Well, the inference that there was a probable HJ is baseless since there is no historical evidence of such a character.
Historical Jesus
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Well, the inference that there was a probable HJ is baseless since there is no historical evidence of such a character.
Roger Ramjets
Philosopher
But in the Bible Jesus never called himself God, and his disciples didn't consider him to be either. Jesus comes across as a plausible human character, unlike Xenu which is just bad science fiction..
If Jesus Never Called Himself God, How Did He Become One?
The NT story of Jesus may be total fiction, but it still describes a man who was later deified, not a god who came down to earth to take human form. Comparing Jesus to Xenu makes even less sense. Scientology is not a real religion and it's pretty obvious L. Ron Hubbard dreamed up the Xenu story as a joke (a bad one, but he wasn't much good at writing science fiction either).
It is a pity that Christians had to make Jesus into a god, because now the Jesus story is saddled with all the baggage that comes with a major religion that has shaped the course of history for thousands of years. But why did they? To answer that you have to understand the historical context.
Jesus means 'savior', and the Jews were expecting a human leader to free them from Roman subjugation. But now they are in Rome, competing against an emperor who has declared himself a god which they need to counter. So as they say, "When in Rome, do as the Romans do". Unless you were there (or can put yourself in that historical context) you can't understand the motivations behind much of what is in the Bible. Not that it stops people here from trying - and then accusing actual historians of being the ignorant ones.
No direct evidence, that's true. But what if there was, and early Christians made sure it never saw the light of day because it conflicted with their deification of Jesus? Or what if there is evidence still waiting to be discovered?
Then there is the Bible itself. The stories didn't come from nowhere (unless you think the Council of Nicaea got together and dreamed it all up on the spot). So this is evidence of a previous religious movement, even if we haven't so far found any outside the 'texts of the religion'. And who knows, perhaps the Vatican has something that they can't reveal because it proves the non-divinity of a historical Jesus!
There are other examples of people who we no evidence for outside of myth, but we don't close the book on them because they don't carry the same baggage. - eg. King Arthur, Robin Hood. They too are the subject of stories that are not 'factual', but we don't insist that they must be pure invention. The difference? They weren't made into gods that theists and atheists are desperate to either affirm or deny.
I agree with Hubbard being like Paul in that both of them cynically claimed to have religious knowledge that they just made up. The difference is Paul co-opted an existing religion, while R. Ron Hubbard created one out of thin air. In this respect they are not at all alike. The idea that Paul created Christianity is silly.
Until recently I was leaning towards the idea that Jesus is no more than myth. But then I saw that the most strident advocates of this theory are just as closed-minded as the theists who refuse to believe he isn't a God. As a skeptic that doesn't sit well with me. One argument that particularly irks me is that Jesus is described as a god in the Bible, but Gods don't exist so Jesus the man could not have existed. This is invariably followed by 'absence of evidence = evidence of absence' and dismissal of anything that might be called evidence. It's almost as though the MJers have a religious need to deny the possibility of a historical Jesus.
Delvo
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I could hardly have asked for a better demonstration of the utter vacuity of the anti-HJ arguments in the recent pages of this thread than the obsessive return to yet more blather about Xenu so soon after it was just laid out what an irrelevant little-known trifle he is to Scientology itself. I literally can't even make an analogy for how bad that is because I can't name any aspect of any other non-Christian religion that is equivalently unknown, not-believed-in, and not-spoken-of by that religion's own members to such an extent as Xenu. (Within Christianty, it's roughly like trying to depict the whole thing as being all about that time a donkey talked in the Old Testament, or that time God tried to kill Moses right after giving him his assignment but couldn't because he was stopped by a woman throwing a magic foreskin at him.)
I prefer to avoid drawing the dividing line at "in the Bible" and "outside the Bible", in favor of "used for Christianity" and "used for other purposes". Interpreting ancient writings to figure out what they can reveal about history involves identifying and weighing the authors' motivations, but it does not involve adding or subtracting credibility points based on what collection a book ended up in as collected by somebody who whom the author never met.
In other words, suppose that there were some perfectly fair and honest historical record by a non-Christian with no pro-Christian agenda from the year 31 asserting that Jesus was a real person who lived at the time it was written. It would be possible for Christians to have chosen to include that book in their Bible. And then it would count as being "in the Bible". But it wouldn't be any less valuable as evidence of Jesus just because that had happened to it; a religion can't make its place in history disappear simply by collecting & canonizing all of the relevant writing that was available. And if mere inclusion in the Bible alone doesn't discredit that hypothetical book, then it doesn't discredit any of the real ones we really have in there either. What does discredit them as sources about Jesus is that the authors had a Christian motivation, which is possibly a motivation to write whatever they thought would be good for Christianity, or at least their own branch(es) of it.
Tassman
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Xeno was a creation of L Ron Hubbard who existed, just as Jesus was feasibly an existing man who was turned into a god by others.
Jesus was not a god and he personally "founded" nothing. The argument has been that a non-divine man existed at the core of the made-up religion that accrued around him.
That’s not the argument.
And I agree with them.
Yes, Paul and the anonymous gospel writers and a whole host of others founded X’tianity. It's a story that grew in the telling.
Cosmic Yak
Philosopher
Firstly, that's only true if you discount the Gospel of John, which you quote yourself, and you can't really do that because it really is part of the Bible.
Secondly, I would have thought that the whole Immaculate Conception thing would rather put paid to the idea that Jesus was human.
ETA: Matthew 16:16: Simon Peter replied, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”
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Delvo
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John was the latest of the canonical Gospels and the most grandiose & epic one. You just described part of the pattern of embellishment, that the story gets bigger and more supernatural with time so the earlier a version of it is, the more mundane it is, which is a trend that points to even more mundane earlier versions before the first known writing of it. In the oldest version of the oldest one (Mark, before an extra chapter or two got added at the end), there's not only no demigod status but also no real claim of a resurrection (just barely an opening for an imaginative reader to use his/her imagination that maybe it could have happened), no birth/childhood story involving angels or cosmic signs or re-enactment of parts of Exodus, and no claim that his death was of any spiritual/supernatural consequence. What supernatural elements does that leave? A few claims of minor magic tricks, which were normal for people like him as described in other sources like Josephus. (Modern guys like Benny Hinn do more of that than Jesus did.) And that was after some number of years/decades for things like that to have gotten added between oral retellings.
Kapyong
Graduate Poster
Not so, as anyone who reads the epistles can see - the early epistles do refer to Jesus as a heavenly being with no earthly connection. The Gospel stories came later. (There were no disciples, they are just part of the later story - not one early Christian ever claims to have met a historical Jesus.)
Jesus Christ as a heavenly being in the epistles :
Hebrews 1:1 -
"1 In the past God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets at many times and in various ways, 2 but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, and through whom also he made the universe. 3 The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word. "
Hebrews 1:8 -
'But of the Son he says,
“Your throne, O God, is forever and ever, the scepter of uprightness is the scepter of your kingdom. '
Philippians 2:6 -
"...have the same mindset as Christ Jesus, who, being in very nature God,"
(or "in the form of God".)
Titus 2:13 -
"waiting for our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ,"
Colossians 1:15 -
"He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. 16 For by Him all things were created that are in heaven and that are on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers. All things were created through Him and for Him. "
It's quite clear that Paul DID consider Christ a heavenly being.
You are speculating that there might be (now), or might have once been (2000 years ago), evidence to show Jesus was real ... but you could make that sort of speculation about absolutely everything in the entire universe! Example - what if there was once evidence to show that evolution, quantum theory, relativity, WW2, the Moon, the solar system, and the entire universe never actually existed! ... and what if there is evidence that it's all imaginary, but we are still waiting to discover that evidence !! ...
... if you go on like that then you can never understand, discover, or believe anything at all !!!
OK, I think I will stop there without reading the additional parts of your reply for now (because we are now reduced to going around in the most obviously spurious circles imaginable).
Your statement is irrational or deliberate mis-representation of the Bible Jesus story.
Jesus is God the Creator and God's own Son in the Christian Bible.
Matthew 16:16
John 1.1-3
Mark 9:7
Luke 1.35
Luke 8:28
Ehrman's argument is brutal nonsense.
The angel Gabriel did not call himself an angel in the Bible neither Satan did call himself the Devil.
Ehrman's HJ arguments are the very worst known to mankind [worst than those of the Bishop of Rome]
What nonsense!!!
Jesus cult Christian writers specifically stated their Jesus was God who came down from heaven.
Aristides' Apology
Well, Jesus cult stories of their Jesus were regarded as fiction.
Justin' "First Apology"
NT authors also made up their Jesus.
Please, what history are you talking about?
The God of the Jews has shaped the course of history for thousands of years long before and after the NT fables of Jesus son of the Ghost.
If Jesus was human then he could not even save himself. If Jesus was crucified as a criminal then it would be absolutely stupid to believe he was a Savior.
Who in the Roman Empire would worship a known crucified Jew as the Savior instead of Vespasian?
What you say makes no sense. Why were you recently leaning to an MJ? What was your MJ theory?
Your idea of an historical Jesus is based directly on absence of evidence.
The NT writers admitted their Jesus was born of a Ghost without a human father so I cannot argue that Jesus existed when there are no such things.
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Just as a point of interest here - how do we know which of those 4 gospels was the earliest? How do we know which ones came first and which were the last?
I have not heard that questions asked in all the previous threads on this subject. But afaik, there is actually no evidence to show the order in which those gospels were written ...
... afaik it's simply an assumption from biblical scholars and others. And afaik it's an assumption based on the idea that it would fit better with their belief in Jesus as a real person, if they assume that the gospels with the least number of invented miracles, were the earliest ones.
IOW - it would (upon that basis) not be the case that the gospels actually did become more fiction-filled as time went on, but instead it is more simply the case that the order was chosen to suit their belief that Jesus was real.
Also, just re the claim that the so-called "short version" of g.Mark has few miracles and that most of it is describing a perfectly ordinary human preacher, as far I can tell that claim is absurd. The short version of g.Mark appears to me to be packed with miracles as well as packed with the most obviously fictional and really quite laughably naive stories of Jesus. So as far as I can tell from checking the contents on the net, g.Mark (in any version) is not remotely credible as a source of evidence for any real human Jesus.
gabeygoat
Master Poster
Sherman Bay
Master Poster
Just for reference, here is the scholarly timeline from Wikipedia's Authorship of the Bible.
Mark, 68–70 CE
Matthew, 80–90 CE
Luke and Acts, 80–90 CE
John, 90–110 CE
But you asked how do we know. The Wiki article goes into detail about this. Another good resource is our friend, Cecil, Who wrote the bible, part 4.
Then you haven't been paying very close attention.
How is it that after so many years in these threads you can still be unaware that Luke and Matt. both quote Mark extensively? That is evidence.
But carry on calling Historians ignorant, its funny.
Can you provide a link to the discussion, I'd like to read it.
No, sorry. I just know that the subject of the order of composition of the synoptic gospels has come up many times in all of the HJ threads.
You could follow the link in Sherman Bay's post above and read what an expert has to say about it.
Thanks for that.
I took a brief look at the Wiki link. It doesn't seem to me very convincing in the case of the gospels. For example, one of what seems to be the most obvious examples of "evidence" is that it says "Matthew copied parts from Mark" ... but how does anyone know which of them was doing the copying? How do we know that it was not the author of g.Mark who was copying from g.Mathew? ...
... and how do we know that neither of them were copying from each other, but instead both taking something else are their source (such as the hypothetical "Q").
Remember also that we are relying on copies written many hundreds of years after any originals were thought to have been written in the 1st century. So how does anyone know that various details (such as mention of a destroyed temple or mention of Jewish wars) were not added by copyists at a much later date?
If you read that wiki page on dating the gospels, what is called there “evidence”, looks extremely weak to put it mildly.
I have not looked at your other link.
Once it is realized that there were multiple Messianic claims in antiquity then references to Christ does not necessarily refer to NT Jesus.
Even NT writers claim there was another person using the name Christ in their fables called Gospels.
Mark 9:38
There were multiple cult of Christians in the 1st century not related to the NT fables.
Followers of Simon Magus the magician were called Christians since the time of Claudius c 41-54 CE according to writings attributed to Justin Martyr.
How do we know? It's called textual analysis and it is what Historians do.
Scholars who use "textual analysis" also argue that Jesus was a myth.
Anyone who is familiar with the arguments about the "Synoptic problem" know that there are multiple hypotheses even by those who supposedly use "textual analysis".
In any event, the supposed dates for the writings of the so-called Pauline Epistles are based on Acts of the Apostles, a known work of useless fiction.
Acts of the Apostles does not even claim Saul/Paul wrote any Epistle to anyone at anytime.
The so-called NT Pauline Epistles were fabricated no earlier than c 175 CE or after the writing of "True Discourse" attributed to Celsus.
Garbage.
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