pgwenthold said:
And my contention is that it is really hard to say that the Jesus in the New Testament is a "historical figure" if all you have is someone who bears little resemblence to Jesus of the bible, aside from a few mundane qualities (e.g. son of a carpenter, wandering preacher).
By that thinking, Dorothy of the Wizard of Oz is a "historical figure." Are Rhett Butler and Scarlet O'Hara "historical figures," too?
Before concurring in this analogy, let's consider how worthwhile it is.
What aspects of the historical existence of the "real" Dorothy could have (words, deeds, names, places, etc.) might - at least potentially - have been bestowed on the literary Dorothy? Not many, I should think. Leaving aside for the moment the fact that we know that Baum's niece died at age 6,
The Wizard of Oz took place in a radically unhistorical context; the plot, settings, situations and character responses are so entirely removed from reality that the book cannot viably be approached as a history of anything.
On the other hand, the life of the "literary" Jesus as recounted in the New Testament is a different matter. The Gospels portray a world populated by a largely plausible supporting cast, references to actual places, texts, events, historical figures and groups, cultural phenomena and so forth. If you believe the analysis of the Jesus Seminar (hardly a bastion of Christian orthodoxy), there are even a handful of statements attributed to Jesus in the NT that are reasonably likely to have been spoken by the same individual and recorded with a fair degree of accuracy.
If one interprets the literary Jesus' most outlandish claims as imposture, and the most fanciful descriptions and explanations of his deeds as superstitious fancy or propaganda, one is left with a document that retains a degree of substance and verisimilitude that I daresay approaches that of many other "historical" narratives of the ancient world. Professional historians have to approach the works of Herodotus in a similar manner. Performing the same exercise with
The Wizard of Oz, however, leaves you with essentially nothing - at least nothing of value to a historian: a little girl born in a nondescript setting in the American Midwest shortly before the turn of the last century, with an aunt called "Em".
The aspects of the NT that are rightly "filtered out" by the critical reader are imbued with so much theological and cultural significance that it is easy to overlook and downplay the historical interest and plausibility of the narrative and central character that undergirds them, including the central figure of Jesus. Unless, of course, you are a historian whose specialties include in the peoples and culture of first-century Palestine, in which case (to judge from the published literature) the odds are much better than even that you have already recognized all this.
I don't know anything about whether Rhett Butler and Scarlett O'Hara and the basic contours of their personal experiences in
Gone With the Wind were inspired by discrete individuals, but if they were, then I can more readily accept the analogy of the historicity of Jesus to that Rhett and Scarlett. To admit that, however, does not imply anything about the relative historical significance of Rhett and Jesus.
)
