eight bits
Graduate Poster
- Joined
- Sep 5, 2012
- Messages
- 1,580
I'd like to return to a rquest by davefoc which I lost track of, on account of the American holiday, and my energetic participation therein. First, I thank dave for his kind words.
1. Opinion of experts
2. Paul's description of meeting with people that knew the HJ
3. There is some truth about an HJ that can be ascertained in the Gospels
Here are my thoughts, and I'm just speaking personally about how I ended up 60-40 in favor of a historical Jesus who might count.
Experts I give just about no weight to expert conclusions about the final question itself. However, their arguments, citations of evidence and attempts to reconcile Jesus stories with what is believed about life in the time and place are grist for the mill.
Paul and whom he said he met Paul never says unambiguously he met anybody who had met a flesh-and-blood Jesus. He does, at least to my satisfaction, say clearly enough that he met people who saw a risen Jesus. The question is when (if ever) had that Jesus died?
Combining those first two dimensions, one use I make of expert opinion is to figure out what Paul, a Pharisee, would have believed before and after meeting what he thought was a dead man risen. It seems he might have believed that the end of days had begun when that man rose. Since Paul expects the end of days to unfold at a crisp pace, I think it is likely that he believes them to have begun near the time of the earliest appearances. That would be about three days after the man died, and Paul thinks he met people to whom the risen phantom appeared.
It could be otherwise, but I'm not more than 60-40 anyway. That's how I read it. Paul thinks Jesus died in the time of living men.
Gospels I think the intersection of Mark and Paul has some additional information, if only as an indicator of how Mark interpreted what he may have read in Paul. For example, I am persuaded that Paul taught that Jesus said something like "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." That Mark says Jesus said it, at 14:38, doesn't by itself sway me, but Paul, in Romans 7: 13-25, seems to give an exegesis of the pithy saying, without attribution.
It could be, of course, that Mark read Romans, thought mistakenly that Paul was expounding on a saying of Jesus, or just that it would improve the story if he depicted Jesus saying something like that, and so found a place for a fabricated short saying in a fabricated story. But again, this is what "60-40" means to me. More likely than not, the dead guy whom Paul was talking about had taught religion, IMO.
Finally, although I do not take much of John at face value, I give some weight to his claim to rely on an eyewitness for the crucifixion and a visionary after-death visitation (chapter 21). I also give some weight to Luke's expressed understanding that there were, once upon a time, not so long before, eyewitnesses. At the very least, the story that reaches Luke appears to have been of a real man who had lived within a generation or two of Luke, in a real place.
The evidence is painfully slim, and so, as always when there is little evidence, my conclusion reflects my sense of how the world works generally. But those are the chief arguments that take what little evidence there is, combine them with the modesty (I think) of what would count as a historical Jesus for me, to arrive at a personal 60-40 that such a man actually lived.
In the same post, dave presented a list of three dimensions for such a case:
1. Opinion of experts
2. Paul's description of meeting with people that knew the HJ
3. There is some truth about an HJ that can be ascertained in the Gospels
Here are my thoughts, and I'm just speaking personally about how I ended up 60-40 in favor of a historical Jesus who might count.
Experts I give just about no weight to expert conclusions about the final question itself. However, their arguments, citations of evidence and attempts to reconcile Jesus stories with what is believed about life in the time and place are grist for the mill.
Paul and whom he said he met Paul never says unambiguously he met anybody who had met a flesh-and-blood Jesus. He does, at least to my satisfaction, say clearly enough that he met people who saw a risen Jesus. The question is when (if ever) had that Jesus died?
Combining those first two dimensions, one use I make of expert opinion is to figure out what Paul, a Pharisee, would have believed before and after meeting what he thought was a dead man risen. It seems he might have believed that the end of days had begun when that man rose. Since Paul expects the end of days to unfold at a crisp pace, I think it is likely that he believes them to have begun near the time of the earliest appearances. That would be about three days after the man died, and Paul thinks he met people to whom the risen phantom appeared.
It could be otherwise, but I'm not more than 60-40 anyway. That's how I read it. Paul thinks Jesus died in the time of living men.
Gospels I think the intersection of Mark and Paul has some additional information, if only as an indicator of how Mark interpreted what he may have read in Paul. For example, I am persuaded that Paul taught that Jesus said something like "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." That Mark says Jesus said it, at 14:38, doesn't by itself sway me, but Paul, in Romans 7: 13-25, seems to give an exegesis of the pithy saying, without attribution.
It could be, of course, that Mark read Romans, thought mistakenly that Paul was expounding on a saying of Jesus, or just that it would improve the story if he depicted Jesus saying something like that, and so found a place for a fabricated short saying in a fabricated story. But again, this is what "60-40" means to me. More likely than not, the dead guy whom Paul was talking about had taught religion, IMO.
Finally, although I do not take much of John at face value, I give some weight to his claim to rely on an eyewitness for the crucifixion and a visionary after-death visitation (chapter 21). I also give some weight to Luke's expressed understanding that there were, once upon a time, not so long before, eyewitnesses. At the very least, the story that reaches Luke appears to have been of a real man who had lived within a generation or two of Luke, in a real place.
The evidence is painfully slim, and so, as always when there is little evidence, my conclusion reflects my sense of how the world works generally. But those are the chief arguments that take what little evidence there is, combine them with the modesty (I think) of what would count as a historical Jesus for me, to arrive at a personal 60-40 that such a man actually lived.
