persist.

Patronizing questions peripheral to the topic are unlikely to entice me to pursue a matter which seems to have been already fully aired, without resolution or much reasonable prospect of one.

So are you saying that to the Gospel Authors Jerusalem was "The Lost World", or as alien as another planet on Star Trek is to us?

 

[Craig B]

You seem to be arguing only about which are the best words to use! You are now reduced to just arguing about the word “able”!?

No. It's an important point. The gospel writers all assert that Jesus was executed by Pilate. That means, in my opinion, that they believed Jesus was executed by Pilate, and therefore that he had lived in the recent past. If these writers had also been presented with the statements: "Jesus was executed by Alexander Janneus" in the less recent past, or "Jesus was executed by Titus" in the very recent past, then they could have stated which of the three statements they accepted as true and which as false. I'm sure we must not assume that they had chosen not to be able to distinguish truth from fiction as you suggest, and simply set down anything that took their fancy in an entirely random way.

The birth stories are evident fictions, but not random ones. Having identified Jesus as the Messiah, gMatthew and gLuke had thereby decided that he must have been born in Bethlehem (a prophesied Messianic attribute) and they duly inserted the appropriate accounts of this. But such considerations cannot explain the statement that he was executed by Pilate, as such a belief is not imposed by any scriptural prophecy or other text. By far the best way to account for it, therefore, is the hypothesis that it is factually true.

 

[JaysonR]

Especially difficult, I would imagine, given the Hellenised nature of 1st Century Jerusalem. ...Two cultures collide; Hebrew God concepts are translated into Greek and transmitted to a new generation of Hellenised Jews, alongside other stories and ideas that come from the Greek language itself.

Give it a few generations and a Jewish/Greek Hybrid Religion appears... It's all about the memes, man!

ETA: I'd also like to point out to interested readers that a lot of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the records of an extremely fanatical sect of 1st century apocalyptic Jews around Jerusalem, were written in Greek, not Hebrew.

I personally believe the case to be more that the tales were Hebrew in origin, and what mostly convinces me personally is the regular use of vernacular Aramaic expressions that really don't make any sense in the Greek (specifically these exist mostly in Mark and Matthew); these aren't translations, but transliterations.

It's not typical for someone to transliterate a term from a culture that is not their own.
Typically, when someone transliterates, it's because they lack a vocabulary strong enough to articulate the same word in the foreign language using multiple words if the word does not have a counterpart in the foreign language.

 

[JaysonR]

As it happens, I do.

We disagree. I have acknowledged that, with disappointment, but also with resigned finality.

We agree the Gospels are set in the authors' past and in an exotic locale for the target audience. We disagree whether it is far enough in the past to avoid the description "contemporary," and to a lesser extent on whether spatial exoticism suffices for genre classification. That disagreement is a situation likely to persist.

Patronizing questions peripheral to the topic are unlikely to entice me to pursue a matter which seems to have been already fully aired, without resolution or much reasonable prospect of one.

That wasn't patronizing at all and I'm sorry if it came off that way.
I meant that phrase conversationally.
You asked how long, and I gave a timeline comparison.

The Synoptics would have to be about that distance away, multiple generations, before we cease having the claim of contemporary fiction.

I gave that because that's about the time distance between the narrative of Daniel and the authoring of it; about the same distance as it would have been if the Synoptics were written at the time of the Nicene Creed instead of much earlier.

You brought up the need to compare and contrast Daniel to the Synoptics and why Daniel would not be contemporary while the Synoptics would be if they were intentionally fictional.

If both were intentionally fictional, then Daniel would be historical fiction and the Synoptics would be contemporary fiction.

I don't communicate through snide or patronizing tone; mainly because I have a difficult time recognizing when others are doing so.
I don't think that way very well and fail to recognize that method of communication when others do it.


I don't agree that it's the author's past (as in, before the author's time), nor recognize the validity of considering the exotic nature of any setting.
I agree that it's their contemporary time and world; again, contemporary is defined as within the same generation.

While I personally think these originated in Judea, the exotic status of any location is irrelevant to the classification of contemporary.

I could write about anywhere in the world, as long as it is my "present" time (keeping in mind this relates to any time within my generation), and it would be contemporary.


There's no reason for you to agree with me; the definition of contemporary fiction stands on its own...I'm not defining that.
The reason that it's called contemporary is because it is "present"; it is written by someone who is writing purposefully fictional stories of their understanding of the world in which they lived.

The Synoptic texts have not been recognized by literary anthropology as being examples of contemporary fiction; they are held as examples of apocalyptic literature.

 

[Craig B]

... ETA: I'd also like to point out to interested readers that a lot of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the records of an extremely fanatical sect of 1st century apocalyptic Jews around Jerusalem, were written in Greek, not Hebrew.

See the Table in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Sea_Scrolls#Language_and_script. The figure given for Greek is an estimated 3% of the total. These were almost all found in Cave 7, which contained mostly Greek texts.

 

[Piggy]

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?

You're kidding, right?

First of all, why do you insist on throwing out not only the best evidence we have, but the best evidence anyone could possibly hope to have?

Also, if you have a more probable alternative scenario to present, then do so.

 

[Piggy]

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...

Oh, that.

Those traditions are not ones that I'm much concerned with, since they're obviously wrong.

Which isn't to say that they're not interesting, but rather that they don't have anything to say about the HJ or about the earliest Xians. They do have something to say about later Xians, but that's not my particular interest.

Originally, the gospels were anonymous. They didn't come to be attributed to those authors until after the time period I'm concerned with.

 

[Piggy]

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.

In Jewish tradition, yes. To be a messiah -- an anointed one -- you had to be a person.

But there wasn't just one messiah. There could be different messiahs for different times, different people chosen by God for different purposes. The Qumranis held that there would be 2 apocalyptic messiahs, for example, one religious and one military.

For the original Christians, to call Jesus a messiah was not a unique term. Only "Son of Man" was unique. "Messiah" was not. God could anoint any number of messiahs, but only one Son of Man.

Of course, the movement we refer to as messianism was a school of thought related to one specific messiah, the one who would re-establish an independent Jerusalem which would be the single superpower among the nations of the world.

 

[maximara]

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?

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

One of the popular explanations for why there are no truly contemporary records of Jesus ministry is that he was preaching to a largely illiterate audience and he himself was illiterate.

However, Josephus in Against Apion (2.204) stated that the "law requires that they (children) be taught to read". Moreover based on Mark 1.39, 2.25, 12.10; Matt. 12.5, 19.4, 21.16; Luke 4.16; and John 7.15 Jesus himself appears to been able to read and write.

So you have all Romans (subjects?) being taught how to read and write and there was a Jewish law requiring their children to read and write and then we are asked to swallow the idea that not a single person recorded Jesus' actions during his lifetime because nearly everybody in the area was illiterate?

HOW DOES THAT WORK?!?

As much a manged mess is Mark's timeline he does give us some things to work with. Jesus started his ministry after being baptized by John the Baptist and was still going after John's beheading. Luke give the first as 29 CE and Josephus indicates the later was in 36 CE resulting in a seven year ministry.

And yet despite all the indications that Romans and Jews of the 1st century were highly literate thanks to a mandated education we are told they weren't so that the absence of records about Jesus during his life time is explained.

And here I thought the shuffle to make Matthew and Luke agree was a piece of work.

 

[Brainache]

One of the popular explanations for why there are no truly contemporary records of Jesus ministry is that he was preaching to a largely illiterate audience and he himself was illiterate.

However, Josephus in Against Apion (2.204) stated that the "law requires that they (children) be taught to read". Moreover based on Mark 1.39, 2.25, 12.10; Matt. 12.5, 19.4, 21.16; Luke 4.16; and John 7.15 Jesus himself appears to been able to read and write.

So you have all Romans (subjects?) being taught how to read and write and there was a Jewish law requiring their children to read and write and then we are asked to swallow the idea that not a single person recorded Jesus' actions during his lifetime because nearly everybody in the area was illiterate?

HOW DOES THAT WORK?!?

As much a manged mess is Mark's timeline he does give us some things to work with. Jesus started his ministry after being baptized by John the Baptist and was still going after John's beheading. Luke give the first as 29 CE and Josephus indicates the later was in 36 CE resulting in a seven year ministry.

And yet despite all the indications that Romans and Jews of the 1st century were highly literate thanks to a mandated education we are told they weren't so that the absence of records about Jesus during his life time is explained.

And here I thought the shuffle to make Matthew and Luke agree was a piece of work.

Don't forget about the complete destruction of Jerusalem and the dispersion of the population into slavery... That might have some effect on how many mentions of travelling preachers around that time are likely to have survived.

 

[maximara]

Don't forget about the complete destruction of Jerusalem and the dispersion of the population into slavery... That might have some effect on how many mentions of travelling preachers around that time are likely to have survived.

The problem is that would only address the lost of records in Jerusalem; the Gospels have Jesus going through not only the Judaea province but the Arabia petraea province (Mt 3:13; Mk 1:9) and perhaps Syria province as well. So what about all the other places Jesus supposedly visited?

 

[JaysonR]

Giving the axiom of his existence to answer the question, Jesus could either not have gone to the locations or could have gone and only been impressionable to those who went with him, or those who somehow heard of these stories of the alleged travels.

Both are shared possibles to Jesus not existing.
This feature is too vague to aid in determining the historicity in itself.

 

[Brainache]

Oh, that.

Those traditions are not ones that I'm much concerned with, since they're obviously wrong.

Which isn't to say that they're not interesting, but rather that they don't have anything to say about the HJ or about the earliest Xians. They do have something to say about later Xians, but that's not my particular interest.

Originally, the gospels were anonymous. They didn't come to be attributed to those authors until after the time period I'm concerned with.

OK, so I googled the phrase - mark learned his gospels...- and the first site was an Apologist Detective (!) trying to make a case. But at least I think I found where the tradition comes from:

http://pleaseconvinceme.com/2012/marks-gospel-is-an-early-memoir-of-peter-2/

Papias said that Mark scribed Peter’s teachings
Eusebius (the well respected Church historian) wrote that Bishop Papias of Hierapolis (60-130AD) repeated the testimony of the old presbyters (disciples of the Apostles) who said that Mark wrote his Gospel in Rome as he scribed the preaching of Peter himself (Ecclesiastical History Book 2 Chapter 15, Book 3 Chapter 30 and Book 6 Chapter 14). Papias wrote a five volume work entitled, “Interpretation of the Oracles of the Lord”. In this treatise (which no longer exists), he quotes someone he identifies as ‘the elder’, (most likely John the elder), a man who held considerable authority in Asia:

“And the elder used to say this, Mark became Peter’s interpreter and wrote accurately all that he remembered, not, indeed, in order, of the things said and done by the Lord. For he had not heard the Lord, nor had followed him, but later on, followed Peter, who used to give teaching as necessity demanded but not making, as it were, an arrangement of the Lord’s oracles, so that Mark did nothing wrong in thus writing down single points as he remembered them. For to one thing he gave attention, to leave out nothing of what he had heard and to make no false statements in them.”

 

[eight bits]

Brainache

So are you saying that to the Gospel Authors Jerusalem was "The Lost World", or as alien as another planet on Star Trek is to us?

Sort of, but with careful attention to how much exoticism you can pack into a magical atory and still be mistaken for a realistic narrative. Mark found just the right "distance," I think, close enough that the story had immediate impact, but exotic enough to mitigate any automatic "that junk could never happen" reaction.

I think of Lost Horizon (which is turning out to be a very durable story, since a lot of it was recycled as the television series Lost). The premise is utterly unbelievable - there is a secret community of exceptionally long-lived people who maintain a watchful eye on the affairs of humanity while preserving a body of advanced cultural knowledge. The exoticism is almost entirely spatial, a setting in the Himalayas, and just a bit temporal, the recent past of the story's first readers. As with the Gospels' back-references to then-ancient prophecies, additional distancing is achieved by setting the backstory of the community far in the readers' past.

Craig B

By far the best way to account for it, therefore, is the hypothesis that it is factually true.

I have sympathy for the gist of the conclusion, being 60-40 and all, but not for the "by far," else I'd be 90-10 or something. The Gospel writers were picking up a character who already had a literature and lore, Paul's performances channeling Jesus. Being consistent with an established fiction is an alternative to conforming with actual fact.

For example, I can write a Sherlock Holmes story if I wish. If I did, then he must be British and live in the Nineteenth Century. I can write about a different character if I find those constraints unacceptable, but if I want to write about Sherlock Holmes, then those are requirements. That's not because they are true, but because this character has those established attributes, and the readership for Sherlock Holmes stories wants those conventions to be respected.

Enough Paul survives that we can see that a (not necessarily unique) reading of what reaches us is that Jesus had died recently, at Passover, as the result of treachery. None of that is actually in survivng Paul, but it is all "suggested" there. If a later writer created those neofacts, then his reader might recognize them as "new information," but nevertheless see them as additional specificity within the range of what Paul had launched (as John's Lazarus tale apparently was received).

If in addition there was any confusion about whether Jesus had actually lived (in other words, early readers thought it was possible that there had been a historical Jesus), then the innovations could easily "stick," and form the foundation for still later authors to build up further (as John could build on "lesser" raising stories, like Jairus' daughter and the widow's son).

Jason

You asked how long, and I gave a timeline comparison.

Which assumes that the standard of "long enough ago" is some set number of years, rather than the practical impossibility of verification in situ. That is what we disagree about. As I've mentioned, it is sufficiently clear that that disagreement will not be resolved here, and that I cannot proceed without being repetitious, so that I withdraw from pursuit of this point - not tfrom he thread, not from engaging you, but from pursuing this point.