Belz...
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But that's not quite true, is it ? Considering the number of times this was repeated to you in the past, I'm having a hard time believing that you somehow missed it.
Bart Ehrman on the Historical Jesus
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But that's not quite true, is it ? Considering the number of times this was repeated to you in the past, I'm having a hard time believing that you somehow missed it.
Foster Zygote
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There you go again, repeating your mantra.
And there you go again attempting to ignore the fact that it isn't my argument. It's the argument of actual scholars whom you are obviously intimidated by. Please demonstrate that the passages from Tacitus and Josephus regarded by historians to be most likely genuine are actually forgeries.
No, you haven't. Perhaps you've asked someone else, but you haven't asked me.
In a 2011 review of the state of modern scholarship, Bart Ehrman (a secular agnostic) wrote: "He certainly existed, as virtually every competent scholar of antiquity, Christian or non-Christian, agrees" B. Ehrman, 2011 Forged : writing in the name of God ISBN 978-0-06-207863-6. page 285
Michael Grant (a classicist) states that "In recent years, 'no serious scholar has ventured to postulate the non historicity of Jesus' or at any rate very few, and they have not succeeded in disposing of the much stronger, indeed very abundant, evidence to the contrary." in Jesus by Michael Grant 2004 ISBN 1898799881 page 200
Richard A. Burridge states: "There are those who argue that Jesus is a figment of the Church’s imagination, that there never was a Jesus at all. I have to say that I do not know any respectable critical scholar who says that any more." in Jesus Now and Then by Richard A. Burridge and Graham Gould (Apr 1, 2004) ISBN 0802809774 page 34
Crossan, John Dominic (1995). Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography. HarperOne. p. 145. ISBN 0-06-061662-8. "That he was crucified is as sure as anything historical can ever be, since both Josephus and Tacitus...agree with the Christian accounts on at least that basic fact."
Robert E. Van Voorst Jesus Outside the New Testament: An Introduction to the Ancient Evidence Eerdmans Publishing, 2000. ISBN 0-8028-4368-9 page 16 states: "biblical scholars and classical historians regard theories of non-existence of Jesus as effectively refuted."
The Gospels and Jesus by Graham Stanton, 1989 ISBN 0192132415 Oxford University Press, page 145 states : "Today nearly all historians, whether Christians or not, accept that Jesus existed".
If you're claiming that all the scholars who have stated that most of their peers regard the historical Jesus as having likely existed, then why don't you go compile a list of all scholars and their positions on Jesus' historicity.
What a waste of words. Why didn't you simply write, "Please identify your source AND tell us the number of all Academic Scholars in the world who argue that there is insufficient evidence to settle the HJ as well as those who argue that Jesus was a figure of mythology". And none of those three redundant sentences are questions, so you should have ended them with periods, not question marks.
You don't actually read what anyone else writes, do you?
Really? The academic community disagrees with you. So, again, why should we conclude that university professors are so stupid that they've been trumped by someone who can't even construct a proper paragraph?
As do a lot of other New Testament scholars. Many a biologist will say that they are "certain" that life arose though a process of chemical abiogenesis when speaking informally, even though that process has not yet been discerned. I'm quite sure that these New Testament scholars are speaking informally when they say that.
Yes. That's because no one can say very much about an historical Jesus. They can only make educated speculations regarding what he might have done and said. Yet Eisenman is still of the opinion that an historical Jesus most likely existed. In fact, as I recall, he thinks that James was probably the leader of Jesus' group from the start, and that Jesus was a loose cannon regarded as crazy by his family who ran off and got himself killed doing something very rash.
Scholars express doubts about things that they think very likely all the time. In every academic field you'll find supporters of various hypotheses who regard them as very likely even though they can't yet provide any proof. Most exobiologists will tell you that they regard extraterrestrial life as extremely likely. The fact that they can't prove it doesn't mean, by default, that they are wrong.
I haven't chosen any of them. The only near universally accepted profile for an historical Jesus is that he was a disciple of someone known as John the baptist who got himself executed by the Romans. He could have been from Nazareth. But then he could have been a Nazirite, and some people who heard oral accounts got it wrong and thought he was from Nazareth. He could have been an Essene, or a member of some other end-times apocalyptic group. If questions about historical personages disqualified them from existence, we'd lose a vast chunk of our history.
Remember the Sumner quote? All of those are plausible.
Other than the occasional run-on sentence that simply doesn't parse, your writings are so simple that there is no challenge in understanding them.
No, actually, at this point, I'm far more interested in the psychological aspects of your reasons for pursuing this issue. In fact, what you don't say has become far more interesting than what you do say. For instance, you keep avoiding my queries as to why we should accept your poorly constructed arguments over those of the majority of academic scholars. You also won't go anywhere near my question regarding whether you were once a Christian. I suspect I hit pretty close to the mark there.
So no, sorry, I don't find you the least bit terrifying or even concerning, although it would appear that you would like to think that you are. (But for that to be the case, the field of New Testament textual criticism would be shaking at its foundations at the mere mention of your name. That doesn't appear to be happening.) I'm fascinated by the reasons behind irrational thinking.
That's precious. You should get a monocle and a Persian cat. I'm not emotionally invested in an historical Jesus. I want to know, if at all possible, what really happened. Barring that, I wan't to know what is possible to have happened. If solid evidence can be presented that no Jesus ever existed, if the scholarly community reevaluates its position and concludes that Jesus was likely a myth, then I will follow it. But right now, most scholars think that an historical Jesus is the best explanation for the origin of the Christian cult.
You're back to the same old argument: The presence of obviously mythical elements in the narrative means that it is entirely mythical. Of course, you have to ignore the fact that other people, known to have been real, have been mythologized. Alexander was said to have had the sea bow before him in reverence. by your reasoning, you would have to conclude that Alexander never actually existed. So, did Alexander really exist?
You mean the story about that guy who was mythologized by Jews, Greeks and Romans?
I'm afraid that's one of those sentences that doesn't parse well. Care to try again?
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But the people in this thread are not the ones providing you with any personally known evidence of Jesus are they!
For what you believe to be evidence of Jesus, you are relying on precisely that same biblical writing from authors who you agree were so hopelessly unreliable as to be solemnly swearing to belief in a Holy ghost, a virgin birth, wall-to-wall miracles, and all the rest of it!
You source of “evidence” is that same hopelessly unreliable bible.
Why do you need to rely on writing so obvious and fatally flawed as that?
They are most certainly not overcoming my refusal to believe that Jesus was born of a virgin impregnated by a ghost.
Paul did not know anything about a living Jesus, did he?
In which case, it would be impossible for Paul himself to give us anything he knew as actual "evidence" of Jesus, would it not?
All that Paul can offer about Jesus, as he constantly tells his readers, is what he came to believe from what "was written", from what "has been revealed in me", and all "according to scripture".
How much clearer can Paul's writing be? He cannot give you any evidence of Jesus, because he does not know any such evidence!
Paul is not a source of any evidence about a living Jesus. Paul can only be a source of evidence about his own religious beliefs.
dejudge said:
You have done exactly what I expected.
Instead of producing the actual data, the actual study with statistics, you present the names of those who are actively engaged in the spreading of the Chinese Whisper and baseless Rumor.
You cannot supply any facts or any data showing how many Scholars in the world took part in any survey of poll regarding their opinion on the existence/non existence of Jesus.
You cannot supply any evidence from antiquity for your preferred version of an HJ.
You are actively engaged in making statements for which you know that there is no supporting data which is compatible with Chinese Whispers and rumors.
You seem to be putting forward the absurd notion that the statements made by plenty people are most likely true even if there is no supporting data.
You are implying that atheism must be false because plenty Scholars believe that God exist.
Atheists don't play the numbers game.
You must know that numbers are meaningless when all we need is Data--all we need is evidence.
Only Data matters.
Only EVIDENCE counts.
Right now you are at ZERO or a lower number.
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If, as some suspect, he was a charlatan, he can't even give us evidence of these beliefs.
Not Paul's reports of seeing Jesus as a light in the noonday sky, but the material associated with Paul's writings more generally, are the source of the evidence. There is internal evidence of chronology in Paul as we have seen. So Jesus was not a second century invention. Luke says things about Paul which receive corroboration in Paul's authentic epistles (in a general sense, I mean). Paul's denunciation of James in Galatians tells us about James's thinking on matters of interest. The account of Paul's misadventures in Jerusalem tells us something about the "Jesus people", and their relationship with the Temple and the Roman authorities.
Paul also believes that Jesus was put to death by crucifixion; the earliest source for that belief. To be sure he tells us not much else, but that's the sort of detail that would be impressive enough to be transmitted orally.
I doubt that many of the pro-HJ posters in this thread have actually read many sceptical books about the historicity of Jesus, and are probably unaware that whilst there are lots of possible theories as to how belief in Jesus may have arisen from a largely mythical or entirely mythical figure, the bottom line in all those books is really just to point out how very weak the historically claimed evidence for Jesus really is.
On which note, almost this entire thread seems to hinge on the fact that some here accept that the evidence is sufficient to believe that Jesus probably was real. Whilst others regard that same evidence as far short of what is required to reach any such conclusion.
At one time it was being said that the evidence in this subject was so incredibly complex that in order to have any valid opinion we either had to have a doctorate in bible history, or else just accept the opinion of bible scholars like Bart Ehrman and the rest. And to that extent we had in an earlier thread a huge long diatribe from Piggy stretching over dozens of posts where he insisted on reproducing as much biblical history as he could which he said would in it’s end show convincingly the evidence that virtually proved Jesus … though in the end, after some of us kept asking when his endless vast tracts of history would get around to providing the claimed evidence, he finished up saying we had already had the evidence and that it was buried in the totality of all he had previously said!
IOW - in the end what that all boiled down to, and what it has all boiled down to here, is that we should believe that the bible is somehow a credible source of evidence for its’ authors knowing about a real human Jesus.
Even though none of those biblical writers, not even Paul, ever knew any living Jesus. So that whatever they wrote, it was quite literally impossible for any of them to be providing any evidence themselves of a living Jesus.
At best all that a biblical writer like that could provide was, in the case of the gospels - evidence of their own hearsay beliefs taken from earlier hearsay beliefs of unknown people who thought that even earlier people had once been disciples of Jesus and were present to confirm that Jesus most definitely did all sorts of things that we now know to be certainly untrue fiction. So the beliefs that those gospel authors wrote about were only evidence of their own religious beliefs, not evidence of Jesus, and the beliefs that they held were certainly untrue.
And as far as Paul is concerned - Paul makes crystal clear that he never knew any living Jesus, and it was therefore impossible for him to personally provide any evidence about the life of someone he never knew. All that Paul could possibly do is to tell his readers how he came to believe in Jesus, and upon that he is again crystal clear in stating that his belief came entirely from what he said “it is written” , from what “God was pleased to reveal in me” and always "according to scripture”. I.e., very clearly stating that his “evidence” of Jesus was entirely from his religious belief and from nothing else.
And even then, as woefully inadequate as that biblical writing obviously is, it is known not from any of those original authors themselves (we actually have no idea what they might ever have written about Jesus), but only from Christian devotional copyists writing centuries after all the original authors had died!
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I have read such books with great interest, starting with works by G A Wells many years ago. http://www.amazon.com/The-Jesus-early-Christians-Christian/dp/0301710147 Your post is of great interest because it juxtaposes the two separate forms of mythicism very neatly.
The observation that the historical evidence is weak is a very sound one, and I accept it. It is a matter of degree. I find it more plausible that the occurrence and nature of belief in Jesus can best be explained by the supposition that he existed in one form or another. (John Frum notwithstanding.) But the assertion that he arose from an already existing mythical figure is in my view fraught with all manner of difficulties. It is moreover a positive assertion, requiring evidence to sustain it, and that evidence is lacking. Where is the pre-existing myth? It has no more been produced than the historical Jesus.
But the pre-existing myth theory at least disposes of the "it was all concocted as an intentional falsehood by forgers in the second and fourth centuries" thesis that appears from time to time in these threads.
Foster Zygote
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"Actual study"? What "actual study"? Are you asserting that there is some scientific study, complete with data and statistical analysis and submitted for peer review, into the exact number of New Testament scholars and the distribution of their opinions regarding the historicity of Jesus?
Tell you what, dejudge. If you think that it's out there to be found, and that it will support your claims, then present it here. We both know that you won't.
And while you're at it, you can demonstrate that the passages from Tacitus and Josephus regarded by historians to be most likely genuine are actually forgeries, and explain why your claims carry more weight than the majority of New Testament scholars.
Foster Zygote
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Apocalypticism, in its various forms, was revolutionary by nature. The apocalyptic groups were predicting a return of the House of David to the throne of Israel and the expulsion of foreign occupiers. This was going to pave the way for a return to proper godly life. That sounds pretty revolutionary to me. I'm sure it did to the Romans as well.
So the fact that Paul cannot possibly be a source of evidence for something he plainly tells us he did not ever know (except as divine revelation), is overcome by the fact that it was also written about later by the anonymous author of g-Luke! In fact only known to us from the anonymous Christian devotional copyists writing g-Luke from say 4th-6th century and later?? And that is your corroborated evidence for Jesus?? ... you really must be joking
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Pardon?
dafydd
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You don't ask for much, do you? How would you set about dong that? Better still, you start by telling us the number of academic scholars in the world who believe that Jesus was not a figure of mythology.
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The point about a pre-existing mythical figure is interesting, as it is, of course, possible. But many things are possible - for example, I have heard it suggested that Buddhist missionaries arrived in the Middle East, and influenced some groups of Jews, who came up with the Christ figure, and also various teachings, which some people think have vaguely Buddhist-type ideas in them.
I find this a truly fantastic idea - by 'fantastic' I mean off the wall - but the point is that it is indeed possible, since tradition claims that the emperor Asoka organized groups of missionaries to travel throughout Asia; in fact, one such Buddhist is supposed to have burned himself to death in Athens as a testament to his faith.
The trouble is, that possibilities are infinite, so we have to produce some constraints. Thus, is there any sign of a Jewish group producing Buddhist-type sutras or sayings? Not as far as I know.
I suppose Doherty's ideas have been criticized along the same lines - where are the Jewish (or non-Jewish) groups which worshipped a Middle Platonic celestial figure?
Well, we shall see what Carrier produces in relation to these possibilities.
Foster Zygote
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No, dejudge. I'm asking you why the great majority of academic New Testament scholars completely contradict your claims. A far greater number of people believe that Jesus rose from the dead and that they'll go to Heaven to be with them after they die than believe that Jesus was no more than a religious crank who got himself killed and was mythologized by superstitious followers. Yet you don't see me arguing for the majority opinion in this case. Replace academic New Testament scholars in your above argument with evolutionary biologists or climatologists and you'll see that you're just trying to deflect the weight of academic against your own poorly informed ideas, like a creationist arguing that the consensus among biologists regarding evolution by natural selection is just some sort of argumentum ad populum.
So you are an atheist? Have you always been an atheist, or were you once a Christian?
To paraphrase: "NAHNAHNAHNAHNAHI'MNOTLISTENINGNAHNAHNAH!!!"
Foster Zygote
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He thinks that the early Christian writings must either be accepted as completely accurate, or rejected as complete fiction, without even a small core of reality at the center concerning the existence of certain much mythologized individuals. He thinks that an historian saying, "It's plausible that Christianity was based on exaggerated and fabricated stories about a real person" is tantamount to accepting the whole thing as the inspired, infallible word of YHWH. He doesn't understand that scholars read these writings not as accurate histories, but as evidence of what early Christians believed about their history.
Again, this total rejection of the possibility of historical truth to anything even underlying the origin of Christianity strikes me as an interesting contrast to the total acceptance practiced by many evangelical Christians. It makes me wonder if dejudge is a former Christian who came to feel angry or betrayed by his belief, and reacted by pulling a complete reversal.
OK, well that post finally sounds to me rather more reasonable than most HJ posts here (though I'm sure I will soon wish I had never bothered to acknowledge that, but anyway ....) ....
I don't know who has ever proposed that the Jesus of the bible arose from belief in an earlier (known to be?) mythical figure, except in the very obvious and surely undeniable sense that just such a saving messiah had been believed as matter of utter certainty since at least 500BC. So Paul’s Yehoshua, was only that exact same statement of belief in the OT messiah who they all believed in.
So, what you ask for as "the pre-existing myth" is well known to you - it is precisely the myth that had been prophesised in the OT since at least the time of Moses and King David c.1000BC!
The only difference is that by about 36AD onwards Paul was now preaching something very similar to the messiah beliefs that had already been in existence in that region in the writing of the Dead Sea Scrolls since as far back as circa.170BC (i.e. 200 years before Paul), where the Jewish Essenes of that same region no longer believed the earlier messianic OT interpretations of the messiah as a human ruler similar to King David, but instead now believed in a much broader range of messianic beliefs centred around preaching of a messiah who already was, or would be, a holy figure sent directly by Yahweh to warn the faithful that Yahweh’s day of apocalyptic judgement was now almost upon them all.
That was, apparently, very similar to what Paul was preaching in that exact same small region.
And of course, whether it was Paul, or the Essenes (who were apparently still writing their scrolls of belief all the way through the time of Paul right up to about 70AD), all of these preachers were taking all of their messiah beliefs from what they believed to be the divinely inspired revelations of Yahweh recorded in the inerrancy of their Old Testament.
But as far as sceptic books are concerned, I think you told me before that you had also read Ellegard, Helms, and Doherty as well as Wells. So in that case you will know that, although any author like that will need to write some positive theory of Jesus mythology in order for any commercial publisher ever to publish such a book, what most of those authors are doing is really just to give chapter and verse on why the evidence claimed for all these years to be proof positive for Jesus, is in fact the precise opposite, and is not actually reliable evidence of Jesus, if indeed it should be called “evidence” of him at all.
Ellegard's book for example, whilst actually titled "Jesus: 100 Years before Christ.", says very little about his theory of Jesus being the shadowy Essene figure called the “Teacher of Righteousness” in the DSS c.170BC to 70AD, but is actually vastly more about why all of the biblical writing and all of the earliest non-biblical writing such as Clement, Tacitus, Josephus etc. cannot be reliable at all in what they say about the authors beliefs in a Jesus figure none of them ever knew.
There you go again with the known Chinese Whisper and Rumor. You have no statistics, no data, no polls for your rumor but repeat it over and over so that it would be believed to be a fact when you have no data and never ever had any.
1. Where is the survey, where is the poll?
2. Who did the poll of the Scholars on the HJ question?
3. What year was it done ?
4. What is the statistical margin of error for the poll?
5. In which country was it conducted?
6. How man Scholars participated?
You will not answer.
dejudge said:
Foster Zygote said:
It seems that it is not only your ears but also your eyes and mouth. You just can't say anything or see any evidence for your HJ--the supposed dead obscurity found in fiction and forgery.
You say, hear and see no evidence for your preferred version of HJ.
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Belz...
Fiend God
So the fact that Paul cannot possibly be a source of evidence for something he plainly tells us he did not ever know (except as divine revelation), is overcome by the fact that it was also written about later by the anonymous author of g-Luke! In fact only known to us from the anonymous Christian devotional copyists writing g-Luke from say 4th-6th century and later?? And that is your corroborated evidence for Jesus?? ... you really must be joking
You should've hilighted what came before that.
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