Bart Ehrman on the Historical Jesus

[maximara]

You appear to believe the claims in the Bible that Jesus was leading multitudes around the place.

Go back and read what I actually said not what you think I said.

 

[Brainache]

Go back and read what I actually said not what you think I said.

Yes I did. You keep taking these things at face value, as if everyone here thinks they were written by eye-witnesses or something.

DOC is the only one who thinks that.

We know the Gospels are full of BS. We know Acts is a work of religious fiction.

These objections you raise are irrelevant to Historical investigation, or textual analysis. No one here has claimed these things were all literally true.

 

[maximara]

Yes I did. You keep taking these things at face value, as if everyone here thinks they were written by eye-witnesses or something.

That was what the early Christian community was claiming and supposedly their opponents were not challenging. The earlier you put the Gospels the more likely those claims would have been challenged by their contemporaries...so where are those challenges?

 

[Brainache]

That was what the early Christian community was claiming and supposedly their opponents were not challenging. The earlier you put the Gospels the more likely those claims would have been challenged by their contemporaries...so where are those challenges?

Have you heard of Celsus? He had many objections apparently, but all we know of them is what Origen quotes.

Josephus talks of many different Histories of the war, none of which now survive.

When Christianity became the Church Of Rome all of that stuff was destroyed.

Like the Gnostic Gospels, if any still exist, they are buried somewhere in a cave or something.

We can't assume that what we have now, is all that was written. We know "Heresies" were sought out and destroyed, so we have to assume that we don't have everything.

 

[David Mo]

Which is why rational discussion is so often lacking in most topics. Disagree with me ? You're an idiot, or insane, or evil, or dishonest. No way you could disagree with me otherwise, right ?

Someone on Youtube (I know, I know) accused me of being a sicko because I don't oppose hunting.

I feel sad that this kind of intolerance could be practised by some persons who consider themselves rationalists.

 

[David Mo]

David


Hence the importance of not letting you rewrite Paul's scriptural concern with a "curse" of being gibbeted. It is not only that Paul says that that curse is in scripture, but that it actually is there. Hence, we know that the appearances are not supposed to be "according to scripture," both because Paul doesn't say they are there, and also because they really aren't there.

Can you explain the highlighted sentences, please? They do not make much sense for me.

 

[David Mo]

Ian: I would appreciate if you were a little more synthetic. Your writings are too long and frequently repetitive. It takes too much time to read them. Thank you.

And what is this nonsense about some words in one particular sentence not being immediately preceded or immediately succeed by Paul saying the words came from scripture? As if that were somehow evidence that the words must have actually come from people who had really met a living Jesus.

Because the correct reading of this passage excluded that some of Paul’s data about the death of Jesus were pulled out of the Old Testament. This is a part of our debate. Notice I was answering a previous question made by you.

Because that is what we are arguing about here. I.e. Craig’s insistence that people in Jerusalem had personally met Jesus, and that they were hence the ones who had to tell Paul about Jesus.

I don’t have to trust absolutely in Paul’s words. (…)The words in the physically surviving P46 are crystal clear in saying that … [etc.]

If we accept that Paul is speaking “crystal clear” we have to accept that he met some people that say him they had known directly Jesus. It is an implicit and unavoidable consequence.

And that is apart from the fact that afaik, none of those other people ever reliably wrote to say they had witnessed any such visions anyway.

Ye, it will be better leave aside this because is a surreal assumption.

If you claim that people in Jerusalem had met a living Jesus, then where is your evidence for that?

Again?

… the argument is over Craig’s repeated insistence that those people in Jerusalem had actually met a living Jesus, and that they were thereby the source of what Paul believed about Jesus, i.e. because Paul had been told that by people who had actually met Jesus. That was the argument!

You did not say this before?

Good grief - you are now actually reduced that same argument that Bart Ehrman was reduced to in his book, when he said that he believed Jesus was real because it said so in the bible where it said that Paul met James “the lords brother!?

How many times have we discussed those three words “the Lords brother”? We have discussed that to absolute death here. (…)

I read long ago Neil Godfrey's blog about this and he did not convince me. However he deserve more respect than the author you quote above and I am ready to get into it (or Carrier), although, frankly, discuss with you in terms of long diatribes not seduce me too. Thank you for the link to Vridar. A more complete view of the subject via Doherty here: http://vridar.org/2012/06/18/20-ear...-bart-ehrmans-case-against-mythicism-part-20/ .

I do not have time to discuss one by one the flimsy arguments that you number from one to seven. Only point 3 has some interest.

3. It is by no means clear that the final three words mean a family blood brother anyway. As Ellegard and others have pointed out - Paul often uses the term brother, brothers, and brethren, but far more often to mean brothers in religious belief than to mean actual family members.​

It is useful remember what are the passages we are discussing:

Galatians 1:18-20
18 Then three years later I went up to Jerusalem to become acquainted with Cephas, and stayed with him fifteen days. 19 But I did not see any other of the apostles except ]James, the Lord’s brother. 20 (Now in what I am writing to you, I assure you before God that I am not lying.)​

Galatians 2 :6-9
6As for those who were held in high esteem—whatever they were makes no difference to me; God does not show favoritism—they added nothing to my message. 7On the contrary, they recognized that I had been entrusted with the task of preaching the gospel to the uncircumcised, just as Peter had been to the circumcised. 8For God, who was at work in Peter as an apostle to the circumcised, was also at work in me as an apostle to the Gentiles. 9James, Cephas and John, those esteemed as pillars, gave me and Barnabas the right hand of fellowship when they recognized the grace given to me.​

Ellegard (also Doherty) claims that “brother” means here what at present is said “brother in Christ”, the belonging to the community of disciples. An analysis of the two passages together clearly undermine this interpretation.

First premise. "Peter, the other players and James, the Gipsy" denotes that James has a defining feature that identifies him among the others: he is a Gipsy.
Second premise. "Peter, the other apostles and James, the Lord's brother", denotes that James has a defining feature that identifies him among the others: he is the brother or the Lord.
Third premise: "Brother” has two possible meanings: "brother in Christ" or "brother in blood".
Fourth premise: All the other people quoted here are "brothers in Christ".
Conclusion: "Brother of the Lord" identifies James only as brother in blood of Jesus.

It has been supposed that James wasn't well known by Galatians and "Lord's brother" was the way Paul uses to say "he is one of ours". It is a convoluted hypothesis (an assumption ad hoc). And the second passage contradicts it because in Galatians 2 James is named in the first place of "our pillars", that is to say, a star. It is obvious that Paul refers to James as more than "one of ours". The brother in blood of Jesus fits perfectly.

OK, - well here is the religious background of Dominic Crossan. Please do not try to claim this is a person whose is neutral and objective on the subject of his Jesus belief -

This is not what I said about Crossan.

How do you know that someone is a “fanatic”?
Rational discussion becomes impossible if we disqualify a priori everybody who has different beliefs than ours.
In the same vein I can refuse to discuss with you because you are a “fanatic” positivist and I am not.
I disagree with the main lines of Crossan’s beliefs, but I think some of his arguments are interesting. I know this because I have read some of his books and I know what I am saying. You cannot have any justified opinion about Crossan’s ideas if you have not read them. Sorry, but your position is the most classical intolerance. Very far of rational criticism.

I don't see that I had qualified Crossan of "objective and neutral" nowhere.
Crossan is neither neutral nor objective. Nor you either.

 

[IanS]

Dear me. You're getting quite exercised about this. I referred you quite explicitly to two of my recent posts. These relate the hypotheses I consider most probable.

I don’t think you did that at all. Where did you answer the extremely simple question of where you claim any of these Jerusalem people got their messiah visions and messiah beliefs from? Please either provide a link to any such post from you, or just state it here -

- where do you claim any of these Jerusalem people got their messiah visions and messiah beliefs from?

ETA You ask: You go bananas at the very impudence of the slightest suggestion that you should undergo the outlandish imposition of being asked to read any part of such evidence; so it's no wonder that you don't know where it is.

You have never produced any reliable or credible evidence of anyone knowing a living a Jesus. So where is the evidence of Jesus? You have had many hundreds of pages now (thousands of pages overall), and still not even the tiniest speck of any genuine evidence.


Where is the reliable evidence of any credible claim of anyone ever meeting a living Jesus?



All the other endless discussion is really just an evasive smokescreen in threads which are directly about the claimed existence or otherwise of a human Jesus. Where is the evidence please?

 

[eight bits]

maximara

Which external evidence shows to be a total fiction.

Your claim was that according to the Gospels and other works, Christianity was wildly popular in the Jewish homeland in 37 CE. You chose Matthew among the Gosepls. Matthew shows a Jerusalem mob demanding and achieving that Jesus be tortured to death on a stick.

Your claim is false and misstates the contents of the works you chose to cite.

You never said anything about John Frum cult spreading but rather claimed "Your go-to factoid, John Frum, shows the rapidity with which a religious idea can travel by contagion (and then die out except in a literally insular vestige)."

Emphasis added, urine stains removed. I did say something about the John Frum cult spreading.

Your claim is false and misstates the contents of what you chose to cite, which is hard to do in the same sentence where you directly quote what you misrepresent.

You of course have proof that the entire John Frum cargo cult has died out to make this claim, right? Right? Thought not.

You and I agree that John Frum cults originated on Tanna and that they are practiced on Tanna today, possibly even when the tourists are watching the volcano instead of the native-culture shows. You have repeatedly brought up the history and geography of the cults between their inception and today, and have furnished no data.

(Tanna is an island of about 215 square miles, or 550 square kilometers. By comparison, Chicago incorporates 234 square miles. The island's dimensions are about 25 miles by 12 miles. The air distance from Rome to Jerusalem is about 1,400 miles)

Assuming that the cults ever had numerous adherents off-island (as I was willing to assume without any data from you), and assuming that this anecdote was informative about contagion-spread of religious ideas in general, then we would expect to see a prompt spread of Christianity throughout the trade network that linked Jerusalem to the rest of the ecumen. For example, we would expect to find some Christian presence in Rome by the 60's.

David Mo

Can you explain the highlighted sentences, please? They do not make much sense for me.

The sentences you marked for comment were: "Hence the importance of not letting you rewrite Paul's scriptural concern with a "curse" of being gibbeted. It is not only that Paul says that that curse is in scripture, but that it actually is there."

You and I had discussed whether or not Paul referred to a passage about "crucifixion" or "staking" in the Jewish scripture. It emerged that Roman crucfixion necessarily included gibbeting as an integral part of the procedure. Deuteronomy 21:23 regulates the duration of gibbeting, remarking that the gibbetee is a curse of God - which phrase Paul uses in his writing.

This fact opens a door to various possibilities in which Paul could write what we have in hand about a Jesus who died by violence and was gibbeted, by Jewish hands alone (the only group Paul blames for Jesus' death), without Roman involvement. Other posters have suggested two such scenarios, stoning and swordplay.

I might have added, but did not, that you have extensively defended the "criterion of embarrassment" in scriptural interpretation. Well, what concerned Paul is the gibbeting, cursed by his religion's sacred scripture, and he says so. It is possible that later writers, or just "Mark," while trying to figure out (at least a generation later) what Paul was on about, inferred that he meant Roman crucifixion, and so imagined the unrealistic "Roman trial" after a Jewish arrest that is the now The Passion. I do not endorse this theory, but the evidence does not exclude it.

 

[Craig B]

... You have never produced any reliable or credible evidence of anyone knowing a living a Jesus. So where is the evidence of Jesus? You have had many hundreds of pages now (thousands of pages overall), and still not even the tiniest speck of any genuine evidence.


Where is the reliable evidence of any credible claim of anyone ever meeting a living Jesus?

Red fonts are a bad sign!

You go bananas at the very impudence of the slightest suggestion that you should undergo the outlandish imposition of being asked to read any part of such evidence; so it's no wonder you don't know where it is.

 

[IanS]

Ian: I would appreciate if you were a little more synthetic. Your writings are too long and frequently repetitive. It takes too much time to read them. Thank you.

They are long because I am quoting to you in considerable detail why various authors think you are wrong. And the reason they repeat the same points is because those points are the essential crux of this issue, and they are never genuinely answered by any HJ believer … for example, very simply indeed - where is the genuine evidence of a living Jesus from anyone who was reliable in what they wrote and credible in what they claimed about knowing Jesus?


- where does anyone, ever, credibly write to claim they had met a living human Jesus?

- where is the genuine evidence of a living Jesus?


And since you want brevity, I will stop there and postpone (for now) answering your remaining questions until you and/or anyone else here first provides any satisfactory reply to that central crucial question of showing the claimed genuine evidence of Jesus.

All else here is really just a deceptive and evasive smokescreen attempting to cover-up the fact that in all these HJ threads over many thousand of pages (in total), nobody can ever produce any genuine reliable or credible evidence of Jesus. None at all. Zero.

 

[Craig B]

... All else here is really just a deceptive and evasive smokescreen attempting to cover-up the fact that in all these HJ threads over many thousand of pages (in total), nobody can ever produce any genuine reliable or credible evidence of Jesus. None at all. Zero.

More red fonts. Oh dear.

You go bananas at the very impudence of the slightest suggestion that you should undergo the outlandish imposition of being asked to read any part of such evidence; so it's no wonder you don't know where it is.

 

[IanS]

Red fonts are a bad sign!

You go bananas at the very impudence of the slightest suggestion that you should undergo the outlandish imposition of being asked to read any part of such evidence; so it's no wonder you don't know where it is.

Right so absolutely no answer at all from you. Just more constant evasion.


If you say people in Jerusalem had visions of the messiah and knew details such as knowing he rose from the dead, then where do you say they got that information?

You have zero evidence of Jesus, and now you cannot explain where people in Jerusalem got their Jesus visions and beliefs either.

Cut the crap -

1 - where is the evidence of anyone reliably ever writing to say the knew a living Jesus?

2. - where do you think these Jerusalem people got their messiah visions?

 

[Belz...]

You statement is totally irrelevant,.

You have no idea what I posted.

What a monstrous fabrication !

 

[Craig B]

Cut the crap.

Please try to calm yourself.

 

[zugzwang]

max, clarification, with apologies


zugzwang


That may be a modern distinction more than an anicent one.

As to the larger question, Paul apparently was a Pharisee, and had a pre-conversion belief that the righteous dead (both Jews and Gentiles) will "rise" at the end of days. He retains that belief after conversion, along with a new belief that the end of days is now.

Not all Jews shared the resurrection belief, so I imagine Paul would have had the opportunity to defend it even before his conversion. Nevertheless, there still sem to be some bugs left to work out by the time he's writing to the Corinthians about it.

The objections seem surface and generic, so it would be hard (I think) to pigeonhole them as characteristic of any particular ideological perspctive. The matter seems to come up in the context of people noticing that Jesus was supposed to have come back, but now people whom Paul had promised not resurrection, but rather that they wouldn't die at all, have died. Any fool would notice that Paul had overpromised a bit.

As we can see, Christianity thrives despite acceptance that the vast majority of Christians will die, maybe all of them (seeing that the end times seem to have progressively become a lot less fun bewteen Paul and Revelation). Achieving that acceptance must have been a big transition, and so maybe there were a lot of people wondering "Why bother with Jesus if you're just going to die regardless?" and so, maybe a lot of different answers were proposed.

Sorry for the delayed reply. One of the interesting points about resurrection, is that presumably Paul and later Christians argue that our resurrection will be in some way like that of Jesus. Is this correct?

Now if you adhere to a kind of celestial Jesus theory, who is crucified in a heavenly realm, and presumably resurrected there as well, it makes our resurrection seem quite odd, since we are not celestial beings, well, we are physical beings, is what I mean.

Another way of putting this, is, if our resurrection is reckoned to be a physical one, modeled on that of Jesus, how is this understood, if Jesus is not seen as physical?

Thus, if Paul saw resurrection as physical, how would he connect that to Jesus, if he saw Jesus not as physical? If Paul saw our resurrection as fundamentally different from the celestial one of Jesus, he would have made this explicit, surely? But we find 'if the dead rise not, then is Christ not raised' (1 Cor. 15: 16).

Perhaps there will be more on this in Carrier's book, who seems to have a 'two-body' idea of the resurrection; although I'm not sure what that really means.

 

[eight bits]

zugzwang

Sorry for the delayed reply.

No worries.

One of the interesting points about resurrection, is that presumably Paul and later Christians argue that our resurrection will be in some way like that of Jesus. Is this correct?

Yes, I think so, and more than half of the living Nicene Chrisitans profess that one of us civilians, Mary, Jesus' mother, has already gotten hers, just like her son's. Opinion is divided over whether she died first (as her son did), or whether she ws transformed without dying (as Paul promised that some would be).

I think the most amusing part of the "celestial Jesus" is reconciling it with Paul's insistence that Jesus was born to a Jewish woman. Jews in outer space? That's Spaceballs. Great movie.

(And for the more intellectual crowd, there's the "alien encounter" segment of Woody Allen's Stardust Memories.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQ-I2qa0ZQY

Woody asks the space traveler what he can do to help humanity.

"Tell funnier jokes.")

When I checked the films on IMDB, I saw the site is running ads for an American TV series called Resurrection. The tag line is "What if someone you lost...returned?"

Hokey ellipsis aside, that's what sells, I think: the idea of being with loved ones again, not just a visit or a message (seeing a ghost) but having a life with them. That takes a body, and that's what I think Paul was selling, not some niche-market celestial cerebral crap.

 

[zugzwang]

eight bits

It suggests that Paul thought that Jesus was a real human; of course, that doesn't mean that he was, but an economical explanation is that he was.

 

[Craig B]

that's what sells, I think: the idea of being with loved ones again, not just a visit or a message (seeing a ghost) but having a life with them. That takes a body, and that's what I think Paul was selling, not some niche-market celestial cerebral crap.

I think you're right. This from 1 Thess 4 looks as if it's about physical bodies being resurrected, and meeting up with those still alive, who don't appear to be dispensing with their bodies as they ascend to meet The Lord.

…16 For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. 17 Then we who are alive and remain will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we shall always be with the Lord.

I think he means all this quite literally.

 

[tsig]

I believe people find this subject fun for engaging in polemics...

but I don't really think that anyone actually "believes" Jesus never existed.

They might believe that He is different than what is reported about Him
but it is utterly ridiculous to deny the way in which history was recorded
and totally discount all tradition and historical axiom(s).

You would have to be incredibly self deceived to actually deny something
as basic as a controversial person existing in history... (and agenda driven).

Question everything.

Except Jesus's existence?