Historical Jesus

[dejudge]

You have no evidence that the stories in the Gospels were invented in the second century or after.
You have no evidence that they were invented to deceive anyone.
To make a claim you have to have evidence, according to you.
Where is your evidence?

All existing NT manuscripts are dated by paleography to the 2nd century or later.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_New_Testament_papyri

You will never ever find an NT manuscripts dated to the 1st century because the NT is a fraudulent historically worthless document falsely attributed by anonymous fraudsters to fictitious characters who never ever existed.

 

[Tassman]

Please, Acts of the Apostles is useless fiction.

Highly unreliable certainly but not totally useless.

There is no historical evidence anywhere that Peter and James lived anywhere and was associated with Judaism in any century. Saul/Paul was a fabricated converted in an attempt to historicise the fables of Jesus and the disciples.

Fabricated by whom and for what purpose? Back then there was no distinction between evangelistic propaganda and what the writers themselves believed to be true.

There is no historical reference to any Jew who was an actual member of an actual Jerusalem church.

The 3rd century Church Fathers accepted that James the brother of Jesus took leadership of the original Jerusalem-based Jewish followers of Jesus (the Jerusalem Church) – and referred to them dismissively as “Judaisers".

Visions are not and have never been accepted as historical accounts. In addition, the claims in the Epistles about the so-called Paul not receiving his Gospel from man but from a resurrected being are total lies.

Of course, “visions” are not historical accounts. But the story of Paul’s conversion via a vision has all the hallmarks of a genuine frontal-lobe seizure. HE would have believed it to be true - especially as belief in magic and divinity was standard in those days. And he obviously had the authoritative charisma to convince the simple followers of Jesus that he had had encountered Jesus in a vision.

There is no historical corroboration of any Pauline Church at anytime. There is no historical corroboration of a single convert of any Pauline Church. There is no historical corroboration that any Church anywhere actually received the so-called Pauline Epistles.

Paul co-opted the Jewish Christians he didn’t have a "Pauline Church" as such.

No Jewish writing of antiquity mentioned a supposed Pharisee who asked Jews and people of the Roman Empire to worship a resurrected being as a God for their salvation and to abolish the sacrifice of animals.

…and yet we know that they did worship a being they believed had resurrected.

NT Paul, his letters and churches were fabricated no earlier than the 2nd century in an attempt to deceive believers he was a witness to the fables called the Gospels and Acts of the Apostles.

So, you keep saying but this is not what most biblical scholars say. There is nearly universal consensus on a core group of authentic Pauline letters, whose authorship is rarely contested, and they are dated in the 50’s.

 

[HansMustermann]

Please, Acts of the Apostles is useless fiction. There is no actual history of Peter and James associated with any church anywhere. There is no historical evidence anywhere that Peter and James lived anywhere and was associated with Judaism in any century. Saul/Paul was a fabricated converted in an attempt to historicise the fables of Jesus and the disciples.

While inventing witnesses would be nothing new, it's still not very clear why would anyone invent a non-witness who only saw the guy in visions after he died.

Plus, you still haven't presented a coherent story of how you imagine the whole thing worked, if you think they needed to invent the guy who founded this or that church. There had to have been A founder, because the church existed. Unless you want to claim that the gang in, say, Corinth, just miraculously sprung into existence by itself, SOMEONE had to be a first one there who convinced and baptized a few others, who then baptized more, and so on. At which point, if you want to put your words in someone's mouth, WTH, you can just put them in the mouth of that guy.

Visions are not and have never been accepted as historical accounts.

Yet you claim both that AND that they invented exactly that kind of witness and it was believed. Which of those is it, because you can't have both?

NT Paul, his letters and churches were fabricated no earlier than the 2nd century in an attempt to deceive believers he was a witness to the fables called the Gospels and Acts of the Apostles.

Yet you just said that such a testimony wouldn't have been accepted as a historical account. Which is it? Would people believe such a non-witness account to be historical or wouldn't they?

But more realistically, some would and some wouldn't, which brings us back to the issue of: why would anyone invent such a weak sauce link, if they had to invent a witness? The gospels and Acts already invented a couple dozen named people who would have been actual witnesses, in addition to multiple unnamed Pharisees, up to thousands of people present at this or that miracle, etc. They even have Jesus naming Peter his successor as church leader.

So exactly what is your story of what happened there, that they needed to invent a non-witness as a source, instead of using some of the already invented actual witnesses? Exactly what is the benefit of inventing a Paul guy who got a couple of things from Jesus in visions, instead of just forging a few more letters from Peter saying he actually got them from Jesus in person, while travelling with him for a year or three?

And I mean, the ONLY thing that Paul shares about Jesus ever actually saying or doing is the Lord's Supper. That's ALL the 'confirmation' that Paul provides for ANYTHING in the gospels. And his testimony is either from a vision or hearsay, since he wasn't there. But Peter and the other apostles were supposed to have actually been right there and actual first hand witnesses. If you need to write hundreds of pages in someone else's name just to invent someone to corroborate the Lord's Supper, why invent someone who ISN'T a witness?

Why not just forge one page from Peter or John, saying, "oh yeah, I was there. He said that."? I mean, WTH, not only both are supposed to be witnesses, as in actually mentioned by name as being there in the gospel, but the former is the supposed appointed spiritual successor and the latter was supposed to be the naked guy that Jesus was loving the crap out of at that party. Either one is both far more convincing and costs a lot less.

 

[HansMustermann]

All existing NT manuscripts are dated by paleography to the 2nd century or later.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_New_Testament_papyri

You will never ever find an NT manuscripts dated to the 1st century because the NT is a fraudulent historically worthless document falsely attributed by anonymous fraudsters to fictitious characters who never ever existed.

Ah, so your main argument is that you don't know how manuscripts worked, and there's no limit to what kind of nonsense you can confabulate when you're talking out the ass

The thing about manuscripts is that they don't work like printed copies. There's no such thing as everyone and their dog having a first edition. Each is a copy of a copy of a copy. As such each one only works as an UPPER limit, not as THE date when it was written.

I mean, equally the first complete copy of Mark is from the 3rd century, but you'd have to be a pretty deranged puppy to take that to mean that that's when it was written. More specifically because it would mean it was written AFTER Luke and Matthew who copied from it.

 

[HansMustermann]

Additionally you seem to take it for granted that they'd definitely first write all the gospels, and THEN start a cult with them. That's trivially false. E.g., Muhammad also just claimed an angel talked to him and made it up as he went along, LONG before someone actually collected that stuff in a book. In fact, the book only happened long after his death.

Presumably not the least because, as I was saying, a book cost a whole lot back then. Just the paper would be a couple grand in today's money, and the highly qualified work of copying it by hand was the even bigger factor. Last I heard an estimate, back then a book cost anywhere between 10,000$ and 100,000$ in today's money.

AND most people wouldn't be able to read it anyway.

So basically you wouldn't start by writing the book and giving everyone a copy if they want one. You TOLD them about your religion, and actually making up a book would only come much later, when there actually was a market for that kinda thing.

But I say, "seem to", because as I was saying, I've yet to hear a coherent story about how you imagine the whole thing happened. Especially when it involves even inventing that someone founded those churches abroad. It should be entertaining to hear how do you think it happened WITHOUT a founder

 

[David Mo]

All existing NT manuscripts are dated by paleography to the 2nd century or later.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_New_Testament_papyri

You will never ever find an NT manuscripts dated to the 1st century because the NT is a fraudulent historically worthless document falsely attributed by anonymous fraudsters to fictitious characters who never ever existed.

The first manuscript of the Iliad is from the second century. Then the Iliad was written as early as the 2nd century... according to your delusional criteria.

Try it again.

 

[Giordano]

The first manuscript of the Iliad is from the second century. Then the Iliad was written as early as the 2nd century... according to your delusional criteria.

Try it again.

Bad choice of example:

1. The existence of a historical Homer has long been questioned. Many, many Homeric scholars have concluded that the Iliad and Odyssey were written by two different authors. Many scholars further believe each are assembles composed by more than one author. Even if a historical Homer existed it is widely agreed by scholars that the popular biographical portrayals of him as a blind poet, etc. are wrong.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homer

2. Just a correction: there are fragments of these epics that date back to 400 and 300 BC.
https://chs.harvard.edu/CHS/article...-evidence-of-eccentricity-or-multitextuality-

Indeed there are multiple examples of famous individuals widely accepted as “real” in the common culture who, on investigation, probably never existed. At least not as proposed.

 

[HansMustermann]

The Iliad (not Homer) does work as an example nevertheless, though: an example that a story could exist before someone put it on paper. I mean, even regardless of whether some guy called Homer actually composed the final form or not, at the very least it's based on stories about the Troy wars, which happened centuries in the past at that point. In fact, in an age when even the writing wasn't the same, and far as anyone can tell, Dorian Greeks couldn't read the Mycenaean Linear B writing, so the only possible connection was oral.

So basically the idea that a story doesn't even exist until someone writes the book, which seems to be dejudge's argument there, still is quite false.

 

[Delvo]

The first manuscript of the Iliad is from the second century. Then the Iliad was written as early as the 2nd century... according to your delusional criteria.

...an example that a story could exist before someone put it on paper.

That was beside the point dejudge was making, though. It was about the dating method: paleography.

That's not about the physical age of the object that is written on. It's about the stage of the language that is written in. Part of how we know that Homer's works were much older than the oldest physical copy is that they show features of an older version of the language.

But, while a document can be written, or especially copied, in an older form of the language, it doesn't work the other way around: nobody writes in what would be for them a future form of the language. So paleography can set harder "this old, no older" limits than manuscript physical dating can. The only question in this case is: "does it really do so in this case?".

 

[smartcooky]

That was beside the point dejudge was making, though. It was about the dating method: paleography.

That's not about the physical age of the object that is written on. It's about the stage of the language that is written in. Part of how we know that Homer's works were much older than the oldest physical copy is that they show features of an older version of the language.

But, while a document can be written, or especially copied, in an older form of the language, it doesn't work the other way around: nobody writes in what would be for them a future form of the language. So paleography can set harder "this old, no older" limits than manuscript physical dating can. The only question in this case is: "does it really do so in this case?".

A more contemporary example might be a book someone claims to have been written in 1950, using the word "gay" to describe a homosexual, or using terms such as "chairperson" instead of chairman or chairwomen. You might get one as a fluke, but too many language anachronisms would be clues that this book could not have been written before the 1970s or 1980s.

 

[HansMustermann]

That's more like style analysis than paleography. Paleography is really about what the name says: old writing. As in, the letter shapes and such. What today you'd call the "font". The basic idea is that writing changes little by little over time, so if you find two manuscripts with the same letter shapes, you can basically guess that they were written within +/-50 years of each other.

So as you gather more and more of a library of documents from across time and space, you can date a new one by looking to see which other writing it matches.

So, yes, it IS about the age of the document, not about its contents.

And why bother with that instead of say, carbon dating, it's because of palimpsests and such. The actual writing on a document can be substantially newer than the age of the paper it's written on.

And therein lies the first widespread misuse of it, especially when it comes to bible dating. Unlike real history, in most bible-related cases they don't tell you the margin of error. Either the middle ground, or in some cases the earlier possible date, gets stated as if it were accurate to the year. E.g., you hear that some fragment of John dates, say, 110 AD, so absolutely positively the story in that form must have existed in 110AD, when actually the margin of error gives you almost as high a latest possible date as just the fact that it's mentioned in Irenaeus.

Even when you hear about a margin of error -- but again, for the bible you almost never do -- it's often the very old assumption of it being accurate within +/- 25 years or so. Which would still be a lot less accurate than what most people expect, but it's HALF the ACTUAL current estimate for the margin of error.

You also rarely hear about the fact that the margin of error is often compounded by the fact that it's really dated by comparing to ANOTHER document which itself was dated by paleography. So you know, you sometimes have a very wide interval around something that itself is somewhere in a very wide interval. With the real mathematical resulting margin of error being, well, what you'd expect if you know how error bars work. So again, often there is the impression of greater accuracy than is really the case.

And I think it works the same for dejudge, really. Many of those documents are really only limited to the 2nd century (sometimes in BOTH directions) by other assumptions, rather than by paleography actually giving anything even vaguely resembling an exact date.


Anyway, yes, you are right that people look at the language too, but that's a different discipline than paleography. Really we use both, when possible.

 

[HansMustermann]

A more contemporary example might be a book someone claims to have been written in 1950, using the word "gay" to describe a homosexual, or using terms such as "chairperson" instead of chairman or chairwomen. You might get one as a fluke, but too many language anachronisms would be clues that this book could not have been written before the 1970s or 1980s.

No, if you want a modern analogy of paleography, it's like if you find a religious comic (e.g., in the style of a Chick Tract) that uses the font Comic Sans. Well, you know that Comic Sans didn't exist before 1994, and within a decade or so it was already getting to be not just out of favour, but HATING it with a burning passion was getting to be a meme that all cool kids adhered to. So, based on the shape of the letters being Comic Sans, you might date that comic to 1999, plus/minus 5 years. Because before the lower end of that interval, nobody was using Comic Sans yet, and after the end of that interval, virtually nobody was using it any more.

Really, THAT is paleography in a nutshell.

 

[David Mo]

That was beside the point dejudge was making, though. It was about the dating method: paleography.

That's not about the physical age of the object that is written on. It's about the stage of the language that is written in. Part of how we know that Homer's works were much older than the oldest physical copy is that they show features of an older version of the language.

But, while a document can be written, or especially copied, in an older form of the language, it doesn't work the other way around: nobody writes in what would be for them a future form of the language. So paleography can set harder "this old, no older" limits than manuscript physical dating can. The only question in this case is: "does it really do so in this case?".

Thanks for your precision.

My argument works the same way if instead of talking about manuscripts we talk about papyrus. According to Dejudge's criterion of evidence, the Iliad would not have been written before the fourth/third century BCE.
Any expert will tell you that this is manifestly false.

If you want to say that there are other criteria of linguistic or historiographical order which fix the date, independently of the first preserved fragment, we agree. We do not have to discuss this.

Apply the story to the case of the Gospels. Unless we find some evidence to the contrary, nothing allows us to conclude that the Gospel tradition didn't exist, especially in oral form, before the date of appearance of the first preserved manuscripts.

 

[David Mo]

The most curious thing is that the date on which the gospels were written has nothing to do with whether the events narrated there were real or not.
Myths and legends may be being created even at the same time as the characters they describe. See Alexander the Great.

What I find inconvenient is to give reasons for scepticism that do not hold up. This is to discredit the healthy scepticism of real historians, which is something more serious than parlor games.

 

[dejudge]

The most curious thing is that the date on which the gospels were written has nothing to do with whether the events narrated there were real or not.
Myths and legends may be being created even at the same time as the characters they describe. See Alexander the Great.

The myths and legends about Alexander the Great were not and never used to determine his historicity.

It is an absolute fallacy to to put forward the notion that the utter fiction in the NT Gospels can be used as historical evidence for Jesus, the disciples and Paul.

What I find inconvenient is to give reasons for scepticism that do not hold up. This is to discredit the healthy scepticism of real historians, which is something more serious than parlor games.

Your term "healthy scepticism" is completely arbitrary and meaningless. Who determines what your "healthy scepticism" is?

You very well know that all sceptics do not agree on everything.

You put forward the absurdity that whatever you do not agree with is not "healthy".

 

[David Mo]

The myths and legends about Alexander the Great were not and never used to determine his historicity.

It is an absolute fallacy to to put forward the notion that the utter fiction in the NT Gospels can be used as historical evidence for Jesus, the disciples and Paul.


Your term "healthy scepticism" is completely arbitrary and meaningless. Who determines what your "healthy scepticism" is?

You very well know that all sceptics do not agree on everything.

You put forward the absurdity that whatever you do not agree with is not "healthy".

Of course, but myths and legends are intertwined with historical facts in the narrative about Alexander. Historians separate them. The same is a priori possible in the case of Jesus the Galilean.

A healthy skepticism has to know the methods and conclusions of the experts on a specific subject. It has to recognize when skepticism is justified and when it is not. This is not the case with you. You enter history like an elephant in a china shop.

 

[Tassman]

The most curious thing is that the date on which the gospels were written has nothing to do with whether the events narrated there were real or not.

Myths and legends may be being created even at the same time as the characters they describe. See Alexander the Great.

The difference between the myths and legends of the likes of Alexander the Great and Jesus is that the events of Alexander's life are supported by external evidence, whereas the alleged events of Jesus' life are not supported by any contemporary evidence at all. This is not to say that Jesus never existed as a peripatetic preacher who acquired a few followers before getting himself executed. Stories don't evolve in a vacuum.

But the stupendous events attributed to him in the NT (e.g. those surrounding the crucifixion) are highly improbable. Exact contemporaries such as Philo, who wrote an account of the Jews, made no mention of Jesus. At all! And he lived in and around Jerusalem the entire time that Jesus existed.

 

[abaddon]

All existing NT manuscripts are dated by paleography to the 2nd century or later.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_New_Testament_papyri

You will never ever find an NT manuscripts dated to the 1st century because the NT is a fraudulent historically worthless document falsely attributed by anonymous fraudsters to fictitious characters who never ever existed.

How exactly do you know that there is not an earlier "Nag Hammadi" out there awaiting discovery?

You don't.

At best, you can claim "the earliest yet found." and no more than that.

 

[HansMustermann]

The myths and legends about Alexander the Great were not and never used to determine his historicity.

It is an absolute fallacy to to put forward the notion that the utter fiction in the NT Gospels can be used as historical evidence for Jesus, the disciples and Paul.

Do you even understand what the criteria of that historical method are, though? Like, WHY do you have more confidence in the existence of Big Al than Jebus, and where does Paul fall on that scale? Because I'm not convinced that you do.

Your term "healthy scepticism" is completely arbitrary and meaningless. Who determines what your "healthy scepticism" is?

You very well know that all sceptics do not agree on everything.

You put forward the absurdity that whatever you do not agree with is not "healthy".

Dunno what he meant, but when half of it is failing logic epically, and half is just sticking your fingers in your ears and pretending that whatever you can't address doesn't exist, I will say that that's not even unhealthy. It's just not skepticism or critical thinking at all. It's just sticking to a preconceived notion. And in fact it's no different than what the flat earthers or 9/11 truthers do. Or for that matter what religious folks do, because that sticking to believing something, no matter what, is nothing more than what they call "faith".

 

[HansMustermann]

How exactly do you know that there is not an earlier "Nag Hammadi" out there awaiting discovery?

You don't.

At best, you can claim "the earliest yet found." and no more than that.

Actually, I'd say that's not why he fails epically.

The part about taking evidence as is, rather than "there might be some that nobody discovered yet" is not wrong. We may yet discover a species of flying pig somewhere in the Amazon, but we don't use the possibility to conclude that there actually is one.

Where he fails (among other things) is not understanding how that null hypothesis works.

You can fall back on "no it doesn't" as a null hypothesis for a claim of the form "X exists" or "Y happened" (the two being trivially equivalent) by virtue of Occam. If no evidence requires X as an explanation, then X is just an unneeded extra entity.

You DON'T have such a fallback when the claim is "X existed before Y", where both X and Y obviously exist. Like, for example, where X=1 Corinthians, and Y=Acts. (Or really, it could be any other X and Y, like arguing whether the Dresden Files invented supernaturals in hiding before or after Vampire The Masquerade, or whatever.) Neither explanation per se involves any fewer entities, since X and Y still exist in any case, so Occam favours neither. You need other considerations to determine or at least guess at which came first.

Or for an even easier way to see why it's wrong, just look at the fact that "X was before Y" and "Y was before X" are perfectly symmetrical by themselves, in the absence of other considerations. If there were some automatic "no, it wasn't" default for one, it would work just as well for the other one.

And basically THAT is one way dejudge fails to understand logic. He seems to think he can just proclaim "no, Paul came after Mark" as a default, and be scot free of any burden of proof for that.