dejudge said:
The contents of the Gospels and Acts do not state Roman Christians wrote them.
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Bart Ehrman on the Historical Jesus
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The contents of the Gospels and Acts do not state Roman Christians wrote them.
You should have at least read the blog before posting because it does not support you.
We already know that the HJ argument is un-evidenced.
We already know that the same historian also admitted no-one has solved the HJ question.
Well I have read that Blog and apparently you haven't, or if you did, you didn't understand it.
It is not an "admission" of anything to say that people disagree over details of Jesus' life. It is certainly not an admission that Jesus was purely mythical, so I don't know why it excites you so much.
People disagree about the details of Napoleon's life too, does that mean he was a myth?
The contents of the Gospels certainly show that they weren't written by Jews.
Who do you think wrote them?
You don't think they appeared miraculously from thin air, do you?
What you say is uncertain.
Braianache said:
What you say is not logical. In the NT it is admitted that the Jesus character was pure unadulterated myth--it was the Son of God born of a Ghost, the Logos and God Creator that walked on the sea, transfigured, resurrected, ate food after it was raised from the dead, commissioned his disciples and then ascended.
The Jesus character is the purest of pure myth.
Braianache said:
People of antiquity disagreed about the details of Romulus but does that mean Romulus existed?
People disagreed about the Creation story but does that mean Adam and Eve existed.
Brainache said:
What did you just write!! You forgot that you claimed that Ancient History is NOT about certainty.
You are either forgetful or have problems with veracity.
Plus, you are now implying that the Jesus story did not originate with Jews.
Your position changes at a rapid rate--at the speed of sound.
Brainache said:
Stories about Adam and Eve appeared from thin air?
Stories about Romulus appeared from thin air?
David Mo
Philosopher
Don't you think this is something we have been discussing the last month?
You maintain that we have to accept the literal sense of a Paul’s saying and to extend it to all the content of his letters; I think we ought to analyse the contradictions or lack of plausibility in order to interpret case by case. This is the difference between to limit the meaning to literal meaning or interpreting (analysing) it. Something well known in the textual critic.
"Evidence" again not, please! I surrender!
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David Mo
Philosopher
This is strange. I have always heard of Paul speaking about Jesus as a heavenly entity which came down to the Earth and died to erase our sins. It fits well with "divine" in the sense of part of a god, adopted by a god, "sponsored" by a god, or similar.
My “fantasies about ancient people being too stupid and gross to appreciate subtlety and depth in their stories”? Really? Have I expressed this idea somewhere? I think not. Yes, I know a lot of Gods suffering and dying, but this has nothing to do with the argument of difficulty I have defended here.
The sufferings and deaths of Heracles, Julius Cesar and Odin have anything in common with the humiliating death of Jesus or are examples of different cultures. You don’t understand this shade (humiliating) that is the centre of the argument of difficulty (also bad called “embarrassment”). It seems I am incapable to explain this to you or you are incapable to understand it. Well, I’m going on a trip some days and this is a good opportunity to stop this fruitless debate.
I think you haven’t provided “formally matching Jewish scripture references”… etc.
“Hanging in a tree” doesn't make any reference to the crucifixion in Deuteronomy 21 18-23. Hanging a corpse in a tree, after being stoned, was a rule well known by all the Jews. Paul is matching here the damnation of a post death punishment and the damnation that involved crucifixion. Two damnations, not two crucifixions, that was a specific Roman punishment at this time.
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The problem is we are not sure Jesus helped launch anything.
It is like the saga of Ephraim McDowell (1771-1830) a physician who managed to perform several successful abdominal operations...long before antiseptics or even anesthesia as we understand it even existed. While called a pioneer surgeon today the reality is McDowell didn't really bring anything to the table in either the short or long term because he drought no new techniques or methods...just a mixture of desperation and extraordinary luck.
Nicolas Appert (1749-1841) is another case study. In 1810 Appert won a 12,000 francs award from the French government for a new method of preserving food. Some 54 years later another Frenchman would get the credit for Appert's idea of using heat to sterilize food (which by that time was being used all over France, England, and even in the United States); perhaps you have heard of him, Louis Pasteur.
Julius Edgar Lilienfeld in 1926 and Oskar Heil in 1934 independently developed the transistor. But it was William Shockley in 1947 who was able to explain why and come up with another method of making a transistor.
History is full of things like that.
You think that is bad?
Why do you believe the bible? Those things are not possible. They are Theological Tropes associated with Miracle Workers, or specific allegories.
Why do you assume that if Jesus existed, that everything anybody wrote about him is supposed to be true? No Historian assumes such a thing, why do you?
Non sequitur, again.
Your argument is, quite literally in this case, illogical.
There are some things we can be more sure of than others. Does this surprise and confuse you?
I am saying that the surviving Gospels were written after the Jesus story had made its way into Greco-Roman hands. I did not say it didn't start with the Jews.
Please take the time to understand the arguments before responding. This is embarrassing.
Very different to claiming that the entire corpus of 1st and 2nd century Christian writings, Apocrypha, Histories and letters included, was faked by some unknown "Forgers" in the 2nd to 4th centuries.
Have you forgotten just how ludicrous that position is? Or, were you hoping that I had forgotten?
Not likely...
eight bits
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David
If you would like to pursue with me such other subjects as Paul's views on Jewish pre-existence and how human sacrifice comports with Judaism, then I shall need chapter and verse, since I have no way of knowing what you have "always heard."
It is like when Matthew tells us Isaiah predicted that Mary would have Jesus and sex in the wrong order. Mattie read his source flatly wrong, but there is no question what his source was. If we are discussing the root of the idea that Mary was a virgin mother, then we take Mattie's reading as he tells us he read it, not how we read the same passages ourselves.
max
I don't see that any new issue was raised in your reply. A shared feature of most hypothesized historical Jesuses who count is that their subject helped launch Christianity. If not, if there is no such person, then the hypotheses are false, and no more needs to be said about them. If instead, some of the hypotheses are true, then their subject need have done no more in all the other days of his life than Rosa Parks did on all except one day in hers. That is, to have acquired acquaintances who would impute meaning to a dramatic, but not especially unusual, event, thereby launching something with a life of its own.
Not strange at all. Paul wrote that Jesus was a man born to a Jewish woman, who died, and then later was exalted by God. Paul promises to his readers, all of his readers, that whatever Jesus essentially is, they, too, shall be soon. In the interim, Jesus needs a dwelling because he is situated, and it's heaven. Everybody has to be somewhere, and Jesus bigger than hell isn't here.
If you would like to pursue with me such other subjects as Paul's views on Jewish pre-existence and how human sacrifice comports with Judaism, then I shall need chapter and verse, since I have no way of knowing what you have "always heard."
Actually, it does. You have proposed that a Jewish man's hideous death was in some way an impediment to the eventual development of a Gentile story about him being a god. Putting aside that it didn't prevent the development (the hideous death story is older than the god story), hideous death is just the sort of thing we find in Indo-European divine stories whether the divinity is "in the sense of part of a god, adopted by a god, 'sponsored' by a god, or similar."
Who are you to pontificate on what anyone else does or doesn't understand? I understand you just fine. I disagree with you. Hercules and Julius Caesar were features of the same culture with each other (they are both god-descended characters in the same book, Ovid's Metamorphoses), and that culture was where the Jesus story took hold. Wotan arises from the same Indo-European rootstock as Greece and Rome.
Why is that my problem? Paul is the one who asserts that the situations are parallel. Take it up with him. In the meantime, however, spare us the BS that Paul didn't cite scripture, as he read it, to support his views about Jesus' crucifixion. He got it wrong, or stretched the point, or saw prophetic intent where none was presented? No Shinola, Sherlock. But the Jewish scriptures were an antecedent and an influence, and Paul lavishly acknowledged them as such.
It is like when Matthew tells us Isaiah predicted that Mary would have Jesus and sex in the wrong order. Mattie read his source flatly wrong, but there is no question what his source was. If we are discussing the root of the idea that Mary was a virgin mother, then we take Mattie's reading as he tells us he read it, not how we read the same passages ourselves.
max
I don't see that any new issue was raised in your reply. A shared feature of most hypothesized historical Jesuses who count is that their subject helped launch Christianity. If not, if there is no such person, then the hypotheses are false, and no more needs to be said about them. If instead, some of the hypotheses are true, then their subject need have done no more in all the other days of his life than Rosa Parks did on all except one day in hers. That is, to have acquired acquaintances who would impute meaning to a dramatic, but not especially unusual, event, thereby launching something with a life of its own.
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Belz...
Fiend God
Propaganda ? Do you even know what you're saying, now ?
David Mo
Philosopher
Some last words before I go out:
The heavenly Jesus is a common idea between mythicists. You can see here a hard version made by Doherty: "A Man Yet To Come" in http://jesuspuzzle.humanists.net/supp08.htm . Other more nuanced alternatives are common between mythicists.
Do not be angry, man. I gave him the opportunity to think that the problems were my inability to explain well the thing. If you like to see it in this way, I have been unable to explain the difference between "humiliant" (pride, shame, etc..) in a culture of pride and "hideous" to modern mentality, for example. And other differences. But this difference exists and you do not catch it.
Well I definitively go out. Good night and good luck.
Well there is no evidence of anyone else telling Paul anything they credibly knew about Jesus, except for what Paul says in his letters where he says the total opposite of what you are trying to claim, and where he says exactly what I said his letters say, and where he says that extremely clearly, repeatedly, with direct and specific emphasis, and with no room for doubt in his actual words.
What you want to do is to say that actual very real evidence of what Paul says in the physically existing earliest papyrus fragments of those letters should be regarded as of less evidential value than you merely speculating that other people might have known Jesus (if he ever existed!) and might have told Paul about it, even though not a single one of those people ever claimed to have known Jesus at all, and not a single one ever wrote to say they ever told Paul any such thing about Jesus.
If you say that people like James, Cephas, Barnabus, whoever, could have told Paul about the crucifixion of Jesus, then they could not have done that unless they had actually met and known Jesus could they! You are simply trying to assume Jesus into existence with zero evidence.
If you think any of those people could possibly have told Paul any truly known story of themselves or anyone else ever meeting Jesus and seeing that execution, then who is this person that ever made credible claims to having actually met Jesus or seen his execution?
Well do you have any reliable evidence of Jesus or not?
Where is the evidence of anyone ever credibly claiming to have met and known a living Jesus?
The problem here is that you simply have zero evidence of any living Jesus. Ever!
What you do have abundant evidence for, is peoples 1st century religious fanatical beliefs in an impossible supernatural god-like messiah of ancient legend that none of them ever knew, but in whom they were all certain as divine prophecy from their ancient holy books.
Paul's letters are even crystal clear in saying that is exactly where he obtained his belief in Jesus. And yet you still want to argue about that saying you want to ignore what Paul's letters actually say, ignore what the gospels actually say, and instead you want to invent the belief that there were some people who really met a living Jesus and told Paul about it!! ... well who were those people then? ... where did any of those people ever write to claim they met Jesus? ... where did Paul ever say any of those people ever told him about Jesus?
What you are trying to do (and probably others here too), is a three step process which is wholly and completely inadmissible -
1. You are trying to ignore the evidence of what is actually said about Jesus in Paul’s letters and the Gospels.
2. You are trying to invent without evidence the claim that others had met Jesus and told Paul about it.
3. You are simply assuming a priori that Jesus did really exist, in order that people could have met him and told Paul about him.
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pakeha
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Yes, that what I meant. Sorry not to have more clear in my expression, which perhaps reflects my reservations about the authors of the Jesus hagiography.
Were they true believers? Paid wordsmiths? Novelists?
It's a question that interests me, given that the NT texts fit into identifiable literary genres.
However, I recognise it that the backstory of those writers in no way implies either an HJ or non-HJ- it's simply something that intrigues me.
A good point, dejudge. One thing is the undoubted existence of Indian con-artists, another is the deity of a wide-spread cult. the worship of Asclepius lasted til the 3rd century, correct me if I'm wrong.
Ricard Carrier mentions Asclepius in his article Kooks and Quacks of the Roman Empire: A Look into the World of the Gospels (1997), an oldie but goldie.
http://infidels.org/library/modern/richard_carrier/kooks.html
By a pleasing though possibly OT co-incidence, I bought Edelstein and Edelstein's book while in Epidauros one autumn.
You make a point there, Dave Mo. Paul was definitely shoe-horning OT texts into his sermon like a modern-day evangelist preacher. Still, done is done, so we have millions of people believing that Deuteronomy text foresees Jesus's existence. It's a strange old world, innit.
eight bits
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pakeha
Deuternonomy 21: 22-23 refers to gibbeting, not execution, as we all agree, I think. However, crucifixion in the Roman style (apparently in common with a practice familiar to Alexander Jannaeus) was both execution and gibbeting, all in one operation. Good engineers, those Romans were.
So, it seems inescapable that for some finite interval of time, a dead naked Jesus was hanging from a (former) tree for public viewing. Jesus was gibbeted. And by the black letter text of Deuteronomy, quoted by Paul, Jesus was a curse of God.
So, Paul needs to account for a Jesus who is accursed after death (not "humiliated" as another poster would have it), in a counterintuitive contrast to Paul's good news that God exalted Jesus after death. I would wager that Paul had heard about this problem from Jewish critics, as an objection to Paul's theories about Jesus being the Messiah after death.
So, the text seems to be more of a problem to be solved than a prophetic opportunity to be exploited, at least for Paul. He need not be guilty of anachronism to link this text to Jesus, since Jesus was in fact gibbeted, and so what the text condemns did happen to his corpse, at least for a while.
Although I agree that Paul was handy with a shoe-horn, I don't think that prophesy is the issue he's addressing in Galatians 3: 13.
Deuternonomy 21: 22-23 refers to gibbeting, not execution, as we all agree, I think. However, crucifixion in the Roman style (apparently in common with a practice familiar to Alexander Jannaeus) was both execution and gibbeting, all in one operation. Good engineers, those Romans were.
So, it seems inescapable that for some finite interval of time, a dead naked Jesus was hanging from a (former) tree for public viewing. Jesus was gibbeted. And by the black letter text of Deuteronomy, quoted by Paul, Jesus was a curse of God.
So, Paul needs to account for a Jesus who is accursed after death (not "humiliated" as another poster would have it), in a counterintuitive contrast to Paul's good news that God exalted Jesus after death. I would wager that Paul had heard about this problem from Jewish critics, as an objection to Paul's theories about Jesus being the Messiah after death.
So, the text seems to be more of a problem to be solved than a prophetic opportunity to be exploited, at least for Paul. He need not be guilty of anachronism to link this text to Jesus, since Jesus was in fact gibbeted, and so what the text condemns did happen to his corpse, at least for a while.
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pakeha
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Of course you're right.
I confused the Deuteronomy text with that lion-like Isaiah psalm.
I daresay you're right, that Paul viewed the Deuteronomy text as a problem to be solved vis a vis Jewish critics. It seems to me likely that Paul cleverly handed the shoe horn to his lovely assistant and delved into his bag of trick for that brazen Corinthians 1:17-25
I can't decide whether that's a 'head em off at the pass' or 'cutting their legs off from underneath them' argument.
Either way, one must admire Paul's cheek or style depending on your point of view.
tsig
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The fundamental question is: When did Paul make those sounds?
The only surviving dated evidence for Paul and his BS beliefs are from the 2nd century or later.
In other words Paul and his BS beliefs were unknown as is evident in 2nd century or later writings like those attributed to Justin, Aristides, Theophilus of Antioch, Athenagoras, Minucius Felix, and Arnobius.
Foster Zygote
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The idea that the oldest known texts can be assumed to be the oldest that ever existed is an utterly ridiculous premise.
eight bits
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pakeha
Those passages sound like a marketing plan. So, do you suppose Mark read Paul complaining
For Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom
(1 Corinthians 1: 22)
and decided to write his very own book about Jesus with a little something for the Jews, a little something for the Greeks, and of course, a great, big honking crucifixion as a thank you to Paul ("but we proclaim Christ crucified") for all the good advice?
Those passages sound like a marketing plan. So, do you suppose Mark read Paul complaining
For Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom
(1 Corinthians 1: 22)
and decided to write his very own book about Jesus with a little something for the Jews, a little something for the Greeks, and of course, a great, big honking crucifixion as a thank you to Paul ("but we proclaim Christ crucified") for all the good advice?
Yes, there is some literature on this, which I will try to find again - as to whether you can compare different documents, look for similarities or shared material, and work out if there were previous documents, e.g. Q, and so on. It's also complicated by the issue of oral traditions, and texts like gospel of Thomas, which are purely sayings collections, with no narrative. It sounds very complicated; anyway, I will try to find a link. Maybe others know of this?
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