O.K., here goes.
First off, it is plainly impossible for any layman to forgo the exercise of standing on others' shoulders in assessing 99.9% of the available data on this figure. The difference is, most responsible readers like me are ready to acknowledge that. Mythers aren't. We can't read Koine Greek. Specialists can. We don't have access to original mss. Specialists do. These are limitations that we share with most posters on this board -- and with mythers.
The reason why I embark with great reluctance on addressing your question is that mythers pretend they have access to a higher truth, having "shed their childhood programming", notwithstanding their frequently poor access to primary materials. Mythers effectively proclaim that they have taken the correct "disillusion" pill against the "pernicious matrix". Professional secular scholars, on the other hand, who are all that responsible posters can go on, have apparently not "shed their programming", not taken the right "pill", in the myther view. "Tsk, tsk, tsk" -- say the bigoted mythers (or mythtics) -- "They haven't taken the 'disillusion' pill." Thus, successive generations of research -- often pursued conscientiously against appalling bigoted headwinds (look up some of the fundies' diatribes against the Jesus Seminar) -- are rendered effectively "useless". Now, anyone who pretends, like the mythers, to have access to a higher truth or the right "pill" is automatically useless as a "discussionist". One can just as well respond to mythers with "@^%*^$E#$#$@&%***$&#@#$^$&$%&*#%" as with anything coherent. It will have precisely the same impact either way: to wit, none.
One tactic that I've encountered (among many) from creationists, for example, is "You're the one asserting that evolution is a driving force; so the burden is not on me to disprove it but on you to prove it". Similarly, whether one responds to mythers with "#%&^@^#%&^&%#" or with something coherent instead, mythers can come back just as easily with identical ex cathedra pronouncements that because the responsible professionals' "case" has not _in_ _their_ _opinion_ been "proven" (even though 21st-century historiography for ancient times deals in the relatively more likely, thank you very much, and not the "proven" at all -- DUH), the mythers therefore proclaim -- a lot of them -- no obligation to defend themselves against the plain data that professional researchers have conscientiously assembled at all.
Excuse me, Reality Check: The secular fully accredited scholars do have the requisite access to Koine Greek and original materials that makes recourse to their peer-vetted research the only sensible option -- DUH. It involves that hated word, "consensus". Consensus is generated through peer-vetting. Peer-vetting is where it's at. Get used to it.
Mythers claim that secular scholars' shoulders are useless in light of the mythers' having taken the needed "pill" to free themselves from a malicious cultural "matrix", and the scholars not, and this bigotry against secular professional scholars is what ensures the futility of presenting anything here that is dependent on scholarship-consensus, just as presenting anything that reflects scientists'-consensus is futile against creationists.
Still, you've asked me a question, and I've reluctantly decided to answer it, however futile the exercise, given the pervasive anti-scholar bigotry on the web. I am aware that this answer has little practical value in a "discussion" of this kind.
Professional scholarly consensus today comes down on the side of the Paul letters being the earliest extant documentation on Jesus the teacher. A number of Pauline letters, though, are forged, meaning one must be as strict as possible in confining the Pauline letters to those that are most likely authentic. The consensus is that seven of them are. However, one view circumscribes that even further, to four only:
http://books.google.com/books?id=A5... Man and the Myth Paul authentic four&f=false
At this link, you can read up on a certain Morton from the '60s, who analysed the letters and found only these four surviving the "cut": Galatians, Romans, Corinthians 1, Corinthians 2.
Clearly, Morton's methods were strongly criticised by some. I only cite Morton as but one example of a few especially strict voices, merely to shew why it may be best to err on the side of too few authentic sources, rather than too many, for whatever reason. The four Paulines that even Morton accepts as genuine also have the relatively largest preponderance of references (among all the Paulines, genuine, doubtful and forged) to Jesus as a human with a human biography. This is a relatively preponderant characteristic they share with all seven of those Paulines which the dreaded consensus accepts as genuine: 1 Thessalonians, Galatians, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Philemon, Philippians, and Romans. If that preponderant characteristic is just a coincidence, then I offer a bridge for sale.................
The four Morton Paulines are typical of arguably the earliest written documentation we have on Jesus the teacher. At the same time, your examples of Tacitus and Antiqs. 20 (the account of James becoming a pulp) are probably the most disinterested. From both sets of documents emerge an historic human figure.
Only with these first as a working foundation does it make any sense to then apply the philological strata that modern academic scholarship has painstakingly assembled for the rest of the data, applied primarily to certain sayings in the Synoptics and in GThomas. Here is where "multiple attestation", as the academics behind the dreaded consensus term it, comes in. But even "multiple attestation" should be applied circumspectly.
For instance, since modern research appears to have achieved consensus that some written details in GMark, for instance, have been simply transcribed directly in GMatthew and GLuke, one can dismiss such details as purely reflective of one source, GMark, and not three. In such instances, "multiple attestation" is not relevant.
But on the other hand, if contexts for other passages/details in GMatthew and/or GLuke and/or both appear independent from GMark, then "multiple attestation" is more relevant, not in proving anything (again, this is dealing with ancient history, remember), but in rendering such details relatively more rather than less likely. A series of shared sayings falls in the latter independent category.
The dreaded consensus has now determined that a nexus of shared characteristics bears out a singularity of voice and style in a small "family" of sayings found in GMatthew, in GLuke -- and even in GThomas, even though the latter may be anywhere from as early as GMark to as late as the early 2nd century. That nexus of shared characteristics comprises, among other things, peculiarly Aramaic structures of speech, a highly colloquial way of framing certain statements, and/or a heavy dependence on the mundane details of living day-to-day in order to make a point.
Taking together the foundation of the least suspect Paulines, the scanty details in Tacitus/Antiqs. 20 and the shared sayings multiply attested in GMatthew, GLuke and GThomas, it is possible to extract an account of an eccentric rabbi who aroused the ire of the Roman authorities and got nailed.
For some perverse reason, I'm not allowed here to construct any written out sequences extracted from primary source material (and even this basic universal academic term, primary source, is disallowed by mythers at one point in the big RatSkep thread!), so here instead is a crude list of the passages you'll have to look up for yourself in constructing precisely what I view as the basics for a _more_ _likely_ bio of the purely human teacher, Jesus of Nazareth. (I provide the Luke cites for the shared sayings.)
If you want to see these cites as a straightforward text without constantly going back and forth from cite to cite, you'll have to take that up with the mods. The one exception I make here in risking direct quotes instead is the nexus of disinterested extra-Biblical materials you've already cited. If even quoting those directly gets me in trouble, then I give up!
Galatians 1:18
1 Corinthians 2:8
1 Corinthians 7:10
1 Corinthians 9:5
1 Corinthians 9:14
1 Corinthians 11:23
Romans 6:4
Luke 11:21-2
Luke 11:33
Luke 12:2
Luke 12:10
Luke 13:18-9
Luke 13:30
Luke 19:26
Josephus: Antiquities, 20 -- "Since Ananus was that kind of person, and because he perceived an opportunity with Festus having died and Albinus not yet arrived, he called a meeting of the Sanhedrin and brought James, the brother of Jesus (who is called 'Messiah') along with some others. He accused them of transgressing the law, and handed them over for stoning."
Tacitus: Annals, 15:44 -- "But all human efforts, all the lavish gifts of the emperor, and the propitiations of the gods, did not banish the sinister belief that the conflagration was the result of an order. Consequently, to get rid of the report, Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judaea, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their centre and become popular."
Now, these are only the basics from which the most likely biographical details can be reconstructed. Far more sophisticated work is then possible, once one has established the basics culled out here. Striking family resemblances are readily detectable between these basic cites and other related material that is also multiply attested -- in the stricter construction of that term. Chiefly, this involves the sayings: The Luke sayings cited here have similarities to additional sayings similarly shared between GMatthew and GLuke and bearing similar linguistic characteristics. Much in the GLuke Sermon On The Plain, for instance (the bulk of Luke, Chapter 6), seems cut from the identical cloth as the cites here, and since portions of it also appear in different contexts in GMatthew, it appears _likely_ (that dreaded word again) that the bulk of the GLuke Sermon On The Plain in Luke's Chapter 6 may be just as fully historical as the cites provided above.
Extrapolations of such a sort are highly useful in determining which aspects of the extant data are more or less likely to be related to all the cites provided above. But that is a complex exercise requiring intimate knowledge of the myriad idioms in Koine Greek, of a level that I cannot possibly pretend to have.
Finally, there is another key term in this equation, along with "consensus": "consilience". There is no such thing as one "clincher" here. Instead, what is involved is a conglomeration of various pieces of data that together form a picture, however fragmented, of what an ancient tattered jigsaw puzzle of a bio might look like. There are maybe a hundred or so similar figures in ancient times who all lived at the fringes of society for whom we have only the scantest documentation. Jesus the human teacher is only one of those. It's not any one datum that clinches his historic existence. Rather, it's the consilience of various pieces of data that, together, make Jesus of Nazareth's historicity more likely than not.
That will never satisfy the mythers because they take ancient history to be the equivalent of a mathematical or a scientific theorem with some kind of "elegant proof" as the end point. News flash: It isn't. Consilience is all we have to shew the greater likelihood rather than lesser likelihood of the historical existence of fringe counter-culturalists like Jesus of Nazareth. If likelihoods are not your speed, then ancient history is not for you.
I think this answers your question sufficiently. Too much is involved here to just answer the question in the cut-and-dried way you may have expected. Instead, the pedagogic equivalent of reinventing the wheel is needed to make my answer in any way honest or useful. Hence the inordinate time taken to respond, and the guarded nature of my conclusions. The latter, though, is emphatically shared with every professional scholar today tasked with summarizing the chief conclusions in this field. I didn't set out to make this post long. Unfortunately, though, to make this post honest and not misleading, home truths had to be addressed one by one by one, and the necessary results can not be synthesized on a postage stamp.
I will however -- and this is probably a disastrous mistake on my part, given the dishonesty of some mythers I've encountered -- take the risk of suggesting that there are two tiers of conclusions as to the Jesus-the-human-teacher bio: The top tier, based strictly on the cites provided above, concludes that Jesus was a victim of Roman jurisprudence, because he introduced a new kind of superstition of an uncertain nature, geared partly around social redress (see Luke 13:30). He had at least two brothers, one of whom was named James. The second tier takes all of that as a given, and then, extrapolating from further Aramaicisms and other similar stylistic ticks and textual patterns, enfolds the additional notion that Jesus called for a radically uniform even-handed approach to all people, enemies included, a call that didn't sit well with various demographics of all sorts, leaving him vulnerable to the very first trumped-up charge that might come along.
An irony in all this is that even though I'm the first to maintain that we ignore the enlightened insights of a Jesus or a Mandela at our immediate peril -- in this age of WMDs and ecological loss where the smallest tripwire could annihilate humanity practically immediately -- I am far from applying the forbearance in both Jesus and Mandela to my own daily life, being, as everyone here knows, too irate with the general complacency of the uneducated and the callous of today to maintain cordiality for longer than a nanosecond or two, if that. I am hardly proud of that -- quite the contrary in fact -- but unfortunately, it seems that if the day will ever come when I can control my temper better, that will be the day when hell (which I don't believe in) will freeze over first.
I have endeavored here to be useful in a way I haven't tried to be for a long time. In the past, posts of this sort have been twisted and perverted by hate speech from mythers calculated purely to demonize one whole portion of humanity: academe. This is why I was so reluctant to indulge in the same futile exercise all over again. But I've given in to the urge again -- goodness knows why! -- and have even inveighed here against another demographic of my own choosing, mythers. Really smart and really constructive -- not. But really typical as well.
Realistically,
Stone
(And if the mods disapprove of this use of the tongue emoticon, I'd like to know why they provide one in the first place.) Since one can't address these patterns on a postage stamp, I knew that the necessary details, even in a polite version, such as Pakeha provides, would prove far too long for anyone to respond seriously. There's just too much there, and I knew going in that there would be too much, which is why I dragged back from responding to Tim's query for so long. Here we are after I sent something in after all, and the response so far speaks for itself. Not one poster, not even Pakeha, addresses a single one of my bullet points. And those that seemed poised to address my rather detailed post in the first place, such as Tim who lodged the query, have evidently lost interest. For all these reasons, I'm not surprised that it has proved a waste of time. Of course, I knew in advance it would be a waste of time, but I did it anyway -- goodness knows why -- and we wonder just why I gave up doing detailed posts like this long ago in favor of just dressing down myther woo in shorter posts serving as wake-up calls instead. I won't try a detailed post like this one again. I've learned my lesson.
