Nailed: Ten Christian Myths that show Jesus never existed

[Kapyong]

Gday,

Jesus's historicity is 'assumed' in the same way that general relativity is assumed in modern physics. It doesn't mean that nobody's ever thought about it, just that the case for it is so overwhelming that reasonable scholars don't bother to argue it.

No way.

Relativity has been tested over and over and found to be true in every test it's been put through. It's a solid, known physical fact.

Jesus' existence is nothing like that - certainly the evidence is NOT 'overwhelming' at all - it's scanty and suspect.

The difference is chalk and cheese.


Kapyong

 

[maximara]

This is argument by counter-example. It means nothing, unless the argument is "there is no possible counter-examples to the existence of Jesus". Since no-one is arguing this, the John Frum myth is irrelevant as an example.

John Frum is relevant because historical anthropology (which is really what is going on when you talk about a historical Jesus) looks for parallels. John Frum shows that all the points used to dismiss the Christ Myth are not valid.

Think of the following argument: "My argument about X is against the scientific consensus. But Galileo argued against the scientific consensus, and he was right! Therefore my argument about X is strengthened."

But of course such an argument is not strengthened, since the argument isn't "the scientific consensus is never wrong".

So how does the John Frum myth apply to Jesus mythicism? What argument is it addressing, if not a strawman one?

I set forth a hypothetical version of events using John Frum as the template:

1) A proto Christ myth is formed c 100CE. It consists of a vague idea that a Messiah (Christ) will liberate the Jewish people from Roman rule ala Moses. (the 1910s John Frum reference)

2) Simon of Peraea's efforts start drawing attention to the Messiah myth. (1940 John Frum)

3) Saul persecutes various sects and then has his vision and assigns the name Jesus to his Christ and calls himself Paul. (The late 1930s vision of the Elders regarding John Frum)

4) Paul starts preaching about his Jesus Christ and various people inspired by his teachings take up the name Jesus and cause problems...possibly one of them getting crucified for his troubles. (The three exiled John Frum's 1940-47)

5) Paul calls a person the "brother" Jesus (Prince Phillip reference)

6) Paul learns about the other "Jesuses" and warns against their teachings in 2 Corinthians 11:3-4 c53 CE (the editing out in oral tradition of the three native John Frums)

7) Paul dies c67 CE

8) Various oral traditions fleshing out Paul's Jesus come using some of the other Jesuses as source material but putting everything before Paul's no later then 37 CE conversion come about finally being referenced in written form c130 CE (this would be c2040 for John Frum so we aren't there yet)

9) Marcion collects Paul's writings (His Evangelikon later identified as an altered version of "Luke" was supposedly by Paul) c140

10) Irenaeus writes his Against Heresies setting the canon for one sect of the Jesus believers...the sect that eventually wins the theological battle in the 4th century.

 

[Brainache]

Gday,



No way.

Relativity has been tested over and over and found to be true in every test it's been put through. It's a solid, known physical fact.

Jesus' existence is nothing like that - certainly the evidence is NOT 'overwhelming' at all - it's scanty and suspect.

The difference is chalk and cheese.


Kapyong

But given that there is no evidence of the worship of a Celestial Jesus, a HJ is the most parsimonious explanation for the formation of Christianity.

Is there evidence that I'm unaware of?

 

[Brainache]

John Frum is relevant because historical anthropology (which is really what is going on when you talk about a historical Jesus) looks for parallels. John Frum shows that all the points used to dismiss the Christ Myth are not valid.

Except John Frum is an outsider bringing gifts, not one of their own promising salvation from oppression.

The Ghost Dance is more what you are looking for:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_Dance

The Ghost Dance (Caddo: Nanissáanah,[1] also called the Ghost Dance of 1890) was a new religious movement incorporated into numerous Native American belief systems. According to the prophet Jack Wilson (Wovoka)'s teachings, proper practice of the dance would reunite the living with the spirits of the dead and bring peace, prosperity, and unity to native peoples throughout the region.[2] The basis for the Ghost Dance, the circle dance, is a traditional ritual which has been used by many Native Americans since prehistoric times, but this new form was first practiced among the Nevada Paiute in 1889. The practice swept throughout much of the Western United States, quickly reaching areas of California and Oklahoma. As the Ghost Dance spread from its original source, Native American tribes synthesized selective aspects of the ritual with their own beliefs. This process often created change in both the society that integrated it, and in the ritual itself...

 

[Kapyong]

Gday,

But given that there is no evidence of the worship of a Celestial Jesus, a HJ is the most parsimonious explanation for the formation of Christianity.
Is there evidence that I'm unaware of?

There is no real evidence for a purely Celestial Jesus, but there is plenty of evidence where Jesus is described in celestial terms, such as Paul's Col 1:15-20

the Image of the invisible God,
the first -born of Heaven,
for in him all things were created,
in heaven and on earth,
visible and invisible,
whether thrones or dominions,
principalities or authorities,
all things were created through him and for him
he is before all things,
and in him all things hold together,
he is the Head of the Body, the church,
he is the beginning,
the first born from the dead,
that in all he might be first,
for in him was the Pleroma,
and through him to reconcile to himself all things,
whether on earth or in heaven,
making peace by the blood of his cross ​

Or his strange comment rather like an initiation ritual (where and when was this said exactly) :
Eph. 5:14

"Therefore it is said:
Awake O sleeper,
and arise from the dead
and the Christos will shine on you"​

Or the celestial Jesus in the Ascension of Isaiah who descends arguably to earth.

Or the prologue of John which describes a celestial logos.

Or the belief that Jesus rose to be a celestial being.


In other words - Jesus is both celestial and mundane, not just an human Jesus. Paul's few statements about a human Jesus are scanty and controversial.

It's possible that the celestial Jesus came first and the human Jesus was grafted on.


Kapyong

 

[Brainache]

Gday,



There is no real evidence for a purely Celestial Jesus, but there is plenty of evidence where Jesus is described in celestial terms, such as Paul's Col 1:15-20

the Image of the invisible God,
the first -born of Heaven,
for in him all things were created,
in heaven and on earth,
visible and invisible,
whether thrones or dominions,
principalities or authorities,
all things were created through him and for him
he is before all things,
and in him all things hold together,
he is the Head of the Body, the church,
he is the beginning,
the first born from the dead,
that in all he might be first,
for in him was the Pleroma,
and through him to reconcile to himself all things,
whether on earth or in heaven,
making peace by the blood of his cross ​

Or his strange comment rather like an initiation ritual (where and when was this said exactly) :
Eph. 5:14

"Therefore it is said:
Awake O sleeper,
and arise from the dead
and the Christos will shine on you"​

Or the celestial Jesus in the Ascension of Isaiah who descends arguably to earth.

Or the prologue of John which describes a celestial logos.

Or the belief that Jesus rose to be a celestial being.


In other words - Jesus is both celestial and mundane, not just an human Jesus. Paul's few statements about a human Jesus are scanty and controversial.

It's possible that the celestial Jesus came first and the human Jesus was grafted on.


Kapyong

Paul gives us lots of mundane information about Jesus eating and drinking and talking to people. He even says he has brothers.

All the supernatural stuff you mention is supposedly post-crucifixion.

The early gospel of Mark portrays Jesus as very human. It's the later stories that got carried away with the spiritual stuff.

 

[IanS]

Take anything you like, if you've decided not to read what I wrote. If you did read it, you would know what it's source was, and how it dealt with the question of evidence. But that's up to you. And if you ever do want to go over something several hundred times, perhaps dejudge could help you out with that.

You cannot use the bible as evidence of the truth of it’s own proven untrue fictional religious beliefs about Jesus.

If your “evidence” comes from that bible writing, then that is no longer credible as factual writing in the 21st century. And we have been over all the numerous reasons for that literally several hundred times before in these HJ threads.

I already said to you that if your post is citing evidence that does not rely on that discredited fictional writing of the bible, then of course I will read what you have offered and give you an honest open reply to whatever you have said

Are you providing evidence which is independent of the bible?

 

[David Mo]

So how are you going to kill the messiah off in your religion? You certainly don't want to give him an ordinary death. That doesn't sound too messiah like to me. So you've got to kill him off with some drama. So what are your ideas? Maybe you're more creative than I am, but crucifixion seems like a pretty good idea.

Many gods died and resurrected in history of religions. No one, as far as I am aware, with a death so infamous reserved to low-grade people.

Read the following comment I address to IanS. It is for you, also.

OK, well that is wrong. For the reason I explained before. To repeat - iirc, you can find in the OT, prophecies that the coming messiah will be rejected by his own people (ie by fellow Jews), and will pass unappreciated and unrecognised as the true messiah by his own people (ie the Jewish nation as a whole). So that is the first part of the explanation, where in fact the letters of Paul himself do say that "according to scripture" Jesus will be betrayed in this way by his own Jewish people.

And then further, again iirc (and I gave the OT refs to all of this before;- you can find them very easily from Wikipedia and Bible Gateway), there are various passages in the OT which could very easily have been interpreted by Paul and the earliest gospel writers to mean that this prophesised rejection and persecution of Jesus, would end in the death of Jesus, and quite possibly even nailed to a "tree" or "cross" in a form of crucifixion. For example, there is the famous passage which talks of the messiah saying something to the effect of his feet and hands having been "pierced" or pinned like the "Bite of a Lion" ... and I think there is even one OT passage that talks of someone who might be the messiah being "hung on a tree", which is apparently a reference to one of several forms of crucifixion (though as I have stressed several times here in the past concerning that very specific passage about being hung on a tree, do NOT quote me on that because I cannot now easily find that particular reference).

So what I am saying to you in all of the above, is - what we are really talking about with the crucifixion story, is the letters of Paul, and his belief that OT scripture revealed to him a fact of prophecy saying that the messiah would be persecuted, rejected, betrayed, and perhaps even put to death by his own Jewish people.

There is a certain thing and a wrong thing in what you say. The correct view is that if we have to look for a basis on which an alleged inventor of the Jesus myth could act, it would be found in the Hebrew tradition. We can dismiss the pagan mentality in which a god suffering punishment devoted to slaves or malefactors is unthinkable. This was a scandal to the Hellenic mentality, as seen in the objections of Celsus, for example.

But you are wrong to believe that Christians could find the figure of a crucified Messiah in Jewish thought of the age. You refer to Paul and the texts of Psalms 22 and Isaiah 53, which are the only ones in which the concept of a suffering servant of the Lord appears -IIRC. But you are wrong when you say that these texts speak about the Messiah. Neither Psalms nor Isaiah say anything about Messiah. Nor any cross. "Pierced hands and feet" has different translations and get different interpretations.

Therefore, the idea of a crucified Messiah is alien to the Jewish mind at the time and had to be invented by Christians by manipulating the meaning of biblical texts. This invention could been made without any real event, in vacuo, as the miticists think, or as a way to justify the failure and humiliating end of a real individual. I.e. post evento.

Both alternative interpretations are possible. But I find the post evento interpretation more plausible. The key of the issue is the cross. A Jewish sect in the First Century could have invented a thousand ways to put an end to his Mesías and blame the Jews without making him to die on a cross. It is more simple and natural to think that the followers of crucified Mesías (or prophet or whatever he was) devote themselves to a frantic search for a biblical "prophecy" that would overtake the evident failure of their hopes.

I don't know if I am sure with the "60-40" or "66-34" of certainty. But I believe that if we have to choose between these two interpretations, I find one of them more plausible than the other. If you want to maintain a strict scepticism, it is all right for me. Even though I will continue to believe that Jesus of Galilee probably existed, this issue has not relevance for me. I have said yet I am not Christian. This is the Christians problem and I don't know why some atheists are so overexcited with it.

 

[Kapyong]

Gday,

Paul gives us lots of mundane information about Jesus eating and drinking and talking to people. He even says he has brothers.

Does he actually say JESUS literally had brothers?
Or does he use an ambiguous phrase "brothers of the LORD"?


Kapyong

 

[maximara]

Except John Frum is an outsider bringing gifts, not one of their own promising salvation from oppression.

That is the John Frum of today...not the first John Frum history actually records.

See Guiart, Jean (1952) "John Frum Movement in Tanna" Oceania Vol 22 No 3 pg 165-177

Manehivi - first "John Frum" -- illiterate native ie NOT an outsider.

"In the early 1900s, the island was governed by both the British and French as the locale was too remote for them to bother fighting over. Instead, they enacted an oppressive regime and sent missionaries who brutalized the natives and burned down their villages in an effort to force them to convert to Christianity and surrender their traditional customs." (John Frum He Come)

"In the 1930s, John Frum appeared in a vision to the residents of Tanna, and his word spread. He promised a new dawn over Vanuatu. The missionaries would leave forever, the old ways would return, and they would also gain access to the material wealth and supplied of the missionaries." (John Frum and the Cargo Cult)

Liberation from oppression and a promise of wealth.

"In my Father's house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you." (Jesus - John 14:2)

 

[Craig B]

Gday,

There is no real evidence for a purely Celestial Jesus, but there is plenty of evidence where Jesus is described in celestial terms, such as Paul's Col 1:15-20 <snip> In other words - Jesus is both celestial and mundane, not just an human Jesus. Paul's few statements about a human Jesus are scanty and controversial.

It's possible that the celestial Jesus came first and the human Jesus was grafted on.

Kapyong

That is indeed possible, but it seems to me more likely that the reverse process occurred. Consider part of what you quoted:

he is the beginning,
the first born from the dead,
that in all he might be first,
for in him was the Pleroma,
and through him to reconcile to himself all things,
whether on earth or in heaven,
making peace by the blood of his cross

We must ask, are the "all dead" of whom Jesus is the first born imagined as dwelling purely in a metaphysical domain? Evidently not, for this is a promise of resurrection made to earth dwelling humans, so Jesus must have been such (whatever else he was) to give humans hope of a future life. And he did it through the cross. Where was the cross set up? In a metaphysical sub-lunar but non-material dimension as the mythicists assert? No, because Jesus was reconciling all things on earth, which is where the cross must have been. You give the gospel and Pauline Jesus both earthly and heavenly attributes, and I'm sure that's a correct interpretation, but the probability is that he began on earth and was later raised. This is what all the sources up to John tell us, and it makes ideological sense, if Jesus was a messiah. John in effect makes him a god, so he has to start him off in the sky at the beginning of time. That's a later development as has been shown.

 

[Brainache]

Gday,



Does he actually say JESUS literally had brothers?
Or does he use an ambiguous phrase "brothers of the LORD"?


Kapyong

There is nothing ambiguous about it. He uses the phrase several times throughout the corpus, and it never means anyone or anything else.

It doesn't mean Disciple, or Apostle or Long-Time Companion (although if it did mean any of those things, it still refers to a flesh and blood Jesus).

Jesus gave rules about Divorce, according to Paul.

How many ghosts do that?

Seeyalatermate.

 

[Craig B]

Gday,
Does he actually say JESUS literally had brothers?
Or does he use an ambiguous phrase "brothers of the LORD"?
Kapyong

He identifies James as a brother. And James is in another source (Matt 13:55) included in a list of the names of Jesus' four brothers, in a very literal context, where people in Jesus' home town are rejecting his pretensions to special status.

Also if it means, companion of Jesus in a general sense, it's odd that Paul never applies it to Peter, for example. Moreover if it's a title, it's a mightily honorific and authoritative one. Why then does Paul apply it to James with whom he had disputes on fundamental questions, and whom he disparages in Galatians 2? Because, perhaps, the expression was literally true.

 

[Belz...]

Of course it was an answer. In fact I gave the same answer several times to you now in successive posts. Why don't you think it was an answer?

Look - if you try to replace the specific value of 60% by a non-specific and extremely vague term such as "leaning", then in all honesty what you should have said was that you were leaning 60-40 in favour of believing Jesus was real. In which case, as I have said before (and as dejudge pointed out to you before), that would be a statement of belief in a real Jesus.

If you want to omit all mention of any actual figures and just say something like "I am leaning that way", then as I said to you before, that immediately brings up the question of what you actually meant by that word "leaning" and whether any such "leaning towards belief in Jesus" is based on evidence of a human Jesus? What evidence are you using to "lean" towards belief in Jesus? ...

... or is it a belief drawn from something other than actual evidence?

When you talk about “leaning” towards anything, that is expressing a tendency to move towards some actual conclusion or position, but where you are not yet at the stage of having reached that conclusion or position. Whereas, in contrast, if you say as you’d did previously, that you are 60-40 convinced of Jesus, that is a very different statement of actually having arrived at that particular conclusion or position …

... putting any numerical value on it (other than the completely null position of 50-50) means you have arrived at a particular conclusion ….. whereas, talking about “leaning” towards any such probabilistic conclusion, is stating a tendency or potential to move in that direction, but without having either arrived at that concluding stage or saying that you have travelled any particular way towards it.

Yes or no, Ian.

in all honesty what you should have said was that you were leaning 60-40 in favour of believing Jesus was real.

That's what I said right off the bat. This is getting ridiculous.

... or is it a belief drawn from something other than actual evidence?

I don't have time to deal with your imagined reasons for my own opinions.

 

[Belz...]

I told you already you cannot guess the percentage of Probability. You need Data.

I told you already you can. That YOU won't isn't my problem. You do not understand English.

You are repeating the same logical fallacies.

You have no idea what that word means.

You claimed everyone agrees the evidence is Terrible for HJ, that it is very weak and that you are not convinced and then turn around and admit you are 60-40 for HJ which is the result of guessing.

You are unable to understand simple concepts: 60-40% is the result of the weakness of the evidence. If it were stronger, I'd be more convinced. What part of this extremely simple fact eludes you ?

It was a fallacy that the evidence was terrible and very weak. It was NON-EXISTENT.

That is your lie. Either that, or you do not understand evidence.

Please, your argument is way below grade school level.

Your own words refer to you, "Please, your argument is way below grade school level."

I'm glad that you are so bereft of arguments that you have to resort to these tactics. It shows that I'm right and you're wrong.

 

[Belz...]

You cannot use the bible as evidence of the truth of it’s own proven untrue fictional religious beliefs about Jesus.

I'd agree that you need corroborating evidence to reach a more definite conclusion, but to call it not evidence is to misunderstand the meaning of the word.

 

[IanS]

Many gods died and resurrected in history of religions. No one, as far as I am aware, with a death so infamous reserved to low-grade people.

Read the following comment I address to IanS. It is for you, also.

David - have a look at the highlighted part which is the basis of your argument. What you are saying there amounts to an argument from incredulity. That is - you are saying that you find it difficult to believe that gospel writers would have invented an untrue story of the crucifixion of Jesus, because you think that death by crucifixion would have been a humiliation of Jesus and thus a denial that he was truly the messianic Son of God. That is the argument you are making about the crucifixion, correct?

OK, well that is wrong. For the reason I explained before. To repeat - iirc, you can find in the OT, prophecies that the coming messiah will be rejected by his own people (ie by fellow Jews), and will pass unappreciated and unrecognised as the true messiah by his own people (ie the Jewish nation as a whole). So that is the first part of the explanation, where in fact the letters of Paul himself do say that "according to scripture" Jesus will be betrayed in this way by his own Jewish people.

And then further, again iirc (and I gave the OT refs to all of this before;- you can find them very easily from Wikipedia and Bible Gateway), there are various passages in the OT which could very easily have been interpreted by Paul and the earliest gospel writers to mean that this prophesised rejection and persecution of Jesus, would end in the death of Jesus, and quite possibly even nailed to a "tree" or "cross" in a form of crucifixion. For example, there is the famous passage which talks of the messiah saying something to the effect of his feet and hands having been "pierced" or pinned like the "Bite of a Lion" ... and I think there is even one OT passage that talks of someone who might be the messiah being "hung on a tree", which is apparently a reference to one of several forms of crucifixion (though as I have stressed several times here in the past concerning that very specific passage about being hung on a tree, do NOT quote me on that because I cannot now easily find that particular reference).

So what I am saying to you in all of the above, is - what we are really talking about with the crucifixion story, is the letters of Paul, and his belief that OT scripture revealed to him a fact of prophecy saying that the messiah would be persecuted, rejected, betrayed, and perhaps even put to death by his own Jewish people.

IOW - that appears in the NT bible as a result of what is said in the letters of Paul, and where the writer of those letters believed (rightly or wrongly) that his OT scripture contained the revelation that the messiah had passed out of earthly existence as a result of being "persecuted, unrecognised or not believed/appreciated as the true messiah" and even put to death, perhaps by crucifixion, and thus betrayed by his own Jewish people.

So that is one very obvious source of where that crucifixion idea came from - it came from the OT, and Paul himself even repeatedly says exactly that in his letters. And that is why Jesus has to die a humiliating death in that way … because Paul believed that was precisely the messiah prophecy revealed by OT scripture.

IOW, this was a way of people like Paul preaching to the faithful, that they must not again make that same mistake of rejecting this revelation of Jesus as the true messenger of God (as Paul now believed). He is telling them of this terrible mistake that the Jewish people themselves had made in destroying their own true messiah, because of their lack of true FAITH in the true message of God that Paul was now preaching to them … they must not again reject this messiah as they did in the past when, according to the certainly of scripture, their lack of steadfast faith caused them to destroy their own true messiah of God. It's a preaching message from Paul emphasising the dire apocalyptic need for Jews to now keep the faith in Paul's messianic message which was revealed to him directly from God.

There is a certain thing and a wrong thing in what you say. The correct view is that if we have to look for a basis on which an alleged inventor of the Jesus myth could act, would be found in the Hebrew tradition. We can dismiss the pagan mentality in which a god suffering punishment devoted to slaves or malefactors is unthinkable. This was a scandal to the Hellenic mentality, as seen in the objections of Celsus, for example.

But you are wrong to believe that Christians could find the figure of a crucified Messiah in Jewish thought of the age. You refer to Paul and the texts of Psalms 22 and Isaiah 53, which are the only ones in which the concept of a suffering servant of the Lord appears -IIRC. But you are wrong when you say that these texts speak about the Messiah. Neither Psalms nor Isaiah says anything about Messiah. Nor any cross. "Pierced hands and feet" has different translations and get different interpretations.

Therefore, the idea of a crucified Messiah is foreign to the Jewish mind at the time and had to be invented by Christians by manipulating the meaning of biblical texts. This invention could been made without any real event, in vacuo, as the miticists think, or as a way to justify the failure and humiliating end of a real individual. I.e. post evento.

Both alternative interpretations are possible. But I find the post evento interpretation more plausible. The key of the issue is the cross. A Jewish sect in the First Century could invent a thousand ways to put an end to his Mesías and blame the Jews without making him to die on a cross. It is more simple and natural to think that the followers of crucified Mesías (or prophet or whatever he was) devote themselves to a frantic search for a biblical "prophecy" that would overtake the evident failure of their hopes.

I don't know if I am sure with the "60-40" or "66-34" of certainty. But I believe that if we have to choose between these two interpretations, I find one of them more plausible than the other. If you want to maintain a strict scepticism, it is all right for me. Even though I will continue to believe that Jesus of Galilee probably existed, this issue has not relevance for me. I have said yet I am not Christian. This is the Christians problem and I don't know why some atheists are so overexcited with it.

David - you need to be careful with what you say above. Look at the highlight in what I wrote (above) - I did not say that the OT makes it clear that such prophecies are definitely about the expected messiah (though iirc, I think many of them are, or can appear to be). What I said to you in the highlight is that Paul and the earliest gospel writers could very easily have come to believe that those sort of passages in the OT were meant to apply to their expected messiah.

In practical terms, it seems to me very unlikely that a wandering street preacher like Paul would have been consulting earlier original hand written copies of the various books of the Jewish OT.

I think it’s far more likely that by the time of Paul, and then even later by the time of Mark, those authors (whoever they really were) would have been mostly relying on oral traditions of what various contemporary preachers had claimed about the words and meaning of the Old Testament. And/or, if they could actually read, and if they did have at their disposal (seems very unlikely to me) actual paper copies of any books of the OT, then by that date (early 1st century) that would probably be parts of the much later Greek translations such as the Septuagint.

Afaik, what was written as prophecy and similar beliefs in the early Hebrew OT, was invariably, and quite deliberately, vague and open to various interpretations as to what it could really have meant and what it might have really been referring to.

For example - by the time of the Essene DSS writers in that same region from c.170BC, the DSS show very clearly that the Essenes were preaching a slightly different interpretation of what they thought was the meaning of passages from their OT, where they now preached that the words of the OT meant an apocalyptic “end times” messiah, rather than the older traditional belief in a mortal kingly ruler such as figures like King David.

So what I am saying to you in the quote you reproduce above is - that there are various passages in the OT which could very easily have been interpreted by Paul and the earliest gospel writers to mean that this prophesised rejection and persecution of Jesus, would end in the death of Jesus.
It was open to interpretation, including all sorts of mistaken beliefs and misunderstandings etc. arising from mostly oral traditions of it’s preaching. It was also from the time of the DSS Essene's, a time when the messiah beliefs were subject to re-interpretation, change, and influence from other religious beliefs that had come into that region from Greek, Persian, and Roman religious beliefs and stories of their gods.

 

[IanS]

I'd agree that you need corroborating evidence to reach a more definite conclusion, but to call it not evidence is to misunderstand the meaning of the word.

It is evidence of the bible writers religious beliefs. But it is not actually evidence of Jesus ... it is not evidence that their beliefs were actually true.

 

[Belz...]

It is evidence of the bible writers religious beliefs.

Ok, we're running in circles, here. Have a nice day.

 

[eight bits]

Kapyong

There is no real evidence for a purely Celestial Jesus, but there is plenty of evidence where Jesus is described in celestial terms, such as Paul's Col 1:15-20

It is undisputed that when Paul is writing, his Jesus is by then a "celestial being," dead Jesus' ghost (pneuma body), who apparently enjoyed an antecedent existence (possibly without the pneuma body). Paul wouldn't be the only Jew who believed that fellow Jews generally had some variety of pre-earthly status

The quesion before us is whether the ghost in Paul's letters is the ghost of an actual man, or the ghost of a some sort of literary character.

Looking back, of the 10 items in your OP,

Myth 1 - The idea that Jesus was a myth is ridiculous
Myth 2 - Jesus was wildly famous - but ...
Myth 3 - Ancient Historian Josephus wrote about Jesus
Myth 4 - Eye-witnesses wrote the Gospels
Myth 5 - The Gospels give a consistent picture of Jesus
Myth 6 - History confirms the Gospels
Myth 7 - Archeology confirms the Gospels
Myth 8 - Paul and the epistles corroborate the Gospels
Myth 9 - Christianity began with Jesus and his apostles
Myth 10 - Christianity was totally new and different

all refer in whole or part to the behavior of other people besides the historical Jesus. As you can see from reading the thread, few people posting here endorse many of the ten positions. What does #10 even mean, if the typical historical Jesus position is that Christianity is a heresy or apostasy which arose in an existing religion, Second Temple Judaism? (Pace sleepy lioness, but "early Judaism" does not communicate the specific antecedent religious environment that concerns us.)

Brainache

He identifies James as a brother. And James is in another source (Matt 13:55) included in a list of the names of Jesus' four brothers, in a very literal context, where people in Jesus' home town are rejecting his pretensions to special status.

Matthew copies from Mark on point, with improvements. Mark portrays anonymous people asking one another questions. There is no answer provided in the text. The answer may be no, or the author simply doesn't know anymore than we do in what sense somebody named James may be a "brother of the Lord." "Mark" has a pattern and practice of laying out alternatives for the various incidents and circumstances he discusses.

Mark also identifies another James who was supposedly among the inner group of Simon Peter, James and his brother, John. All three apparently survive Jesus, and would plausibly be the nucleus (and maybe the entirety of the permnanent membership) of the "church in Judea" which Paul had persecuted. If so, then James might plausibly be called a "brother of the Lord" in an obvious figurative sense, along with John and Simon Peter.

It is not at all odd that Peter wouldn't be described that way, since Peter has a commission from Jesus and God, to be for the Jews what Paul is to the nations. "Brother of the Lord" would be a reduction in rank. At least one other person besides James has the title, however, since brothers, plural, travel with women.