Bart Ehrman on the Historical Jesus

[IanS]

IanS,

Jesus never existed.

Jesus was just some benign artisan who was killed for some reason.

Jesus never existed, but some people like him existed and influenced the legends which would then become attributed to the name, "Jesus".

Which of these three does not damage the Chritian belief?

Afaik, few if any Christians believe any of those statements. But as long as they feel certain that nobody in authority ever says there is reason to doubt the existence of Jesus, then they can happily continue to decide for themselves what they believe about the miracles and about praying to God as part of "trinity" etc. Eg, the recent Archbishop of Canterbury Dr. Rowan Williams famously said in an interview that he does believe literally in the “virgin birth” and does believe Jesus had actually raised Lazarus from the dead. And just this weekend we have news that the Vatican has canonised two Popes with three objectively & evidentially confirmed miracles between them http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-27140646 , so Christians do feel perfectly at liberty to claim evidence for miracles etc.

But that Christian belief position comes under threat of course if it is admitted that those in authority begin to say Jesus may only ever have been a fictional figure after all and the evidence for anything more than that is extremely poor. That calls into question everything the bible says about God sending his Son and Christ rising from the dead and passing into heaven, etc. etc.

Also, why do we care what damages the Christian belief?

Well that is really a separate subject, and one which has precipitated mountains of personalised abuse and vitriol every time it's even so much as mentioned here. So I'd suggest starting another thread on that if you want peoples opinions.

But very briefly, - we care about it today (in a way that we certainly do not care about Pythagoras or any Trojan Wars), because Christianity has a very significant influence in the lives of millions of people and a direct influence on governments in the USA and throughout Europe. It has a voice influencing those governments, the most powerful and persuasive in the world, on issues such as taxation, education, science and medical research, foreign policy inc. military actions, etc. So the influence of Christianity, and it’s power to influence, is of direct importance to everyone.

 

[proudfootz]

Odd how people accuse you of trying to poison them when you feed them their own cooking.

It's exactly what I expected - the hypocrisy would be revealed.

I'm guessing the relentless trolling against dejudge is motivated, but that is immaterial. It's the trolling itself that is unreasoning anti-intellectualism.

 

[proudfootz]

◊◊◊◊*** B-I-N-G-O !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Stone

Any chance Stone will correct his views now that he knows the 'if it be lawful to call him a man' pre-dates Agapius?

I'm betting the facts will be ignored. Again.

 

[Craig B]

It's exactly what I expected - the hypocrisy would be revealed.

I'm guessing the relentless trolling against dejudge is motivated, but that is immaterial. It's the trolling itself that is unreasoning anti-intellectualism.

Adverse comments regarding dejudge are indeed relentless, and they are motivated: but not by hypocrisy. Nor are they trolling, unreasoning or anti intellectual.

 

[IanS]

Well first of all Craig, what the hell have you done to create that quote above? You have actually edited together two parts from completely different paragraphs of one of my posts!

You have been told about that before around a dozen times now by me, where you have on a dozen separate occasions quite deliberately tried to actually alter and misrepresent peoples quotes in ways like that.

Yes, citing two relevant parts of your post, with an ellipsis to show I have omitted the intervening part, and using the quote function with link back to your original post.

Well do NOT do that, with my posts or anyone else’s. By cutting out parts from two completely separate paragraphs and then pasting them together as if they were originally posted as a continuation in one paragraph of their own, you are deliberately and quite blatantly altering peoples posts.

When you quote someone’s post, cut and paste their exact words exactly as originally posted. Do not cut out parts from completely different paragraphs from completely different areas of the original post, and then paste them together as if they were all part of the same original continuous paragraph! Because that is quite blatantly & deliberately altering and misrepresenting other peoples actual posts.

IanS
But secondly; what on earth is the point in me trying to tell you what I believe and what I say about any of this, when you just wrote the following saying outright that you refuse to believe what I say when I repeatedly tell you that my reason for thinking Jesus may not have been real is because of the lack of evidence, and not because of whatever I may think about Christian religion or any other religion today.

You won't read what I give as evidence, and you won't write what you mean, when asked. Fine. as you please.

Who are you to say that I am not writing what I mean or writing my own opinion when I tell you that my reason for scepticism about Jesus is because of the lack of reliable evidence, and NOT for any reasons of opposition towards Christian religion?

You just told somebody else here, in black and white, and quite blatantly, that you completely refuse to accept what I have told you now 10 times or more about that in the clearest possible terms. So what is the point of me ever telling you what I believe about any of this if you are going to state quite blatantly that you know I actuality believe the very opposite of what I have just repeatedly said to you!

As for your evidence which you said I would not read - I asked you if you were intending to cite the same evidence that we have all seen from the same bible for the 100th time. And your reply was “Yes”, you are indeed going to claim your evidence from the same bible yet again. Well we had already discussed that biblical evidence hundreds of times before you ever told me to read it all again.

If you have some other evidence which is not from a wholly unreliable & discredited bible, then as I said to you at the time, of course I will try to read it. But you completely refused to respond to that with anything other than your repeated claim that the bible is credible evidence for people in the first century knowing Jesus. Well it’s not! There is no evidence anywhere in the bible of anyone ever writing to make any credible claim of knowing Jesus.

 

[proudfootz]

You take Galatians 1.19 at face value while admitting Paul was a Liar so do not really have any idea what logic is.

You think that because Plenty people teach HJ at Universities it is evidence of an HJ.

Robert Eisenman, an historian, admits that NO-ONE has EVER solved the HJ question.

Dr Dale Martin a professor at Yale admitted the REAL Jesus was God Incarnate--100%God and 100% man.

It is clear that people who teach HJ have NO supporting evidence from antiquity yet persist the baseless un-evidenced argument--void of logic and facts [evidence].

You are quite correct, as usual.

That some persons teach that Jesus is real is not in itself evidence for an historic Jesus.

That this bit of trivia is still floated as being a persuasive argument is testimony to the paucity of actual evidence for the claim.

Void of logic and facts, we are presented with a video of a confessing Christian who happens to hold a professorship. What more could we ask for?

Stundie, anyone?

 

[proudfootz]

It get really bad when that comparison is done to a post printing press figure. However IMHO the most morally bankrupt comparison is with the Holocaust....something our boy Bart D. Ehrman does in Did Jesus Exist?:

"In a society in which people still claim the Holocaust did not happen (...) -- is it any surprise to hear that Jesus never even existed?"

It's troubling that anyone in a position of responsibility would trivialize the Holocaust in this way. It speaks of moral and intellectual bankruptcy.

True but the methodology used and quality should be the same.

They should be, but apparently bible scholars have devised their own 'criteria' to try to spin straw into gold.

Alexander and Hannibal for example had known contemporary accounts that while now lost were used in later sources that have survived. Boudicca has a possible contemporary source: Gnaeus Julius Agricola the father-in-law of Tacitus.

Paul our own only known contemporary to Jesus despite saying he met James brother of the Lord also states that his information regarding Jesus came from revelation not a human being (Galatians 1:11-12) putting Paul's account at best on par with 19th century Penny Dreadful-Dime Novels starring people like Buffalo Bill, "Wild Bill" Hickok, and Annie Oakley. And we are not sure if it is even that good because as Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh who has only sisters shows you can be said to be the biological brother to a figure who may have never existed (John Frum).

That is why comparison to someone like Julius Caesar is insane and silly.

It seems some bible scholars are hoping some of the reality of actual figures of history will rub off onto their bible characters. Sorry, Charlie, it doesn't work that way.

"What the myth theory denies is that Christianity can be traced to a personal founder who taught as reported in the Gospels and was put to death in the circumstances there recorded." - Archibald Robertson's 1946 summation of John Robertson's 1900 position.

(The Christ myth is) "the theory that no historical Jesus worthy of the name existed, that Christianity began with a belief in a spiritual, mythical figure, that the Gospels are essentially allegory and fiction, and that no single identifiable person lay at the root of the Galilean preaching tradition. In simpler terms, the historical Jesus did not exist. Or if he did, he had virtually nothing to do with the founding of Christianity" Ehrman, Bart (2012) Did Jesus Exist? Harper Collins, p. 12

Ehrman cannot even correctly identify what the literary origins of christianity implies without smuggling his own assumptions into it.

What 'Galilean preaching tradition'? All the literature is written by Greek-speaking people outside of Galilee.

When it came time to bring christianity to Palestine, these foreign materials had to be translated into the local language - supposedly the origin of the cult.

 

[proudfootz]

Well first of all Craig, what the hell have you done to create that quote above? You have actually edited together two parts from completely different paragraphs of one of my posts!

You have been told about that before around a dozen times now by me, where you have on a dozen separate occasions quite deliberately tried to actually alter and misrepresent peoples quotes in ways like that.


But secondly; what on earth is the point in me trying to tell you what I believe and what I say about any of this, when you just wrote the following saying outright that you refuse to believe what I say when I repeatedly tell you that my reason for thinking Jesus may not have been real is because of the lack of evidence, and not because of whatever I may think about Christian religion or any other religion today -

It seems the habit of editing and re-arranging texts is a bad habit among those who need such heroic efforts to support heir pre-conceived notions.

This is how the 'historic Jesus' was created in the 18th century, after all.

Now we will have the 'historic IanS' (according to redactors).

 

[Craig B]

It seems the habit of editing and re-arranging texts is a bad habit among those who need such heroic efforts to support heir pre-conceived notions.

This is how the 'historic Jesus' was created in the 18th century, after all.

Now we will have the 'historic IanS' (according to redactors).

I have simply pulled from a long post the sections relevant to the matters I was discussing, and I indicated that I had done that by the conventional method of inserting an ellipsis between the passages to indicate omitted material. I added nothing and changed nothing in the wording of the passages I selected for purposes of discussion. See http://public.wsu.edu/~campbelld/engl402/cited.htm

1.2.4. Ellipsis. If you need to omit material from the middle of a quotation, use an ellipsis, which is indicated by three spaced dots (. . . ). The plural of “ellipsis” is “ellipses."

 

[dejudge]

We have not two generations of James in the context of Galatians as in your example. In Galatians Paul accounts his encounter with the Jerusalem hierarchy. According to Paul the hierarchical structure of the Jerusalem church approximately is: three pillars (Peter, James, the "brother of the Lord", and John), the apostles and the disciples (which sometime are called "Lord's brothers"). It makes not sense that in order to identify James Paul will call him "brother of the Lord” in the sense of “the disciple". First, because James is more than a simple disciple. What distinguish him is to be a "pillar". Second, because this not differentiates him from other James. James is mentioned here by his family relations in order to distinguish this James from other James -that is the function of an apposition-, as usual among the Jews.
I think this is enough convincing.

Your argument is hopelessly irrelevant. Virtually all Apologetic writers of antiquity DENIED James the Apostle was the brother of the Lord Jesus.

All the Pauline letters claimed the Lord Jesus was God's Son and in Galatians itself at the very introduction the Pauline writer admitted his Jesus was NOT a man.

The Entire Pauline writings are historically useless and WITHOUT corroboration.

Saul/Paul is UKNOWN outside the Bible and Apologetics, NO Pauline writings have been found and dated before c 70 CE and even 2nd century Christians wrote NOTHING of Saul/Paul.

 

[tsig]

◊◊◊◊*** B-I-N-G-O !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Stone

Any chance Stone will correct his views now that he knows the 'if it be lawful to call him a man' pre-dates Agapius?

I'm betting the facts will be ignored. Again.

There you go ignoring the intellectual arguments for an HJ.


B-I-N-G-O BABY B-I-N-G-O* , now who could argue with that.


*ETA !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

[tsig]

It's troubling that anyone in a position of responsibility would trivialize the Holocaust in this way. It speaks of moral and intellectual bankruptcy.




They should be, but apparently bible scholars have devised their own 'criteria' to try to spin straw into gold.



It seems some bible scholars are hoping some of the reality of actual figures of history will rub off onto their bible characters. Sorry, Charlie, it doesn't work that way.



Ehrman cannot even correctly identify what the literary origins of christianity implies without smuggling his own assumptions into it.

What 'Galilean preaching tradition'? All the literature is written by Greek-speaking people outside of Galilee.

When it came time to bring christianity to Palestine, these foreign materials had to be translated into the local language - supposedly the origin of the cult.

Isn't it a corollary of the Godwin Rule:

C1: Anyone who compares their opponent to a holocaust denier loses the argument.

 

[proudfootz]

Isn't it a corollary of the Godwin Rule:

C1: Anyone who compares their opponent to a holocaust denier loses the argument.

What's more they know they've already lost the argument when this is what they open with.

 

[Craig B]

Jesus was missing for those years and returned a lot smarter. The is what Buddhist monasteries do to young minds, they enlighten them.

If you think that's evidence that Jesus went to India I think you should go back to the monastery for a while.

 

[jond]

Sounds like somebody read "Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Jesus' Childhood Friend" as historical instead of hysterical (which it is).

 

[IanS]

I have simply pulled from a long post the sections relevant to the matters I was discussing, and I indicated that I had done that by the conventional method of inserting an ellipsis between the passages to indicate omitted material. I added nothing and changed nothing in the wording of the passages I selected for purposes of discussion. See http://public.wsu.edu/~campbelld/engl402/cited.htm

No you did not!

What you did was to take the first half of one paragraph from near the middle of my lengthy post and paste it together with the 2nd half of another paragraph from 8 paragraphs further down the page! Just showing the join by writing “( … )“ as if all you had done was to omit some irrelevant stuff from the middle of an otherwise single paragraph.

Do NOT rearrange peoples posts like that when you quote them. Because if you do, then what you are presenting as a verbatim quote is likely to be highly misleading, not to say actually a misrepresented creation of your own (plus I had to search several times to see where I had ever written such a paragraph ... only to find I never had written that paragraph!)

So stop it please. And that’s about the tenth time I’ve had ask you not to do that with quotes you make from other peoples posts.

 

[IanS]

Adverse comments regarding dejudge are indeed relentless, and they are motivated: but not by hypocrisy. Nor are they trolling, unreasoning or anti intellectual.

Well they should not be relentless. They should not even be there at all! You are supposed to "attack" the other persons argument, not attack them personally upon their integrity and honesty etc. (as the HJ side has done literally hundreds of times in this thread alone ).

 

[Craig B]

Do NOT rearrange peoples posts like that when you quote them. Because if you do, then what you are presenting as a verbatim quote is likely to be highly misleading, not to say actually a misrepresented creation of your own (plus I had to search several times to see where I had ever written such a paragraph ... only to find I never had written that paragraph!)

So stop it please. And that’s about the tenth time I’ve had ask you not to do that with quotes you make from other peoples posts.

Well, I note your objection. But I have checked and you wrote the words I cited. Moreover these two passages were the parts of your post where you state that I make claims about your alleged distaste for Christianity and that my claims are false. That is the one thing I was commenting on. It was not merely a verbatim quote but a cut and paste.

I think if you have an objection to this and believe that I am lying and wilfully distorting what you write, then make a complaint to the moderators. In my view I am making reasonable observations on relevant material cited verbatim from your posts.

 

[IanS]

Well, I note your objection. But I have checked and you wrote the words I cited. Moreover these two passages were the parts of your post where you state that I make claims about your alleged distaste for Christianity and that my claims are false. That is the one thing I was commenting on. It was not merely a verbatim quote but a cut and paste.

I think if you have an objection to this and believe that I am lying and wilfully distorting what you write, then make a complaint to the moderators. In my view I am making reasonable observations on relevant material cited verbatim from your posts.

Do not misrepresent peoples quotes by joining together pieces from completely different paragraphs. If you want to quote pieces from two different paragraphs, just quote the two parts completely separately from one-another, then there is no confusion and no risk of misleading people about what the quoted person actually wrote.

And for the 20th time - your belief that my reason for saying I distrust the evidence of Jesus offered by bible scholars, is that I am “hostile” to Christian religion, is 100%, flat-out, totally WRONG.

The only reason I am distrustful of what they offer as their evidence, is because it’s fatally flawed and far to weak. Nothing else.

 

[tsig]

... I am lying and wilfully distorting what you write...

Shame!