pakeha
Penultimate Amazing
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Thanks for a great link, maximara.
Yes.
The protests over Pilate's aqueduct project come to mind.
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What counts as a historical Jesus?
- Thread starter Humes fork
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Thanks for a great link, maximara.
Yes.
The protests over Pilate's aqueduct project come to mind.
Belz...
Fiend God
I think you're confusing Maximara and IanS, here.
Sorry to all concerned. I know they have different views.
The flaw here is that Euhemerism was pretty much flavor of the period. Herodotus, the father of history, had argued that myths were distorted accounts of real historical events. Euhemerus took that idea and kicked it up to the next level suggesting that all myths had some basis in historical fact (Spence, Lewis (1921) An introduction to mythology p. 42)
"The work is of immense importance, for Euhemerus proposes that myth is history in disguise, that deities were originally living men and women who were elevated to divine status because of heroic feats when alive." (Neusner, Jacob; Alan Jeffery Avery-Peck (2007) Encyclopedia of religious and philosophical writings in late antiquity Brill, Page 369)
The statement "Osiris, Attis, Adonis were men. They died as men; they rose as gods." (Hastings, James; John Alexander Selbie, Louis Herbert Gray (1919) Encyclopædia of religion and ethics, Volume 10) captures this mind set perfectly.
If the mindset that every known deity is actually the distortion of a once living person then the concept that a deity was the product of hallucination with no real person behind them would never occur to you.
In fact, hallucination and delusion being viewed as reliable evidence was demonstrated in the 1692 Salem witch trials.
So you have a view that every deity is the distorted memory of someone who did a great feat coupled with the idea that "visions" are messages (ala Oracle of Delphi) totally nixing any idea of philosophical myth.
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There were any number of mythical gods introduced into the religious beliefs of that region by the Greeks from at least 300BC, and then with the Romans from around 30BC. Like Jesus, several of these were also dying and rising gods. Those gods all had names. But none of them were real … though people at the time were certain they were real.
The "case" is made by the simple fact that if you read Helms, he describes where all the gospels stories of Jesus came from in OT writing. The Jesus of those stories was certainly mythical, because the stories were already in the OT many centuries before Paul‘s vision of a supernatural risen messiah (get a copy of Helms book, and you can read it for yourself).
All throughout history, since many thousands of years BC, and all the way through right up to the present day, religious fanatics in all religions and in all parts of the world, have believed in countless imaginary mythical gods, angels, devils, demons & spirits etc. So it would hardly be a surprise if Jesus was any different from all the thousands of others, especially since nobody who ever wrote about him had ever seen him, heard him or otherwise met him, and all thought that he must have died at some time in their past. The anonymous biblical writers and copyists who wrote about him were also probably Christians’ fanatical in their religious belief, & hardly a neutral reliable source on the matter of their religious beliefs in the supernatural.
The Dead Sea Scrolls which long predated Jesus, but which continued to be written all through the time of Jesus and Paul, ie from c.200BC through to about 70AD, also describe a previously unknown figure who they called their Teacher of Righteousness, who may or may not ever have been a real living high priest of the time, or who may have been a real priestly leader from centuries before, or who may have only ever have been just a mythical figure drawn from their practice of creating reality out of their religious dreams based yet again on their faithful certainty in the inerrancy of OT writing about the messiah who would definitely save the Jewish nation ... just like Paul seems to have been doing by c.35AD.
So there are plenty of earlier precedents for someone like Paul claiming to see a vision of a supernatural messiah sent from God and fulfilling the OT. In this case, a supernatural messiah who had in any case been prophesised and believed by devout Jews in that precise region as a god-given certainty from at least 500 years before Jesus.
And against that, you want to say what? That you just can't understand how Paul or later gospel writers could have come to think a messianic god figure had once existed, according to OT scripture, and done all the things in OT scripture? You are just incredulous about that?
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Belz...
Fiend God
And what to make of the Spartan kings, who believed they descended from Herakles. Was the latter a real person because of this ?
I don't think you fully understand how Euhemerism operated.
Remember the whole premise of Euhemerism was that all deities and heroes were real living people with their stories being exaggerations and perversions of their actions.
So it wasn't because the Spartan kings believed they descended from Herakles that made him viewed as a real person but because within the framework of Euhemerism that was a given.
The closest modern examples would be
George Washington and the Cherry Tree
Jessie James and the Widow
Davy Crockett and the Frozen Dawn
So in the Euhemerism mindset something like the Grim Reaper would not be viewed as a personification of a concept but rather that there once had been an emaciated person running around with a scythe killing people.
Heck the Euhemerism concept was so strong that if you took any fictional character with a large body of material to that time they would go from the standpoint that the character actually existed and work backwards from there.
Take Galactus devourer of worlds from Marvel comics for example. In the Euhemerism mindset the go to is that Galactus was a once a living person. Now in Greek the term for worlds as we know them is ἀστὴρ πλανήτης (astēr planētēs) which can be shorted to πλανήτης which means "wander" or if you wish travelers. So in the Euhemerism mindset the stories of Galactus are perversions of the actions of a cannibalistic innkeeper.
While this is over simplistic it does show the problem we have with putting our modern views into that time period.
Go back to Sherlock Holmes for a moment. A good hunk of him was based on two real people: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle himself and his teacher Joseph Bell. This is something people with the Euhemerism mindset could kind of relate to but they would put the Holmes stories on par with The Trojan Women a fictionalizing of actual historical events.
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Craig - if you and others here have not already seen the following clip, then it’s quite revealing - it says almost word for word what I have been describing to you over the past however many pages.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21NoQuKTB8Q
The clip (which is quite short) shows an amicable and non-confrontational discussion between Richard Dawkins and Bible Scholar and Historian John Huddlestun who is Associate professor of Religious Studies at the College of Charleston. http://religiousstudies.cofc.edu/about/faculty-staff-listing/huddlestun-john.php
As might be expected for a religious Studies professor whose entire academic record is derived from religious qualifications, Huddlestun does believe that Jesus was real and that James was his real brother (though that specific issue is tactfully side-stepped by Dawkins). But apart from that, Huddlestun freely admits that almost everything else in OT and NT writing is probably fictional.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21NoQuKTB8Q
The clip (which is quite short) shows an amicable and non-confrontational discussion between Richard Dawkins and Bible Scholar and Historian John Huddlestun who is Associate professor of Religious Studies at the College of Charleston. http://religiousstudies.cofc.edu/about/faculty-staff-listing/huddlestun-john.php
As might be expected for a religious Studies professor whose entire academic record is derived from religious qualifications, Huddlestun does believe that Jesus was real and that James was his real brother (though that specific issue is tactfully side-stepped by Dawkins). But apart from that, Huddlestun freely admits that almost everything else in OT and NT writing is probably fictional.
I can't get YouTube here. I'll look at it later. A reading of The God Delusion suggests that Dawkins admits the probability of an HJ.
This is certainly the case for C Hitchens, God Is Not Great. On p118 of the hardback edition he opines not only that Jesus existed, but that he believed himself to be "God or the Son of God". I wrote to him disputing this point in these terms:
May I say that Hitchens perpetrates a few Biblical howlers in the GING hardback.
On page 117 he divides the Gospels into two categories: "apocryphal" and "synoptic" thus leaving poor John out in the cold.
And a historical howler.
In fact they were removed in 1791 by the National Assembly, and Napoleon reimposed discriminatory laws in 1808.
I value the opinions of Dawkins but his main area of expertise is not the historicity of the scriptures. That is even more true of the late Christopher Hitchens.
By the way, everything I state in this subject is about the existence or otherwise of a natural historical person. There is a mythical Jesus who certainly had no real existence, like the mythical Alexander or Midas, if not like Robin Hood or William Tell who had no non-mythical counterpart at all.
Belz...
Fiend God
I think you have to be cautious and read between the lines when hearing Dawkins say anything either way on the existence of Jesus.
For example - the only time I’ve heard Dawkins say anything direct on this, is in one of his YouTube debates where he merely says something like “we don’t really know if Jesus existed, he probably did, but in any case …”, and then he drops that issue altogether and continues with the other points that they were actually debating.
But that sort of spoken line from Dawkins is really just being delivered as a way of refusing to be drawn into any direct debate about a real-HJ, and probably on the basis that its’ not at all the reason he’s been speaking out against religious belief.
Try to get a look at that link (above). I had not seen that before. But what Huddlestun says about the total lack of evidence and the obviously fictional nature of much of this Judeo-Christian writing may come as a surprise to many people who believe that there is much if any factual historical basis to any OT or NT writing.
It would of course have been even more interesting if Dawkins had asked Huddlestun what actual evidence he was using to conclude that Jesus did exist and that “James” was his brother. But as I say, Dawkins decided not to make any comment on that at all, and I suspect that was because it would have risked taking the discussion into an altogether more emotive area.
Sure. But the God Delusion is not a book which is concerned in any way at all with the historical existence or otherwise of Jesus. And neither Dawkins, nor Hitchens, nor indeed Sam Harris or Dan Dennett or Victor Stenger etc. are concerned at all in their writing with disputes over the existence of Jesus. For all of those authors, the focus of their concern is the danger posed by modern-day fanatical religious belief ... mainly radical Islam, but also to a lesser extent radical Christian beliefs in the USA.
That's why I have never referenced The God Delusion or any similar books anywhere in this thread. They are not really relevant here at all.
The relevant books are those from authors like Ellegard and Helms etc. (Wells, Carrier, Doherty....), which are specifically and entirely on this question of the evidence for the existence of Jesus, and where I have of course drawn attention to several of those.
In that YouTube clip, Dawkins is merely acting as benign interviewer. The answers, and hence the interesting info., is what comes from Huddlestun as the academic Biblical Scholar/Historian.
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Then there is no need for you to mention them in this thread. Moreover if Dawkins has said that HJ "probably did" exist, then either he believes that Jesus probably did exist ... or he is a liar.
You will notice that Dawkins does not say how Jesus might have existed. Dawkins could be going for the way Robin Hood and King Arthur "probably did exist"-- just enough to point to there being one or more people being behind the stories but not enough to really say anything more than that.
No I think he means that Jesus probably did exist. Robin Hood certainly, and Arthur probably, didn't exist. If he thought Jesus was like Robin Hood, he would surely have said "almost certainly did not exist". I am here assuming that Dawkins knows what words mean, and that he is honest in the expression of his opinions.
Belz...
Fiend God
Probably, certainly, can we move on to some of the evidence we were promised ?
davefoc
Philosopher
I think, at this point, it is reasonable to not expect that anybody participating is this thread is going to supply any evidence that can sustain a strong belief that an historical Jesus existed that is going to satisfy the majority of the participants in this thread.
But what about the evidence that is enough to sustain a view that an HJ probably existed? Perhaps it would be useful to get a better presentation of that in this thread. Craig B and eight bits seem to have done the best job of that so far of doing that and perhaps one of them could provide a good summary of what they think those arguments are?
A very preliminary description of what I think some of that evidence might consist of is:
Opinion of experts
Although I have mostly argued that the opinion of experts is not as useful as the people who believe that the existence of an HJ is a given it still seems like an argument that favors the existence of an HJ. John Huddleston the man in the video that IanS linked to above seemed to think it was a given that an HJ existed and he seemed like a bright guy that was very well informed and very objective about biblical history.
Paul's description of meeting with people that knew the HJ
If one assumes that Paul existed, that he wrote some of the letters attributed to him and that he is not lying about everything his references to meeting people that knew the HJ seem to provide some evidence for an HJ. How persuasive is this evidence and specifically which references to Jesus' associates are the most persuasive.
There is some truth about an HJ that can be ascertained in the Gospels
Maybe there is. One of the arguments is that some of the incidents described in the Gospels seem to be against the interest of the people promoting the new religion and if there hadn't been an oral tradition that supported those incidents which forced the hand of the Gospel writers to include them they wouldn't have been included.
FWIW, I agree that the above arguments are weak and can't be used to support a case that the existence of an HJ is highly likely. But are they good enough perhaps combined with other similar kinds of arguments enough to support a view that an HJ probably existed?
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Calm down. There’s no need for you to be so confrontational in every reply. I did not "mention them" to raise anything they said on the matter ... it was you who "mentioned/introduced" The God Delusion and Hitchens book (God is not Great) ... as I emphasised before, Dawkins is only there as an interviewer asking what Huddleston says (not what Dawkins thinks ... he doesn't really say what he thinks, he just asks Huddlestun for his academic opinions).
Belz...
Fiend God
I am not convinced that Paul is likely to have met people who actually met Jesus. That's not at all clear from his letters, in my opinion. Also, your paragraph begins with three words that throw the "probably" thing under the bus.
Doesn't sound like much, does it ?
Acleron
Master Poster
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Dawkins is reflecting the way many scientists think, if there is little or no evidence then it is not an 'interesting' question.
I scare quote the word because in this context it means it is not a question that can lead to any further knowledge.
The discussion here is interesting in so far as it shows a different approach by those convinced of an HJ, general historical research and those with a more scientific background.
Too many years ago I uncritically accepted that HJ existed. This thread has shown that the Jesus of the faiths almost certainly did not exist, and that the evidence for even someone who was born somewhere in the Middle East, died on a cross and was called Jesus is lacking much credibility. My own estimate of the probability of an HJ is presently 0.3 and falling. (Thank you Douglas)
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