The Jesus Myth, and it's failures

[eight bits]

IanS

You seem to be labouring under the misapprehension that I had earlier been arguing with you to say that the miracles attributed to Jesus were unique or especially amazing.

Actually, we were arguing about whether there were any miracles at all whose cause was attributed to Jesus during his natural life in Mark or Paul. We also disagree about whether those authors attribute the supernatural content of their works to the character of the times, or to some personal character attribute(s) of Jesus.

So far as I can tell, you and I would agree that John's version of the Feeding of the Five Thusand depicts a miracle performed by Jesus. Perhaps we also agree that Matthew's remarks about virgin motherhood recount a miracle, but not one performed by Jesus. I am unsure how we could agree on those two things and not on the well-foundedness of a distinction between miracles performed by Jesus and miracles where Jesus was present, but the miracle was performed by the Jewish God, but it appears that we do.

In any case, analogies are offered only to illustrate a particular connection its author wishes to discuss. It is uninteresting, or even desirable, that an analogy fails to exhibit a different connection. It is regrettable that my analogy didn't communicate with you. I am consoled by the thought that it wasn't addressed to you personally.

 

[pgwenthold]

One thing I'd like to see re-introduced in these discussions is the question raised by Hans some time ago about why the Romans would crucify Jesus?

This is especially important in the context of the minimalist historical Jesus question, which is the best anyone can honestly support (you know, the "wandering preacher who spoke wisely and therefore people built a religion around him", without any of the prominence or supernatural baggage attributed to him in the bible). As Hans asked, if that is what Jesus was, why would he have been crucified? Hence, it almost seems that as you pare away the complexity and significance of the character, you are compelled to dispense with even more significance. You can't just say, "He was a wandering rebel who irritated the authorities, so Pilate had him crucified" because, according to Hans, the conclusion doesn't follow.

I realize this goes back to the "What counts..." thread, but the problem I see is that as the minimalization takes place, the mythology grows, to the point where there is just no substance left. I mean, is there ANYTHING to the character in the bible at all? Or is it the equivalent of Paul Bunyan stories?

 

[HansMustermann]

Sounds easy, but isn't.
Remember those koch-type graves (post 50CE) preclude a Jewish settlement there, much lessa refuge for refugee Temple priests.

Not completely. Their purity rules did forbid graves closer than IIRC 20-something yards from a house, or viceversa, the graves in Nazareth leave room for a couple of houses in the middle while obeying that rule.

I.e., it wouldn't be much of a village, certainly not to the BS extent that the modern tourist trap mis-represents. And probably not someone's first choice for where to live in more peaceful times. (If nothing else, such a tiny village would offer no mutual protection against bandits and whatnot.) BUT a couple of refugee families could fit there in more, shall we say, interesting times.

 

[IanS]

IanS


Actually, we were arguing about whether there were any miracles at all whose cause was attributed to Jesus during his natural life in Mark or Paul. We also disagree about whether those authors attribute the supernatural content of their works to the character of the times, or to some personal character attribute(s) of Jesus.

So far as I can tell, you and I would agree that John's version of the Feeding of the Five Thusand depicts a miracle performed by Jesus. Perhaps we also agree that Matthew's remarks about virgin motherhood recount a miracle, but not one performed by Jesus. I am unsure how we could agree on those two things and not on the well-foundedness of a distinction between miracles performed by Jesus and miracles where Jesus was present, but the miracle was performed by the Jewish God, but it appears that we do.

In any case, analogies are offered only to illustrate a particular connection its author wishes to discuss. It is uninteresting, or even desirable, that an analogy fails to exhibit a different connection. It is regrettable that my analogy didn't communicate with you. I am consoled by the thought that it wasn't addressed to you personally.

OK, well .... just to try explaining a bit more of my view on any of this -

I understand the hypothesis you are presenting, where Jesus does various things that were not actually miracles, but where people at the time or perhaps later when the gospels were written, mistakenly thought that miracles had really happened. I think that's what you were proposing earlier?

I don't think we need to go over that again.

But just to explain my comment on the computer analogy - again that was not any sort of personal continuation of our earlier disagreement over whether it was, or was not, reasonable to propose that Jesus really did live and did things described in the gospels, but that they were not actually supernatural miracles. In the "analogy" post I was not trying to pursue any of that. Except in so far as the computer analogy seems to be a way of endorsing that hypothesis of the miracle stories not really involving any miracles, in which respect all I am trying to point out about the analogy is ...

... (to put it very simply) - in the computer case, people saw things which really existed and which really happened ... the computer really was physically present, and it really did show calculations and pictures on the screen etc. Years later, those sceptical people realised that what they had thought was untrue, was in fact true.

... but the opposite happened in the case of Jesus. In those stories (accepting for this present purpose your hypothesis that the events actually happened, but were not miraculous) people thought they had seen things which actually did NOT happen ... eg Jesus did not actually walk on water and did not really feed 5000 people with 5 loaves and 2 fishes (whereas, the computer really did exist and really did perform a massive calculation in seconds). Many years later even theists have now realised that what people thought was actually true, has now turned out to be untrue (ie the miracles).

Anyway, enough of that.

So .... yes, I do appreciate that you were just trying to find an illustrative analogy. And I expect we both agree that analogies of any sort usually have shortcomings, so that whilst they are often very useful, they can also be misleading for reasons which are not always immediately obvious. Anyway, be that as it may ... so much for analogies.

Lets declare a truce lol! … err until the next contentious point at least!

 

[HansMustermann]

@pgwenthold
TBH I don't exactly remember when I asked that and where I was going with that, but there are a number of more noteworthy people than me (e.g., Fitzgerald) who do raise the objection that almost none of the 'reconstructed' Jesuses make any sense of that execution AND manage to stay historically believable. So it's probably not a bad idea to try to figure that out in any case.

For the record, the most common explanation is that he led some kind of attack on the temple to drive away those money changers, and was executed for being a rebel. I find some major problems with that, especially if one also wants to keep a peacenic proto-hippy rabbi as their Jesus, but also because it would be kinda like an attack on the Vatican these days: someone would write about it. But anyway, that seems to be the most common explanation offered.

 

[pgwenthold]

@pgwenthold
TBH I don't exactly remember when I asked that and where I was going with that, but there are a number of more noteworthy people than me (e.g., Fitzgerald) who do raise the objection that almost none of the 'reconstructed' Jesuses make any sense of that execution AND manage to stay historically believable. So it's probably not a bad idea to try to figure that out in any case.

For the record, the most common explanation is that he led some kind of attack on the temple to drive away those money changers, and was executed for being a rebel. I find some major problems with that, especially if one also wants to keep a peacenic proto-hippy rabbi as their Jesus, but also because it would be kinda like an attack on the Vatican these days: someone would write about it. But anyway, that seems to be the most common explanation offered.

But that's kind of the point. In order for it to make sense, Jesus had to be way more than the type of character that even folks like Bart Ehrman contend he was. But there is no way to get to that point, so you have to throw that aspect out, too.

That is why I am so underwhelmed with these minimalist, mostly insignificant versions of Jesus that people keep postulating. If that's all Jesus is, then yeah, pretty much everything we have about him is a myth, and Jesus of the bible is absolutely a mythical being.

 

[IanS]

One thing I'd like to see re-introduced in these discussions is the question raised by Hans some time ago about why the Romans would crucify Jesus?

This is especially important in the context of the minimalist historical Jesus question, which is the best anyone can honestly support (you know, the "wandering preacher who spoke wisely and therefore people built a religion around him", without any of the prominence or supernatural baggage attributed to him in the bible). As Hans asked, if that is what Jesus was, why would he have been crucified? Hence, it almost seems that as you pare away the complexity and significance of the character, you are compelled to dispense with even more significance. You can't just say, "He was a wandering rebel who irritated the authorities, so Pilate had him crucified" because, according to Hans, the conclusion doesn't follow.

I realize this goes back to the "What counts..." thread, but the problem I see is that as the minimalization takes place, the mythology grows, to the point where there is just no substance left. I mean, is there ANYTHING to the character in the bible at all? Or is it the equivalent of Paul Bunyan stories?

Well, obviously (from all my posts in these various threads), I don't think there would be much left of any messiah at all if we got rid of all the obviously untrue parts and all the highly dubious parts of the biblical writing. And particular so if, as Randel Helms and others have shown, so many of the biblical stories of Jesus are actually versions of what was written long before as messiah prophecies in the ancient Jewish OT. That is just far too much to be passed off as coincidence ... one or two OT similarities might be waved away, but a book full of them is just far too much.

On the question of why the Romans might execute a Jewish messiah … doesn’t that claim hang entirely on the belief that Pontius Pilate definitely did order the crucifixion?

Afaik, and certainly from our earlier discussions in the What Counts thread, it’s far from clear where the gospel authors ever got the name of Pilate from in the first place. That seems to me quite likely just a later deduction taken from what the gospel writers thought Paul had said and/or written decades before about seeing a vision of the risen Jesus around 30-35 AD, and assuming this would have occurred on, or shortly after, the prophesised 3rd day. Which puts the death of Jesus (iirc, Paul’ letter just says Jesus had died) at the time when later writers thought that the official in charge of executions would have been a man named Pilate.

I suppose it’s too "way out" to ask if Pontius Pilate ever existed himself!?

Yes I know that a single rather modern looking inscribed stone tablet was found in the 1960’s. But is that genuinely ancient? How likely is that to be a modern fake. Afaik, until that discovery in the 1960’s, many people had wondered if Pontius Pilate was actually a real person?

 

[Crossbow]

One thing I'd like to see re-introduced in these discussions is the question raised by Hans some time ago about why the Romans would crucify Jesus?

This is especially important in the context of the minimalist historical Jesus question, which is the best anyone can honestly support (you know, the "wandering preacher who spoke wisely and therefore people built a religion around him", without any of the prominence or supernatural baggage attributed to him in the bible). As Hans asked, if that is what Jesus was, why would he have been crucified? Hence, it almost seems that as you pare away the complexity and significance of the character, you are compelled to dispense with even more significance. You can't just say, "He was a wandering rebel who irritated the authorities, so Pilate had him crucified" because, according to Hans, the conclusion doesn't follow.

I realize this goes back to the "What counts..." thread, but the problem I see is that as the minimalization takes place, the mythology grows, to the point where there is just no substance left. I mean, is there ANYTHING to the character in the bible at all? Or is it the equivalent of Paul Bunyan stories?

Jesus, along with a few thousand other people of his day, was crucified by the Romans because the Romans thought that Jesus was a threat to the Roman occupation of Judea.

After all, Jesus trashed the Temple, spoke of how the Romans need to leave Judea, and spoke against those Jewish people who worked with the Romans in order to enrich themselves.

On top of it all, Jesus was the head of a movement which had a small, but rather strong following. Hence, the Romans figured it was better to kill him sooner rather than to allow him to develop into a potent threat later.

 

[pgwenthold]

Jesus, along with a few thousand other people of his day, was crucified by the Romans because the Romans thought that Jesus was a threat to the Roman occupation of Judea.

After all, Jesus trashed the Temple, spoke of how the Romans need to leave Judea, and spoke against those Jewish people who worked with the Romans in order to enrich themselves.

On top of it all, Jesus was the head of a movement which had a small, but rather strong following. Hence, the Romans figured it was better to kill him sooner rather than to allow him to develop into a potent threat later.

But if his movement was small, why would the Romans consider them a threat?

Read what Hans said in this post, and throughout the thread

http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?postid=8149223#post8149223

Here's a succinct statement of the issue:

The two just can't be true at the same time. A Jesus which is so unimportant that nobody mentions him even when compiling lists of messiah claimants and whatnot, surely can't be so popular and have such a following that both the Jewish leaders and the Romans have to act fast to preempt a revolt. Something doesn't add up.

 

[Crossbow]

But if his movement was small, why would the Romans consider them a threat?

Read what Hans said in this post, and throughout the thread

http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?postid=8149223#post8149223

Here's a succinct statement of the issue:

Well, if you will actually read my post then you would have your answer.

But just to reiterate, in Judea in the time of Jesus, the Romans crucified thousands of people whom they suspected would be/could be a threat to the Roman occupation of Judea.

Sorry, but I do not know why you have such trouble understanding that fact since it is so very well documented.

 

[pgwenthold]

Well, if you will actually read my post then you would have your answer.

But just to reiterate, in Judea in the time of Jesus, the Romans crucified thousands of people whom they suspected would be/could be a threat to the Roman occupation of Judea.

Sorry, but I do not know why you have such trouble understanding that fact since it is so very well documented.

What is your basis for the claim that he "trashed the temple"? How does the temple being trashed go unnoticed by everyone except the gospel writer?

Hans addressed this above, as well as in the other thread.

 

[eight bits]

Hans and pgwenthold

But if his movement was small, why would the Romans consider them a threat?

How much did it take to be crucified? What does level of threat have to do with it? People are punished because they have, to the satisfaction of the sentencing authority, transgressed, and there's enough in the budget to cover the cost of punishment.

All four Gospels (useful as a filter, if not much of a reason to believe all that dribbles out) agree that:

At some point in his career, Jesus violently assaulted money changers in the vicinity of the Temple.

Shortly before his arrest, Jesus staged an entry into Jerusalem which could be interpreted as staking a claim to legitimacy as a ruler.

When making his sentencing decision, Pilate had access to people who were hostile to Jesus and who could explain to Pilate the possible significance of Jesus' entry into Jerusalem.

At the time of his arrest, Jesus had an armed escort who inflicted bodily injury on a peace officer.

The Gospels also agree that Pilate finds himself holding the prisoner not because of some expenditure of Roman resources to capture Jesus, but rather that the prisoner was handed over by Temple authorities who had him. At the time of Jesus' sentencing, the Romans had two other people whom they were planning and ready to crcuify. They weren't making a special trip.

If Pilate had let Jesus loose, then we'd be debating whether that was a miracle. The entire criminal career of Jesus need not have subtended so much as an hour of his life. An hour is well within the range of time-on-task of first offenders found in modern prisons.

That is why I am so underwhelmed with these minimalist, mostly insignificant versions of Jesus that people keep postulating. If that's all Jesus is, then yeah, pretty much everything we have about him is a myth, and Jesus of the bible is absolutely a mythical being.

I also have some problem characterizing a tzedek interpretation of Jesus as "minimalist." It is rare for a tzedek to found a religion, but how that rarity was overcome is fully explained by Paul's interest. All of that happened after Jesus' death, and focused on persuading Gentiles that they should make nice with a Jewish holy man's ghost.

A dead tzedek with a press agent seems to me a completely apt person to found a religion. For crying out loud, the competition is a caravan robber, a murderer, both retail and wholesale, with a talkative brother, a rich kid who ran out on his wife and child when he learned that pain hurts, a flim-flam man who read scripture in his hat, ...

 

[pgwenthold]

Hans and pgwenthold


How much did it take to be crucified? What does level of threat have to do with it?

The claim is that Jesus was a threat. But how much of threat was he?

Hans claims that while the Romans were ruthless, there was a method to their madness. Why would they crucify a minor threat while not bothering with others who pose more of one?

 

[Crossbow]

What is your basis for the claim that he "trashed the temple"? How does the temple being trashed go unnoticed by everyone except the gospel writer?

Hans addressed this above, as well as in the other thread.

Well, thanks for at least reading my posts and calmly responding. But I am surprised that you have to ask such a question.

My basis for Jesus trashing the Temple is the data provided in the Gospels. I am sure that such event was noticed by quite a few people, however since that event occurred nearly 2000 years ago then that means that none of these people are still about who can personally testify to the issue.

As far as I know, the Gospels is the only source we have which provides any accounts of Jesus. While there may be other such records, none have been discovered thus far.

I hope that clairifies things for you.

By the way, if you want me to see what 'Hans' had to say about this issue, then please provide the specifics on what he said in this thread as well as that other thread you referred to.

 

[Crossbow]

The claim is that Jesus was a threat. But how much of threat was he?

Hans claims that while the Romans were ruthless, there was a method to their madness. Why would they crucify a minor threat while not bothering with others who pose more of one?

If I may interject ...

I already told you twice that the Romans crucified thousands of people in Judea at the time of Jesus who they viewed as a threat to the Roman occupation of Judea.

Do you understand now?

Thousands of people were crucified; not just one person was crucified, but thousands of persons were crucified.

 

[davefoc]

pgwenthold,

Several people have posted responses above to your post about the crucifixion that describe my view of this as well.

Regardless of what the speculation is about the HJ crucifixion, evidence doesn't exist to allow one to form a verifiable answer. I think HM summarized the most likely answer assuming that the HJ existed, the HJ pissed off some temple officials and they used their political power to get him executed. It might be true, who knows? The trial narratives in the Gospels seems implausible, is there any truth in them? I don't think anybody knows.

I think the only person participating in this thread that significantly disagrees with this is Crossbow who has read a book recently and has come to believe that facts about the HJ are knowable and he and the author of his book know what those facts are. It is a common scenario. Make a guess about the HJ based on some part of the NT, refine the guess by picking which data in the NT best matches your guess, pick a bit of historical data to support your guess and write a book.

But that's kind of the point. In order for it to make sense, Jesus had to be way more than the type of character that even folks like Bart Ehrman contend he was. But there is no way to get to that point, so you have to throw that aspect out, too.

That is why I am so underwhelmed with these minimalist, mostly insignificant versions of Jesus that people keep postulating. If that's all Jesus is, then yeah, pretty much everything we have about him is a myth, and Jesus of the bible is absolutely a mythical being.

This sentiment is expressed in various ways many times in these HJ threads. Mostly, the facts suggest an HJ that doesn't count. The religion was formed by Greek speaking people that never knew him and probably knew almost nothing about him if he existed. There have been some fairly good summaries of all the people whose writings have come down to us that would have written of an HJ if he had had much of a following. So, on his own steam, the HJ was, per force, a small time guy if he existed. What has come down to us about him is self contradictory and not all that impressive if he is going to be judged as a philosophical thinker.

Maybe, there is some aspect of him that does count, in that he may have led a small time group that railed against the religious bureaucracy and advocated a more democratic approach to religion or maybe he led a resistance movement against the Romans or maybe anything. So the idea that he did something that had a significant historical impact can't be ruled out but there are any facts available to sort out the possibilities.

As to the fact that you are underwhelmed by the probable nature of an HJ. I think you went to the heart of the matter with that comment. There isn't much left that is plausible to be whelmed by. It is rational and reasonable to conclude that it doesn't matter whether an HJ existed or not with regard to what shaped the nature of Christianity or its effect on the world. And it is rational and reasonable to move on to intellectual pursuits other than attempting to understand the nature of the HJ. That is unknowable and probably not historically significant information even if you could determine that he existed.

 

[pgwenthold]

pgwenthold,

Several people have posted responses above to your post about the crucifixion that describe my view of this as well.

Regardless of what the speculation is about the HJ crucifixion, evidence doesn't exist to allow one to form a verifiable answer. I think HM summarized the most likely answer assuming that the HJ existed, the HJ pissed off some temple officials and they used their political power to get him executed.

But as HM also notes, this is completely inconsistent with what we know about how the Romans acted, especially considering what information we have about what happened. They didn't crucify insignificant rabel rousers. Sure, they might disembowel them if they got uppity, but crucifixion?

 

[pgwenthold]

If I may interject ...

I already told you twice that the Romans crucified thousands of people in Judea at the time of Jesus who they viewed as a threat to the Roman occupation of Judea..

On what basis was Jesus considered a threat to the Roman occupation? Moreover, compared to others at the time who they didn't crucify?

You can't just say, "Oh, Jesus did X so they whacked him." When we have reports of others who also did X and weren't whacked, it still begs the question, "Why did they crucify Jesus"?

The best you got is his big violent attack on the temple, which no one seemed to notice.

 

[davefoc]

But as HM also notes, this is completely inconsistent with what we know about how the Romans acted, especially considering what information we have about what happened. They didn't crucify insignificant rabel rousers. Sure, they might disembowel them if they got uppity, but crucifixion?

I don't know enough, historically to judge the plausibility of the Romans executing somebody that the Jewish religious hierarchy didn't like. Politics makes strange bedfellows and the Romans probably ruled by assisting the people that were in power that were keeping the peace and cooperating with the Romans. It seems plausible to me right now that the Romans could have assisted some kind of ruling bureaucracy that they supported with a problem. I don't know how to assess the likelihood of it though. It is an obviously unlikely story, but people tend to write stories about unusual occurrences so maybe it was unlikely for any particular individual but it happened once? Or maybe the Romans just killed him but didn't crucify him? To beat a dead horse, there is no reliable data available to sort any of this out (as you know).

 

[Crossbow]

On what basis was Jesus considered a threat to the Roman occupation? Moreover, compared to others at the time who they didn't crucify?

You can't just say, "Oh, Jesus did X so they whacked him." When we have reports of others who also did X and weren't whacked, it still begs the question, "Why did they crucify Jesus"?

The best you got is his big violent attack on the temple, which no one seemed to notice.

Well since Pilate got had the power to cruicfy anyone in his territory who was threat to the Roman occupation,
and since Pilate crucified thousands of people who he considered to be a threat to Roman occupation,
then one cannot say precisely why some were crucified and some were not.

Obviously, Pilate did not care too much for due process as applied to non-Romans, so the record keeping was rather spotty.

However, what is also quite obvious is that you still failing to read my posts. I provided other reasons at to why Jesus was crucified besides the Temple issue.

And since you ae the one who is asking for the data, then if you really want the answers to your questions, then you do yourself a favor and pay attention to the answers to your questions.