What on earth are you talking about? These are my definitions of what would be meant by HJ, in response to a reminder of what the OP asked for. If you have different definitions, then by all means set them down.
What counts as a historical Jesus?
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eight bits
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IanS
Ironically, what might happen is what actually happened in this thread. Somebody qualified as an "expert witness," and testified at legnth on all manner of surmise and conjecture, based entirely on just these documents. It is only slightly more difficult to qualify as an expert in a United States court than on an internet forum, and only slightly less prestigious.
As an aside, I wouldn't assume that words attributed to a speaker in an ancient document were offered as verbatim, nor that they would have been taken as verbatim by the document's first readers. (Since you like legal documents, the same is true of the United States Congressional Record.)
The Gospel of John cites one witness-informant, male by the pronoun used, not necessarily any of those people, but the Beloved Disciple is a good candidate. Thus, at least six people are placed at the scene who are not proposed as witness-informants, along with one person who is claimed to be a witness-informant.
The disciple John is a good candidate for the Beloved Disciple. No disciple, however, is a leading candidate to be the evangelist John. So, when the evangelist says that BD was a witness to something, he is not (likely) speaking of himself.
We have in hand an unsworn hearsay report, not anything filed in an Anglo-American civilian-system adversarial-subject-matter legal action. The reporter says he has a witness for each of two incidents. Believe him or don't, but it's pointless to guess what would have happened had the matter been litigated in jurisdictions that didn't exist when the report was written.
Ironically, what might happen is what actually happened in this thread. Somebody qualified as an "expert witness," and testified at legnth on all manner of surmise and conjecture, based entirely on just these documents. It is only slightly more difficult to qualify as an expert in a United States court than on an internet forum, and only slightly less prestigious.
Witness has two meanings: more broadly, any person who had sensory experience of some event, and more narrowly, a person who claims to be a broad-sense witness and who tells the reporter about the experience. I am not aware of any Gospel report of witnesses in the second narrow sense, except for the two cases I mentioned. In neither of those cases did the reporter claim that there were narrow-sense witnesses for all the events reported.
As an aside, I wouldn't assume that words attributed to a speaker in an ancient document were offered as verbatim, nor that they would have been taken as verbatim by the document's first readers. (Since you like legal documents, the same is true of the United States Congressional Record.)
The Gospel of John places several survivng people at the crucifixion, some of them named (three Mary's), one nicknamed (the Beloved Disciple - whose identity plausibly was known to the first readers of the work), one identified by relationship (a sister of Jesus' mother) and functional characters (soldiers, plural, one of whom stabs Jesus).
The Gospel of John cites one witness-informant, male by the pronoun used, not necessarily any of those people, but the Beloved Disciple is a good candidate. Thus, at least six people are placed at the scene who are not proposed as witness-informants, along with one person who is claimed to be a witness-informant.
davefoc
Philosopher
Maximara, this has been a theme of yours throughout this thread. I don't know why. Craig B has stated his definition of an HJ. When he says that somebody that meets these characteristics probably existed he means that an HJ that meets his criteria for an HJ probably existed. I do not understand what there is to discuss about that. Nothing in a discussion precludes somebody from defining terms. It is done all the time.
If you want to use a broad definition of HJ in your posts nobody is preventing you from doing that. For me, your definition is too broad even if you can find historical precedent for it, but when you use the term HJ I don't have any trouble understanding what you are talking about.
As I understand your definition of HJ he certainly existed. The Gospels stories weren't created out of a complete vacuum. They used bits and pieces of information that were derived from stories about real people. Those people existed and one or a few of them would have contributed to ideas that got put into the Gospels. But this discussion has been mostly about whether an individual that roughly meets Craig B's definition existed. If there wasn't a specific person that roughly meets Craig B's definition most of us would agree that an HJ didn't exist. If you think that by your definition an HJ would have existed despite the fact that there wasn't one that met Craig B's definition that is a semantic disagreement only. Craig B has made his definition and you have made yours. Why is that a problem?
Because Craig B has this annoying habit of latching on minor points so the actual point is avoided. We already know that "the Jesus of Bethlehem, the Christ of Christianity, is an impossible character and does not exist."
We also know "That a man named Jesus, an obscure religious teacher, the basis of this fabulous Christ, lived in Palestine about nineteen hundred years ago, may be true. But of this man we know nothing. His biography has not been written."
One of the points I asked Craig B and instead got this little dodge was
"Also why would a historical Jesus need to be baptized and undertake preaching and healing expeditions? If as some people say Jesus was in reality an obscure nobody in his own time then these two points can be dismissed as efforts to make him more important."
As Wells pointed out "the "historical Jesus" reconstructed by New Testament scholars is always a reflection of the individual scholars who reconstruct him" to the point that "even if there was a historical Jesus lying back of the gospel Christ, he can never be recovered. If there ever was a historical Jesus, there isn't one any more."
Even Schweitzer had issues with this in 1906 but it raises a uneasy problem--if as both Schweitzer and Wells pointed out Jesus is something of a Captain Scarlett Tabla Rosa puppet then doesn't that mean any search for a historical Jesus is basically a search for the one in our head?
In this sense the search the historical Jesus becomes more like the search for the historical Robin Hood or King Arthur where anyone that fits what ever criteria we are looking for fits the bill.
Sorry I'm sure.
Dodge? Sorry again. I thought I was engaged in a discussion. I much resent these remarks and if a moderator deigns to read them I would ask for her or his assessment of their propriety.
I call them as I see them and you still haven't answered this point:
"Also why would a historical Jesus need to be baptized and undertake preaching and healing expeditions? If as some people say Jesus was in reality an obscure nobody in his own time then these two points can be dismissed as efforts to make him more important."
If your above comment is not a dodge (and now coupled with an implied threat) I don't know what is.
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IMHO one need to only look to Josh McDowell's "Evidence That Demands A Verdict" to see there much of this mindset is coming from. The book's very title suggests a trial when what you really get is at best a Grand Jury indictment.
And even by the standards of the US institution that would "indict a ham sandwich" (Sol Wachtler) the evidence is a joke. The chain of custody is a shambles on all the evidence. And even if somehow it got past the Grand Jury it would get pounded in the formal trial.
As John Armstrong pointed using this model all the Gospels are ripped to shreds. As for the other evidence it is too late to be anhy good...even if there wasn't evidence that it had been tampered with (which there is)
I think Craig B has answered that point. If he wasn't baptised by JTB, didn't preach or heal - then as far as Craig B (and almost everybody else in this thread) is concerned - it wasn't the Historical Jesus.
And if there was a guy, an obscure nobody who wasn't baptised by JTB, didn't preach about the Kingdom of God and didn't try to heal anybody- Then why the hell would anybody be starting a religion about the guy?
That and the coincidence -- which no myther has ever adequately explained away -- of the more colloquial passages in the NT being philosophical/ethical/etc. while the more and more extravagant and overt the "supernaturalia" in the texts, the more self-consciously "literary" the style. This is a pattern that points to the mundane and real becoming embellished and fantastical/supernatural over time, rather than the reverse, something mythical becoming human.
Since myther bots have already addressed and then just ignored or explained away, in ways that utterly ignore the principle of Occam's Razor, these two highlighted aspects ad nauseum, on this and other boards that I've seen -- just as creationists have routinely addressed and dumped the best evidence for evolution, and Holocaust deniers have done the same with the most solid evidence for 6 million Jews having been deliberately exterminated -- I now know that stressing this morphing from colloquial to "literary" and the Josephus reference to James brother of the Annointed -- which is invariant in all sources and even cited in Origen before Christianity was even mainstreamed -- is just a waste of time. Mythers and their fellow travelers are not interested in honestly scrutinizing the evidence, only in peddling their propaganda by any means necessary, including ignoring the facts that SECULAR AND FREQUENTLY ATHEIST PROFESSIONAL SCHOLARS have painstakingly assembled across the decades.
Once someone like the mythers' pre-judging outrageously biased ilk submits a peer-vetted argument in a professional scholarly journal, that and that only will be the time when we can really field-test these arguments for their integrity. Until then, their standing is precisely the same as that of all creationists. A journal article of that sort has not happened yet. Moreover, when it happens, we will have to see what is its reception after that.
There is another aspect here that makes the typical myther approach fundamentally flawed: like Creationists, they insist on pretending that there is only a tiny minimal handful of individual pieces of evidence that purportedly support the consensus position from professionals (such as the consensus that evolution is for real), thus pretending that once this minimal number of "supports" is tossed aside (for invariably meretricious reasons), one can then throw out an entire century of additional carefully peer-vetted professional research by hundreds of different researchers from AAAAAAAAALLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL cultural perspectives.
Thus, they ignore consilience: the consilience of thousands of pieces of data, large and small, that all point to the same set of conclusions.
In this case, the James reference in Josephus and its confirmation in the pre-Constantine Origen, plus the morphing from colloquial to "literary" paralleling the morphing from mundane to supernatural, are only the most striking aspects in a whole assemblage of data, large and small, that together points to Jesus as an embellished historical figure, in the same way that the decisive work from Gould of the 20th century is merely the most striking corpus of work that, together with hundreds of other pieces of data, points to evolution being real. Ignoramuses can easily and glibly -- and violating Occam's Razor in so doing -- dismiss Gould's work in a vacuum once they decide they are under no obligation to undertake a lifetime of reading to understand just why a Gould's work is so decisive WITHIN ITS CONTEXT OF THE ENORMOUS WORK DONE ON EVOLUTION PRECEDING HIM.
Similarly, posters like you feel that by dismissing, for reasons inimical to the principle of Occam's Razor, decisive aspects like Origen's pre-Constantine confirmation of Josephus's reference to brother James, plus the morphing from colloquial to literary paralleling a spectrum from the mundane to the supernatural, you can then dispense with any obligation to peruse a whole additional assemblage of data. This additional data has been painstakingly accumulated by professionals across many decades, in frequent opposition to the Christian community of their day. But in your ignorance you have rationalized away two of the most decisive aspects indicating a historical HUMAN JESUS THE TEACHER, the two aspects that I waste my time here recounting to pre-judging amateurs like you. You wholly ignore the overwhelming consilience of data that is so blatant. You ignore the significance of the CONTEXT in which these two key aspects then emerge. You ignore a whole corpus of professional research that has been developed, making these two decisive aspects somehow the beginning and the end of an entire careful scholarly discipline rather than strictly the end points only. This is no different from the creationist's approach to Gould.
Piggy has been mauled by posters here for submitting post after post instead of giving a postage-stamp precis of the "evidence". In fact, he is sacrificing his time to give you a virtual seminar in the type of scholarly research required for a proper background in the type of hard-to-marshal data typical of this field. Could any scientist possibly give in one short posting an adequate understanding of evolutionary/biological science to a creationist? Obviously not. Instead, Piggy has mistakenly believed he is dealing here with genuinely interested adults who want deeper understanding of a highly specialized field. So he is trying to supply us with a firmer understanding of the consilience of the data pointing to a historical teacher extravagantly embellished in successive layers of text, rather than a mythical figure made human. Those really interested in understanding the field will be grateful. Those only interested in axe-grinding will be furious. Piggy's exhaustive and generous posts have given us a way of finding out which posters in this thread are here for sheer propaganda driven by ignorance and hate and which ones are honestly curious in which aspects of the various Jesus texts constitute extravagant embellishment and which aspects historical memory, however blurred.
Stone
This is essentially the Euhemerism view of deities and has huge logic problems the way you presented it.
Even when Euhemerus argued that Zeus has been a moral Cretan king he didn't suggest that the flesh and blood Zeus ran around throwing thunderbolts at people.
A more modern example is John Frum.
Of the white literate US serviceman who appeared February 15, 1931 no trace can be found. The best history can do is an illiterate native named Manehivi taking up the name John Frum who caused trouble 1940-1941 and was exiled from the island along with some of his main followers (Worsley, Paul (1957) The Trumpet Shall Sound, pp. 153–9)
By 1957 a schism group gave John Frum Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh as a brother...despite the fact Prince Philip has no brother, only sisters.
Raffaele, Paul (February 2006) In John They Trust provides some more details on the John Frum cargo cult
But if there was no white literate US serviceman who was brother to Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh who appeared to the village elders on February 15, 1931 preaching that the Americans would "bring planeloads and shiploads of cargo to us from America if we pray to him"-- 'Then why the hell would anybody be starting a religion about that guy?'
The whole Jesus the obscure nobody idea is to explain why no contemporary accounts exist of the Gospel Jesus exploits.
The position you present has the logic hole of if Jesus' baptism by JTB was so important why doesn't Josephus mention it?
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For crying out loud
CAN WE STOP WITH THE BRAIN DEAD, MORONICALLY IDIOTIC, AND MORALLY BANKRUPT COMPARISONS OF CHRIST MYTH THEORISTS WITH CREATIONISTS AND HOLOCAUST DENIALERS?!?
THEY ARE IN NO WAY SIMILAR
Creationism require the ignoring of physical sciences and their proven principals along with ignoring the actual reason Darwinian Evolution came about (Creationism was being cut to pieces in the 19th century by Occam's Razor becoming more and more complex trying to explain discovery after discovery finally become a Rube Goldbergian mess by the 1820s)
Holocaust denial requires ignoring not only the hard physical evidence but the actual contemporary records by both the Allies and the Nazis. In fact much of this evidence was presented in Nuremberg 1945-1946 less then a year after the Holocaust ended.
When a HJ proponent goes for the Creationism and Holocaust denial comparison cards you are nearly guaranteed that their position has less credibility then a Enron accounting report.
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pakeha
Penultimate Amazing
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If I understand you correctly, you are stating the Jesus we know is an historical figure embellished by later writers.
When have I disagreed with that view, Stone?
We're simply trying to establish what we can actually know about that figure.
Now about that "whole assemblage of data, large and small, " when are you going to starting posting it up or links to it?
eight bits
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max
Christian and Muslim apologists scholars of the Ancient Near East. The other poster raised, and you revisit, the question, What standards ought to be applied to evaluating it?
The evidence wasn't assembled for a lawsuit, so it can hardly be surprising that it doesn't resemble evidence that is assembled for that use. I would propose treating Mark as a journalistic report. It appears to aspire to be taken as a possibly true story, but despite all the BS about it being a "contemporary" tale in an "accessible" place, it is set safely in its first audience's past, and for almost all of them, in places they never saw.
So, as Google was kind enough to remind us yesterday, about two generations have passed since the Roswell New Mexico unidentified formerly flying object discovery. Recent journalistic accounts of that event are easily found. Those are our Mark, I think.
Whatever thought I give to the Roswell problem, I am not going to visit New Mexico (you are within a few hours' drive, but most people reading this post aren't). Even if I did, there would be little directly relevant for me to see there. In fact, whether two generations removed or sixty-two, the most efficient and effective research I could do, as a pracitcal matter, would be to examine reports of the body of evidence already assembled by people close to the event in time.
That would be dead people. So, no Perry Mason stuff, I'm not going to cross-examine anybody. Every single one of them could have lied, and some of them could plausibly have thought that their lying served some greater good. No doubt I would also encounter the testimony of some "Ananias of New Mexico," an otherwise anonymous person accidentally caught up in events which happened to unfold nearby. This is his moment, the one and only time anybody will ever care what he says about anything. What's he going to say?
I'm thinking there was a historical weather balloon, and nothing happened in history after that which requires more than debris from a weather balloon. It could be that there wasn't even that, and a story got cobbled together from other, earlier, real or imagined weather balloon misadventures. OK, could be. Wouldn't be the first or last time, even. OK, wouldn't be.
And there we are.
Stone
There are more degrees of freedom in this problem than there are data points. There is no comparison group at all. No phenomenon has been shown to occur which calls for an explanation.
We all seem to be on the same page here about the evidence for a historical Jesus. It's the New Testament, rechristened (so to speak) as "textual artifacts" by a dedicated cadre of
The evidence wasn't assembled for a lawsuit, so it can hardly be surprising that it doesn't resemble evidence that is assembled for that use. I would propose treating Mark as a journalistic report. It appears to aspire to be taken as a possibly true story, but despite all the BS about it being a "contemporary" tale in an "accessible" place, it is set safely in its first audience's past, and for almost all of them, in places they never saw.
So, as Google was kind enough to remind us yesterday, about two generations have passed since the Roswell New Mexico unidentified formerly flying object discovery. Recent journalistic accounts of that event are easily found. Those are our Mark, I think.
Whatever thought I give to the Roswell problem, I am not going to visit New Mexico (you are within a few hours' drive, but most people reading this post aren't). Even if I did, there would be little directly relevant for me to see there. In fact, whether two generations removed or sixty-two, the most efficient and effective research I could do, as a pracitcal matter, would be to examine reports of the body of evidence already assembled by people close to the event in time.
That would be dead people. So, no Perry Mason stuff, I'm not going to cross-examine anybody. Every single one of them could have lied, and some of them could plausibly have thought that their lying served some greater good. No doubt I would also encounter the testimony of some "Ananias of New Mexico," an otherwise anonymous person accidentally caught up in events which happened to unfold nearby. This is his moment, the one and only time anybody will ever care what he says about anything. What's he going to say?
I'm thinking there was a historical weather balloon, and nothing happened in history after that which requires more than debris from a weather balloon. It could be that there wasn't even that, and a story got cobbled together from other, earlier, real or imagined weather balloon misadventures. OK, could be. Wouldn't be the first or last time, even. OK, wouldn't be.
And there we are.
Stone
We have a sample of size five (Paul and the Evangelists), arranged ordinally according to a pair of subjective criteria, criteria which were chosen after closely examining the evidence. Those five mutually dependent observations were themselves selected as a group in order to create a "convincing" ensemble of stories.
There are more degrees of freedom in this problem than there are data points. There is no comparison group at all. No phenomenon has been shown to occur which calls for an explanation.
Belz...
Fiend God
I wanted to read your post, but I stopped reading there. If you can't make one post without labeling or insulting people, why should people bother with you ?
This is essentially the Euhemerism view of deities and has huge logic problems the way you presented it.
Even when Euhemerus argued that Zeus has been a moral Cretan king he didn't suggest that the flesh and blood Zeus ran around throwing thunderbolts at people.
A more modern example is John Frum.
Of the white literate US serviceman who appeared February 15, 1931 no trace can be found. The best history can do is an illiterate native named Manehivi taking up the name John Frum who caused trouble 1940-1941 and was exiled from the island along with some of his main followers (Worsley, Paul (1957) The Trumpet Shall Sound, pp. 153–9)
By 1957 a schism group gave John Frum Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh as a brother...despite the fact Prince Philip has no brother, only sisters.
Raffaele, Paul (February 2006) In John They Trust provides some more details on the John Frum cargo cult
But if there was no white literate US serviceman who was brother to Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh who appeared to the village elders on February 15, 1931 preaching that the Americans would "bring planeloads and shiploads of cargo to us from America if we pray to him"-- 'Then why the hell would anybody be starting a religion about that guy?'
Did the natives have a tradition going back hundreds of years that "John Frum" would take human form?
It was important to the original Jewish followers for whom John had legitimacy as a righteous teacher. I doubt Josephus knew the details of what the Jesus cult were telling each other...
OK, I hate to be an attention whore, but I can't help but notice that this post went unloved. It was near the bottom of the page, so maybe you all missed it...
In it I compared this bit from the Dead Sea Scrolls:
Where the first part is a verse from the book of Habakkuk and the second part is the interpretation or "Pesher" of that verse by some religious nutjob at Qumran. (Exactly when is in dispute). I compared it to this bit from the Epistle of James (Its in the bible, google it):
Am I the only one seeing a similarity here? Maybe the translation is off for one, or both, my Ancient Greek and Hebrew is a little bit non-existent...
Yes, this is Eisenman again, equating the "James Gang" with the DSS Community. An idea to which Piggy and the Mainstream scoff in derision...
At this point I appeal to skeptics of Mainstream Biblical Scholarship (and Piggy), by pointing out that Eisenman is a Historian, not a Theologian and that his early academic studies were in Maths and Physics, not Bible Studies or Religion. Anyway, I digress:
Why bring it up? Because if they are the same group of people, they are talking about our HJ. "Teacher of Righteousness" and "the innocent one" murdered by the wealthy and corrupt Priests who will be destroyed by what's left over after they've looted the whole country - That's Mr Deity's boy Jesse, taking one for the team...
In which case the DSS are indeed the eyewitness accounts of Jesus that everybody has been asking for.
In it I compared this bit from the Dead Sea Scrolls:
DSS said:
Where the first part is a verse from the book of Habakkuk and the second part is the interpretation or "Pesher" of that verse by some religious nutjob at Qumran. (Exactly when is in dispute). I compared it to this bit from the Epistle of James (Its in the bible, google it):
James said:
Am I the only one seeing a similarity here? Maybe the translation is off for one, or both, my Ancient Greek and Hebrew is a little bit non-existent...
Yes, this is Eisenman again, equating the "James Gang" with the DSS Community. An idea to which Piggy and the Mainstream scoff in derision...
At this point I appeal to skeptics of Mainstream Biblical Scholarship (and Piggy), by pointing out that Eisenman is a Historian, not a Theologian and that his early academic studies were in Maths and Physics, not Bible Studies or Religion. Anyway, I digress:
Why bring it up? Because if they are the same group of people, they are talking about our HJ. "Teacher of Righteousness" and "the innocent one" murdered by the wealthy and corrupt Priests who will be destroyed by what's left over after they've looted the whole country - That's Mr Deity's boy Jesse, taking one for the team...
In which case the DSS are indeed the eyewitness accounts of Jesus that everybody has been asking for.
I think you'll need more evidence than you've given us to overcome the derision of the Mainstream in the face of that proposition.
I'm still waiting for my books to arrive, but if/when they do I might start a new thread.
That will be interesting, at least. But I find theories equating the DSS community with Jesus' followers very unconvincing. There have been discussions of this on a previous long thread, which it might be worth looking up.
The problem with this comparison is with Roswell you have a chain of journalistic accounts going all the way back to the Roswell Daily Record July 8th 1947 report supposedly the very day of the discovery.
Never mind all the speculative stuff written about the Roswell crash from 1947 to today.
Mark on the other hand has this 70 CE to 85 CE range and even that is a guess as there is no evidence for Mark before 140 CE.
It would be as if today was the first time we even heard about the Roswell Crash.
IMHO a closer analogy would be Flight 19 where the mythical version stops dead with Allan W. Eckert's April 1962 American Legion Magazine article "The Mystery of the Lost Patrol".
In fact if you can find a copy of the NOVA/Horizon episode "The Case of the Bermuda Triangle" (originally aired on June 27, 1976) you can see how the claims of eyewitnesses doesn't mean anything. The eyewitnesses when actually talked to did NOT back up the claims they were being cited to support.
Actually it has come out that the "historical weather balloon" was itself a cover story for Project Mogul...a top secret method of monitoring Soviet atomic tests using high altitude balloons with microphones.
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