Bart Ehrman on the Historical Jesus

[dejudge]

Thanks for the thoughtful reply, dejudge. I can see your point about the non-Jews building up a case for the Jewish responsibility for Jesus' death.


Tertullian and Justin Martyr are middle to late second century, Hippolytus and Origin, 3rd century.
How do you reckon they influenced the gospel writers, since their works are written after the gospels?

There is no need for them to influence the authors of the Gospels.

They merely reported what caused the Jesus story to be written and what Christians believed.

Aristides and Justin Martyr are 2nd century witnesses of the early Jesus cult.

There is no evidence of the Jesus cult of Christians before the 2nd century.

While I agree there's not a lot of reasons to think the gospels were written before the destruction of Jerusalem chroncicled by Josephus, it does seem to me likely that diatribe about the 'corrupt generation, etc.' is modeled on OT prophets, to be expected from a wandering apocalyptic preacher in that place and time.

There is no evidence that the Jesus cult was modeled after an actual wandering apocalyptic preacher when virtually all the words of Jesus in the NT are found in the Septuagint.

It does not make any real sense to start a new religion with a known lie.

If Jesus was a known apocalyptic preacher and had a known earthly father then it would be of no use claiming he was born of a Holy Ghost and that he was the Logos and God Creator.

If Jesus was a known crucified man then it would have been virtually impossible for Jews and Romans to have worshiped such a character as a God.

Essentially, a known human Jesus who did virtually nothing as described in the NT is the very least likely reason for the start of the Jesus cult.

At c 33 CE--the Jews had no reason to worship a known crucified criminal as a God for Remission of Sins when the Temple was standing, Caiaphas was High Priest and their Laws of God were being practised.

The Fall of the Temple is the reason for the Jesus story in NT Canon.

The Entire Canon was composed AFTER c 70 CE.

There was a massive crisis for the Jews c 70 CE when the Temple Fell--the Laws of God for Remission of Sins by Sacrifice at the Temple were made obsolete.

Sometime in the 2nd century stories were circulated that the reason the Temple of the Jewish God was destroyed was because the Jews KILLED the Son of their own God after he himself came down from heaven and told the Jews to REPENT of their sins.

There is NO evidence of the Jesus cult of Christians or their writings until the 2nd century or later.

The earliest witnesses of the Jesus cult of Christians appear to be Aristides and Justin Martyr--NOT the unknown "Paul".

 

[dejudge]

Hi, dejudge.
Was it walking on the sea or walking on a lake?
According to wiki, Lake Tiberias^WP is just that, a lake. I've seen footage of Cris Angell walking on water, so I associate the event with magicians or swamis rather than ghosts.
Still, I can see Jesus the artiste has less of a ring about it than Jesus the ghost.

I MUST, MUST, MUST repeat EXACTLY what is written. If you read a book and it stated that George Washington cut down a Cherry Tree then I cannot assume that the author did not know it was some other tree.

It is extremely important that we repeat what is found written not what we believe should have been.

The veracity of the author and historicity of the NT is critical.

If the author claimed Jesus walked on the sea when it was in fact a lake then this may be an indication that the author was not familiar with the topography of Galilee and was most likely NOT from the region.

Essentially, the more errors we find and the more the errors are repeated in other Gospels give us an indication of who wrote the Gospels.

Based on these repeated errors in the NT it can be logically deduced that the Gospels were written by Non-Jews.

 

[Belz...]

Still waiting for your explanation of my "total contradiction", Dejudge.

 

[pakeha]

"Someone is wrong on the internet" syndrome.

It should count as one of the fundamental forces.

There is no need for them to influence the authors of the Gospels.

They merely reported what caused the Jesus story to be written and what Christians believed.

Aristides and Justin Martyr are 2nd century witnesses of the early Jesus cult.

There is no evidence of the Jesus cult of Christians before the 2nd century.


There is no evidence that the Jesus cult was modeled after an actual wandering apocalyptic preacher when virtually all the words of Jesus in the NT are found in the Septuagint.

It does not make any real sense to start a new religion with a known lie.

If Jesus was a known apocalyptic preacher and had a known earthly father then it would be of no use claiming he was born of a Holy Ghost and that he was the Logos and God Creator.

If Jesus was a known crucified man then it would have been virtually impossible for Jews and Romans to have worshiped such a character as a God.

Essentially, a known human Jesus who did virtually nothing as described in the NT is the very least likely reason for the start of the Jesus cult.

At c 33 CE--the Jews had no reason to worship a known crucified criminal as a God for Remission of Sins when the Temple was standing, Caiaphas was High Priest and their Laws of God were being practised.

The Fall of the Temple is the reason for the Jesus story in NT Canon.

The Entire Canon was composed AFTER c 70 CE.

There was a massive crisis for the Jews c 70 CE when the Temple Fell--the Laws of God for Remission of Sins by Sacrifice at the Temple were made obsolete.

Sometime in the 2nd century stories were circulated that the reason the Temple of the Jewish God was destroyed was because the Jews KILLED the Son of their own God after he himself came down from heaven and told the Jews to REPENT of their sins.

There is NO evidence of the Jesus cult of Christians or their writings until the 2nd century or later.

The earliest witnesses of the Jesus cult of Christians appear to be Aristides and Justin Martyr--NOT the unknown "Paul".

I read your post and much of what you write is fascinating.
However, "It does not make any real sense to start a new religion with a known lie.", while logical, makes no real sense in a world that sees any number of cults based on known lies.
The more I read about the 1st century, the more I think just about anything would have been believed then.
Just like nowadays.

I MUST, MUST, MUST repeat EXACTLY what is written. If you read a book and it stated that George Washington cut down a Cherry Tree then I cannot assume that the author did not know it was some other tree.

It is extremely important that we repeat what is found written not what we believe should have been.

The veracity of the author and historicity of the NT is critical.

If the author claimed Jesus walked on the sea when it was in fact a lake then this may be an indication that the author was not familiar with the topography of Galilee and was most likely NOT from the region.

Essentially, the more errors we find and the more the errors are repeated in other Gospels give us an indication of who wrote the Gospels.

Based on these repeated errors in the NT it can be logically deduced that the Gospels were written by Non-Jews.

Or by Jews unfamiliar with the Judaean topography.
Alexandria, Antioch could be cities where the gospels were written, even Rome, why not?

 

[Foster Zygote]

You have no idea that an on-going Quest for an HJ does not mean your HJ existed--an assumed obscure crucified criminal.

As I've already explained to you, that is not what I said. I don't know how to explain it to you any more simply. I can only conclude that your education is so deficient that you are unable to understand such a simple concept.

 

[Foster Zygote]

The Jesus story is probably the world's greatest Ghost story ever told--even atheists believe the Ghost was really a human being.

In other words, they don't believe that he was a ghost at all.

 

[Foster Zygote]

The Jesus story and cult did not start in the 1st century as the evidence shows.

Then who was Nero persecuting in the mid 1st Century?

Not a single manuscript or Codex of the Jesus story has been recovered in Judea and none in the 1st century pre 70 CE.

If there was no story of Jesus and no cult in the 1st century then this is exactly what would be the case--no recovered evidence.

Then I guess Josephus was a Medieval fabrication. Oh wait, I forgot. You refuse to admit when other situations prove your arguments false. So you'll just go on claiming that the lack of 1st Century copies is proof that none ever existed (as though the preservation rate for ancient texts is extremely high), while still quoting other ancient sources for whom no 1st Century texts exist.

It's too bad that you don't realize that you are still thinking like a religious fundamentalist.

 

[dejudge]

The Jesus story and cult did not start in the 1st century as the evidence shows.

Then who was Nero persecuting in the mid 1st Century?

That is the precise question that YOU cannot answer and is in capable of answering.

The very 11th century copy that YOU use show that the word "ChrEstian" was manipulated and never claimed the WELL KNOWN Christus was crucified.

You have presented an uncorroborated forgery with no evidence of YOUR standard HJ--the crucified criminal.

The HJ argument for an obscure crucified criminal is an established failed dead end argument for hundreds of years.

The Questers cannot and are incapable of presenting any evidence for the assumed obscure crucified criminal.

Keep Questing!! You may be lucky.

 

[Belz...]

Every time you refuse to answer my request, Dejudge, you just show that your claim was a lie.

 

[maximara]

It is possible in the BT case, as described in wiki. There is an analogy with Jesus. The Bermuda Triangle woo is nonsense promoted by charlatans and lunatics. Does that mean the loss of Flight 19 is a false tale? No, it's historical, but may be explained by natural means.

True but there are other stories regarding the Bermuda Triangle that appear to made out of whole cloth. There Ellen Austin and the derelict (1881), Loria (1866), Viego (1868), and Miranom (1884) are examples of these.

 

[dejudge]

I read your post and much of what you write is fascinating.
However, "It does not make any real sense to start a new religion with a known lie.", while logical, makes no real sense in a world that sees any number of cults based on known lies.
The more I read about the 1st century, the more I think just about anything would have been believed then.
Just like nowadays.

Religions are not started by known lies. Religions are started when people BELIEVE what they read or are told is TRUE.

If the Jesus cult was started c 30 CE then people would have known that Jesus was not the Logos and God Creator or God's Own Son without a human father.

If it started c 117-138 CE, at least 100 years later, then people may have BELIEVED the Son of God was on earth c 30 CE.

There is no corroborative evidence for an actual apocalyptic preacher who was worshiped as a God by Jews and people of the Roman Empire c 37-41 CE.

The supposed preaching of Jesus was Blasphemy to the Jews and the Romans would not have worshiped a known Jewish criminal as a God.

Essentially you could not have read of any actual corroborative evidence for an apocalyptic preacher who was believed to be God.

The more one reads from it becomes clear that the Entire Canon, including the Pauline Corpus, are post c 70 CE writings and was written to explain the Fall of the Temple.

The Gospels and the Pauline writings only make THEOLOGICAL sense after the Jewish Temple of God had fallen and the Jews were not able to practice their Sacrifices for Remission of Sins.

The story that God sacrificed his Son for Remission of Sins was invented after the Fall of the Temple.

 

[Craig B]

True but there are other stories regarding the Bermuda Triangle that appear to made out of whole cloth. There Ellen Austin and the derelict (1881), Loria (1866), Viego (1868), and Miranom (1884) are examples of these.

This must be the BT equivalent of the "pre-existing mythology" like the crucifixion of a saviour in the sub-lunar region of spiritual flesh and woo, from which some mythicists believe that the story of Jesus is derived. According to wiki the origin of the superstition is as follows

The earliest allegation of unusual disappearances in the Bermuda area appeared in a September 17, 1950 article published in The Miami Herald (Associated Press) by Edward Van Winkle Jones. Two years later, Fate magazine published "Sea Mystery at Our Back Door",[10] a short article by George X. Sand covering the loss of several planes and ships, including the loss of Flight 19, a group of five U.S. Navy TBM Avenger bombers on a training mission. Sand's article was the first to lay out the now-familiar triangular area where the losses took place. Flight 19 alone would be covered again in the April 1962 issue of American Legion magazine.

Thus, the earliest accounts post date Flight 19, and it was included as an example of the phenomenon from the start, according to the notices in wiki. Which may be wrong, of course.

What aspects of later BT lore are included in the earlier works you have cited?

 

[maximara]

Then who was Nero persecuting in the mid 1st Century?

Perhaps no one. No person actually in Rome c64 as an adult such as Josephus or Pliny the Elder mentions Christianity.

There are three ways to explain that: either they didn't exist in Rome in noticeable numbers (which would make targeting them meaningless as an effort to counter claims of firesetting), they didn't call themselves "Christians" but some other name and 2nd century Pauline Christians claimed them as part of their group rather then the many splinter groups they may have belonged to, or they were a pagan sound alike group such as Chrestians who supposedly followed Osiris and if a supposed 2nd century letter is to believed not highly regarded by Romans.

 

[tsig]

Then who was Nero persecuting in the mid 1st Century?


Then I guess Josephus was a Medieval fabrication. Oh wait, I forgot. You refuse to admit when other situations prove your arguments false. So you'll just go on claiming that the lack of 1st Century copies is proof that none ever existed (as though the preservation rate for ancient texts is extremely high), while still quoting other ancient sources for whom no 1st Century texts exist.

It's too bad that you don't realize that you are still thinking like a religious fundamentalist.

Do you have any evidence that Nero persecuted Christians?

 

[Foster Zygote]

That is the precise question that YOU cannot answer and is in capable of answering.

The very 11th century copy that YOU use show that the word "ChrEstian" was manipulated and never claimed the WELL KNOWN Christus was crucified.

You have presented an uncorroborated forgery with no evidence of YOUR standard HJ--the crucified criminal.

The HJ argument for an obscure crucified criminal is an established failed dead end argument for hundreds of years.

The Questers cannot and are incapable of presenting any evidence for the assumed obscure crucified criminal.

Keep Questing!! You may be lucky.

So you're just going to pretend that all that stuff in the article that you linked to about how "Chrestians" and "Christians" was used interchangeably never existed? Let's look at it again:

It has been stated that both the terms Christians and Chrestians had at times been used by the general population in Rome to refer to early Christians. Robert Van Voorst says that many sources indicate that the term Chrestians was also used among the early followers of Jesus by the second century. The term Christians appears only three times in the New Testament, the first usage (Acts 11:26) giving the origin of the term. In all three cases the uncorrected Codex Sinaiticus in Greek reads Chrestianoi. In Phrygia a number of funerary stone inscriptions use the term Chrestians, with one stone inscription using both terms together, reading: "Chrestians for Christians". Source

The sad thing is that the above passage comes right after the part you quoted about the alteration of the letter 'e' to an 'i'.

You are ignoring facts because they don't support what you want to be the truth. How does that make your arguments any different from religious apologia?

 

[Craig B]

Perhaps no one. No person actually in Rome c64 as an adult such as Josephus or Pliny the Elder mentions Christianity.

There are three ways to explain that: either they didn't exist in Rome in noticeable numbers (which would make targeting them meaningless as an effort to counter claims of firesetting), they didn't call themselves "Christians" but some other name and 2nd century Pauline Christians claimed them as part of their group rather then the many splinter groups they may have belonged to, or they were a pagan sound alike group such as Chrestians who supposedly followed Osiris and if a supposed 2nd century letter is to believed not highly regarded by Romans.

I'm finding this "chrestian" thing more and more problematic. Yes Suetonius mentions Jews expelled from Rome on account of disturbances "instigated by Chrestus" and the Tacitus manuscript may well have had "Chrestians". But we can't rush from there to the assumption that they were a soundalike pagan group.

For this reason: our earliest complete NT, in all the three occurrences of the word, has Chrestian too.

Tacitus is believed to have spelt Christians as Chrestians in his original; and the earliest (11th century) copy we have today apparently had signs of an edit in the copy process to reflect Christians. It has been discovered, however, that both spellings were used even by early followers of Jesus and Chrestianoi was used in all three references to the term in the New Testament in the Greek Codex Sinaiticus of the Bible.

http://www.theskepticsgod.net/documents/utils.php?action=download&filename=TheSkepticsGod.pdf
Are we then forced to the conclusion that the group mentioned in the NT is soundalike pagan outfit too? That is carrying mythicism a bit far.

 

[maximara]

I'm finding this "chrestian" thing more and more problematic. Yes Suetonius mentions Jews expelled from Rome on account of disturbances "instigated by Chrestus" and the Tacitus manuscript may well have had "Chrestians". But we can't rush from there to the assumption that they were a soundalike pagan group.

For this reason: our earliest complete NT, in all the three occurrences of the word, has Chrestian too.

You do realize that the Codex Sinaiticus is from 330–360 or nearly 200 years after the quote fest that is Against Heresies (c180), right?

The letter in question supposedly is from 134 CE:

"Egypt, which you commended to me, my dearest Servianus, I have found to be wholly fickle and inconsistent, and continually wafted about by every breath of fame. The worshipers of Serapis (here) are called Chrestians, and those who are devoted to the god Serapis (I find), call themselves Bishops of Chrestus are, in fact, devotees of Serapis. There is no chief of the Jewish synagogue, no Samaritan, no Chrestian presbyter, who is not an astrologer, a soothsayer, or an anointer. Even the Patriarch himself, when he comes to Egypt, is forced by some to worship Serapis, by others to worship Chrestus. They are a folk most seditious, most deceitful, most given to injury; but their city is prosperous, rich, and fruitful, and in it no one is idle."

Compounding matters as noted in Mitchell, James Barr (1880) Chrestos: a religious epithet; its import and influence and Pleket, H.W.; Stroud, R.S.. "Egypt. Funerary epithets in Egypt.(26-1702)." Supplementum Epigraphicum Graecum. Current editors: A. T. R.S. R.A. Chaniotis Corsten Stroud Tybout. Brill Online, 2013. "Chrestus" was also used as a title and some of these inscriptions predate the supposed time of Jesus.

According to one source the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum CIL VI:24944 which is dated to 1st century BCE has the inscription Iucundus Chrestianus. If the dating is correct then Chrestianus cannot be a misspelling for Christianus...unless you accept the Jesus 100 BCE theory.

Finally there is a funeral stone with the inscription "Chrestians for Christians" (Van Voorst, Robert E (2000). Jesus Outside the New Testament: An Introduction to the Ancient Evidence Eerdmans Publishing ISBN 0-8028-4368-9 pages 33-35; Gibson, Elsa (1978) The Christians for Christians Inscriptions of Phrygia) which if they were the one and the same group would be totally nonsensical.

The evidence suggests there was a Chrestian group around that possibly predated the Jesus followers by a century.

You also have to remember that the Jews took meticulous care in translating their holy book from Hebrew into Greek and would know the difference between the Greek word for annotated (ΧΡΙΣΤΟΣ) and the one for good or useful (ΧΡΗΣΤΟΣ). So if Jesus was the annotated one why did his followers not get it right until the mid point of the 5th century (c450 CE) and keep calling him the Good or Useful?

Furthermore if until 450 CE the Christian themselves were calling themselves Chrestian what does that mean regarding all the references to Christian that are supposedly before that date, hmm?

 

[Craig B]

You do realize that the Codex Sinaiticus is from 330–360 or nearly 200 years after the quote fest that is Against Heresies (c180), right?

Yes but people here keep citing Tacitus and stressing that the earliest manuscript dates from the eleventh century. My point is, that we can't take for granted that Chrestus is definitely not another form of Christus, unless we apply this reasoning to our first complete NT manuscripts, which precede the Tacitus and other manuscripts by many centuries. That the NT refers to a pagan group is untenable.

 

[Belz...]

True but there are other stories regarding the Bermuda Triangle that appear to made out of whole cloth. There Ellen Austin and the derelict (1881), Loria (1866), Viego (1868), and Miranom (1884) are examples of these.

That's a bit self-defeating, though: the bermudas actually exist.

 

[Belz...]

OK, so I'll just go ahead and conclude that Dejudge lied when he claimed my post was a total contradiction. I just wish he had the courage to admit it.