The Case Against "The Case Against Historical Christ"

[KDLadage]

Outside the people who knew him, he most certainly was a common man

So...

• He brings a man back from the dead after he had rotted in his tomb for a while... an this is a common man?
• Three kings of the East travel -- following a star -- to see a baby that is supposedly born of a virgin... and this is a common man?
• He has a trial where the Roman leadership felt his death was not needed, yet his own people are so threatened that they insist that he be killed {1}... where it is claimed by many that he rose three days later and walked out of his own tomb... and this is a common man?
• ad astra

So who, then, in those days, qualified as uncommon?


{1} Please note that if Jesus existed, then he was one of many death-cults of the day preaching that the kingdom of God was near. Yet the NT does not speak of mass killings of the other cult leaders... just Jesus. And you claim this man is common?

 

[MG1962]

Really? The guy performed miracles, and you think he was common?

Maybe everyone had supernatural powas back then?

Yes because we all know we had the communication technology to spread these stories 2000 years ago. Of course the whole world knew what he was doing

 

[MG1962]

• He brings a man back from the dead after he had rotted in his tomb for a while... an this is a common man?

And how many people knew about this?

Three kings of the East travel -- following a star -- to see a baby that is supposedly born of a virgin... and this is a common man?

How many people knew about this

He has a trial where the Roman leadership felt his death was not needed, yet his own people are so threatened that they insist that he be killed

How many people knew about this

{1}... where it is claimed by many that he rose three days later and walked out of his own tomb... and this is a common man?

How many people knew about this

 

[Bikewer]

Even skeptical scholars like Ehrman think that JC was a real person, while admitting the severe lack of evidence.
Ehrman paints him as an Apocalyptic preacher who said the wrong things in the wrong place and got offed for it.
Subsequently, his followers knitted together a remarkable (but also remarkably inconsistent) narrative...
Note that this is precisely the genesis of many other religions and religious figures.....

 

[MG1962]

Even skeptical scholars like Ehrman think that JC was a real person, while admitting the severe lack of evidence.
Ehrman paints him as an Apocalyptic preacher who said the wrong things in the wrong place and got offed for it.
Subsequently, his followers knitted together a remarkable (but also remarkably inconsistent) narrative...
Note that this is precisely the genesis of many other religions and religious figures.....

And that is an important point. Regardless of our opinion about the spiritual elements of Christ. Scholars by their profession have to divorce themselves from this and deal with only the potential history of the man

 

[SpuriusMaximus]

Even skeptical scholars like Ehrman think that JC was a real person, while admitting the severe lack of evidence.

... no offense, but it is a textbook case of appeal to authority. What Ehrman thinks is fully irrelevant if he doesn't have evidence. It's as simple as that.

Yes because we all know we had the communication technology to spread these stories 2000 years ago. Of course the whole world knew what he was doing

Yet other more minor events of Pilate's reign are documented in letters to Rome and the like. But such major events as the zombie plague that Matthew describes somehow those absolutely need Internet to spread. Sorry, I'm not buying it.

As for Piggy...

This is incorrect.

There are no references in Mark to date it past the destruction of the 2nd Temple. At one point, the utter destruction of the earthly Jerusalem is foretold, but that obviously was not the experience of the ancient audience, so it belongs with passages predicting, for example, the fall of Rome or the coming of the Kingdom of God to Earth.

The mainstream view is that Mark, alone among the gospels, was composed during the 2nd Temple, around the time of the latest letters of Paul.

Lack of any evidence is not evidence of the contrary. And again an appeal to what is mainstream view doesn't do much for me. Wake me up when what you have is actual evidence.

Let's be perfectly clear about one thing. This "equally valid explanation" is made up out of thin air.

Let's also be perfectly clear: the Q document explanation is equally made up out of thin air. There is no copy of Q, there is no historical reference to Q, there is nothing except a hypothesis that there might have been a document those two copied. Nobody knows if it actually existed or what it looked like. (E.g., whether it was a part of an expanded Mark after all.)

So you're telling me, what? That you call someone "crank" and rail like that based on just your siding with one made-up fairy tale against another made-up fairy tale?

Really, of all the silliness I've read on the topic of Jesus, it always cracks me up when someone with a straight face acts as if he's actually seen Q and knows exactly what it is and exactly what it isn't. Get a clue, seriously.

And generally, meh, it's rare to see this big a burst of several messages of pure BS and judging which BS is right without any supporting evidence, outside of the fundies' threads.

 

[sgtbaker]

Paul is not "outside the bible" evidence, though; which makes him part of the claim. If I recall correctly, Paul never actually met Jesus in person so even his claims of Christ are, again, if I recall correctly, inspired by the gospels.

 

[KDLadage]

[/LIST]And how many people knew about this?

How many people knew about this

How many people knew about this

How many people knew about this

So...

The fact that nobody wrote about this (outside of the gospels) is indicative that few were aware... but the idea that these events were written about 60-120 years later, once everyone that may have been there was dead... this is to be takes as... what, exactly?

Sorry... not ready to drink that Kool-Aid.

Look: was there a man who was preaching an apocalyptic message on or around anno domini (+/- 35 years)? Sure. Lots of them.

Was there a particular one that had a (perhaps superficial) likeness to the travels of Jesus, The Christ, as reported in the NT? Perhaps. Highly unlikely (thanks to this being an oral record, evidently, and understanding how such records drift with each re-telling); but certainly possible.

Does this equate to being the historical Jesus, The Christ -- described in written texts that were scribed some one-to-six generations later? Most certainly not.

 

[Lord Emsworth]

Paul is not "outside the bible" evidence, though; which makes him part of the claim. If I recall correctly, Paul never actually met Jesus in person so even his claims of Christ are, again, if I recall correctly, inspired by the gospels.

Oh, just forget about "The Bible". And as an aside, the Pauline epistles are amongst the earliest material that we got, and as such predate and cannot be based on the Gospels.

 

[Ichneumonwasp]

Paul is not "outside the bible" evidence, though; which makes him part of the claim. If I recall correctly, Paul never actually met Jesus in person so even his claims of Christ are, again, if I recall correctly, inspired by the gospels.

Paul is extra-gospel evidence. Of course it depends a bit by what you might mean by "gospel", but if you use the common meaning today -- the four canonical works that begin the Christian scriptures -- then Paul was not inspired by them. He almost assuredly died before the first of these works were written, so there would have been no way for him to be inspired by them.

He clearly heard stories about Jesus, and we have no reason to doubt that he actually met people who directly followed Jesus -- the pillars that he mentions in his letter to the Galatians. There is very good textual evidence that the Kerygma predated Paul and that at least one hymn that was very likely sung in Aramaic and not Greek pre-dated him as well, testifiying to the fact that there was a Jesus movement independent of Paul.

As to Paul's claims of "Christ", he reported somehow experiencing Christ in some sort of revelation that he thought given to him by God. What exactly he meant by that we have no clue, but he at least claimed direct revelation of the Christ though he never met Jesus (or Yehoshua) in the flesh and not merely inspiration from others telling stories.

 

[SpuriusMaximus]

I think a more important case to be made is that any actual similarity would be coincidental, rather than even having a "historical" Jesus as merely the person whose name was reused. Same as if I were to make up a story about a guy in Russia called Ivan who was killed by Germans in WW2, by sheer chance there will be a couple thousand people who happen to have been named Ivan (it's a very common name there) and among the millions who died in WW2. But that doesn't make them "the historical Ivan" if my story wasn't actually based on the deeds of a particular Ivan.

The crucial point there is that Mark (*) as the earliest biographer, doesn't even freaking know the geography of the place. He has Jesus cross the Jordan directly from Galilee to Judaea, completely omitting the provinces of Decapolis and the Gaulanitis in between, for example. And he's writing in Greek, presumably for a greek audience.

Mark also gets some details not just wrong, but _stupidly_ wrong. E.g., the whole dressing Jesus in purple incident is blatantly false and stupidly so. Purple was extremely expensive, and its use regulated by rank. The only person who was entitled to wear purple at all in the whole province was Pilate, and even then only a stripe. A toga of solid purple was reserved for the Emperor, the Gods at certain celebrations, or the Emperor's representative opening the games in Rome in his name. Nobody was allowed to even have one in the whole province. And even if Pilate had one, due to sheer cost alone, he wouldn't dress a freshly scourged convict (you know, lots of blood and all that) in it just for the sake of a few minutes of mockery.

Mark wasn't there. Mark wasn't writing about anything he personally saw. There is no historical Jesus to find in Mark, because Mark hadn't actually met one.

Likely Mark was confabulating for the benefit of one of the churches founded by Paul, and based on no more actual information than what little they had inherited from Paul. At any rate, it's an unreliable second hand account, and we don't even know where the first hand one comes from or what it was like or about whom.

(*) ... meaning, "Mark" as in, "the guy who wrote the gospel of Mark", not as in, "the apostle Mark." There is no claim in the actual text that it was written by the latter.

 

[Ichneumonwasp]

And that is an important point. Regardless of our opinion about the spiritual elements of Christ. Scholars by their profession have to divorce themselves from this and deal with only the potential history of the man

Yes, but most scholars also have a vested interest in there being an historical Jesus if they wish to publish anything on the topic, the case for his non-existence being well worked over.

I don't think we can use scholarly credentials to help much, except that these folks know the material well. They are subject to the same sorts of biases as are we all.

 

[pgwenthold]

Paul is extra-gospel evidence.

Of what?

Let me ask this question I asked before of Piggy.

Change the names. Change the name of Jesus in the gospels to Barney and maybe John the Bapist into Fred. Now separate the stories. Could anyone who read the authentic epistles of Paul recognize that Paul's Christ Jesus is the same guy as Barney?

Raised from the dead is Paul's running theme. Indeed, Barney was, in later versions of the Gospel (post Paul's version, that's for sure) raised from the dead. But how about any other characters that were raised from the dead? Elvis was claimed to be alive after he died. Could you distinguish Barney from Elvis?

How much actual independent verification of the gospels does Paul provide? I know Paul talks a LOT about old testament stuff. I won't go as far as Doherty to suggest that Paul didn't know anything about a person named Jesus, but in terms of the gospels? Even granting that it is intrabiblical confirmation, how much confirmation IS there?

 

[Ichneumonwasp]

I think a more important case to be made is that any actual similarity would be coincidental, rather than even having a "historical" Jesus as merely the person whose name was reused. Same as if I were to make up a story about a guy in Russia called Ivan who was killed by Germans in WW2, by sheer chance there will be a couple thousand people who happen to have been named Ivan (it's a very common name there) and among the millions who died in WW2. But that doesn't make them "the historical Ivan" if my story wasn't actually based on the deeds of a particular Ivan.

The crucial point there is that Mark (*) as the earliest biographer, doesn't even freaking know the geography of the place. He has Jesus cross the Jordan directly from Galilee to Judaea, completely omitting the provinces of Decapolis and the Gaulanitis in between, for example. And he's writing in Greek, presumably for a greek audience.

Mark also gets some details not just wrong, but _stupidly_ wrong. E.g., the whole dressing Jesus in purple incident is blatantly false and stupidly so. Purple was extremely expensive, and its use regulated by rank. The only person who was entitled to wear purple at all in the whole province was Pilate, and even then only a stripe. A toga of solid purple was reserved for the Emperor, the Gods at certain celebrations, or the Emperor's representative opening the games in Rome in his name. Nobody was allowed to even have one in the whole province. And even if Pilate had one, due to sheer cost alone, he wouldn't dress a freshly scourged convict (you know, lots of blood and all that) in it just for the sake of a few minutes of mockery.

Mark wasn't there. Mark wasn't writing about anything he personally saw. There is no historical Jesus to find in Mark, because Mark hadn't actually met one.

Likely Mark was confabulating for the benefit of one of the churches founded by Paul, and based on no more actual information than what little they had inherited from Paul. At any rate, it's an unreliable second hand account, and we don't even know where the first hand one comes from or what it was like or about whom.

(*) ... meaning, "Mark" as in, "the guy who wrote the gospel of Mark", not as in, "the apostle Mark." There is no claim in the actual text that it was written by the latter.

While I basically agree, I'm not sure I would go quite that far.

I think we can know with only a little bit of conjecture a few little details, and we know them from Paul. We have to start by trusting basically what Paul has to say, even though he clearly has an agenda. He claims to have met the pillars of the Jerusalem community. They seem to have been followers of Jesus. And they also were concerned with giving to the poor; and, if Paul is to be believed, they did not have much of a problem with his message, so Jesus probably preached about a coming kingdom of God.

Other than that, I don't think we can know much else; and with that I agree with you 100%.

As to Mark writing within a Pauline community, that is certainly possible and one of Price's main contentions. I'm not sure I agree, though, since it is also very possible (and I'm more drawn to the idea) that the author of Mark wrote not within a community founded by Paul but one that was only influenced by him -- namely Rome. One theory is that this book was written in a community under some sort of duress; and this certainly fits with Rome in the time of Nero (which would have pre-dated the fall of the Temple), or possibly as Roman troops were descending on Jerusalem.

 

[Ichneumonwasp]

Of what?

That there was a Jesus community.

Let me ask this question I asked before of Piggy.

Change the names. Change the name of Jesus in the gospels to Barney and maybe John the Bapist into Fred. Now separate the stories. Could anyone who read the authentic epistles of Paul recognize that Paul's Christ Jesus is the same guy as Barney?

Raised from the dead is Paul's running theme. Indeed, Barney was, in later versions of the Gospel (post Paul's version, that's for sure) raised from the dead. But how about any other characters that were raised from the dead? Elvis was claimed to be alive after he died. Could you distinguish Barney from Elvis?

How much actual independent verification of the gospels does Paul provide? I know Paul talks a LOT about old testament stuff. I won't go as far as Doherty to suggest that Paul didn't know anything about a person named Jesus, but in terms of the gospels? Even granting that it is intrabiblical confirmation, how much confirmation IS there?

Paul provides almost no independent verification of the gospels. He only provides evidence that there was a community of people, independent of him, who followed Jesus and who seemed to think that he had been raised from the dead. He provides the kerygma, which pretty much just says that they thought he was raised from the dead; and he provides one hymn. He relates two sayings, if memory serves, that no one should get divorced and that folks should pay their preachers. That's about the sum of it.

 

[pgwenthold]

That there was a Jesus community.

and in that respect, there are a lot of extrabiblical sources.

Perhaps a more interesting question of things Paul says that are consistent with the gospels, are there things Paul says about Jesus that contradict the gospels? Given how light Paul is on the person Jesus in the first place, I wouldn't be surprised if there weren't really.

 

[Ichneumonwasp]

and in that respect, there are a lot of extrabiblical sources.

Perhaps a more interesting question of things Paul says that are consistent with the gospels, are there things Paul says about Jesus that contradict the gospels? Given how light Paul is on the person Jesus in the first place, I wouldn't be surprised if there weren't really.

It's almost impossible for him to do so, because he says so little about Jesus as a human. Paul primarily conceived of the Christ as a cosmic entity -- the one who had been elevated by God -- and he almost always speaks of him in those terms. That is why some are so easily seduced by the idea that Paul only spoke of Jesus in those terms.

I'm not aware of any direct contradictions.

 

[Ichneumonwasp]

and in that respect, there are a lot of extrabiblical sources.

Yes, but the important point being, for discussions about an historical Jesus, that Paul seems to provide evidence for Jesus communities that pre-dated his involvement with them. That is important for this sort of discussion because it is often claimed that Paul created Christianity whole-cloth rather than having learned most of it from others. He clearly seems to have invented an 'interesting' theology that almost assuredly did not predate his involvement, but that is different from creating the whole idea for the religion.

 

[Lord Emsworth]

and in that respect, there are a lot of extrabiblical sources.

Perhaps a more interesting question of things Paul says that are consistent with the gospels, are there things Paul says about Jesus that contradict the gospels? Given how light Paul is on the person Jesus in the first place, I wouldn't be surprised if there weren't really.

I don't think this would matter all that much? It is not about inerrancy, or something like that, rather it is about whether somewhere underneath it all there is a historical Jesus, right? There is nothing that is either implausible or problematic about untrue and/or conflicting stories/rumors.

 

[Ichneumonwasp]

That's simply not the case.

Each gospel writer was trying to do the same thing -- for his church (which at that time meant a small group meeting in each other's homes) to collect the accepted stories about Jesus into a narrative, and by default leave the other stories out. They're writing the canon for their group.

And each gospel writer had to deal with all of the different stories that were circulating orally and in codeces (a codex was a kind of book or pamphlet, as opposed to a scroll) at the time and place that he wrote.

In fact, that was the whole reason for writing -- to sort out the mess. Keep in mind, we have literally thousands of Christian codeces from the first couple of centuries CE, and that's undoubtedly a tiny fraction of what was in circulation.

Mark was the earliest biographer we know of. And obviously, it was the first successful attempt to write a canonical biography of Jesus.

Matthew and Luke -- written after the fall of the Second Temple and the destruction of the Priesthood, probably a few years before the start of the 2nd century -- used Mark because it had become accepted by their groups (among others). It wasn't the only source, by any means, but it was a privileged source.

I'm also surprised by the glib way that Price tosses out phrases like "some additional post-resurrection narratives". Here, he's talking about the apostolic witness, which sets up the whole dividing line between the true-apostolic (Jamesean) groups and the Pauline/gentile groups, as well as the ascention, which places Jesus firmly in the company of the highest of the annointed men of God, such as Elijah.

What seems to have happened here is that Price understood the basic source scholarship, but then made incorrect assumptions about the paucity/plethora of sources to draw his conclusion.

Then there's this:



Let's be perfectly clear about one thing. This "equally valid explanation" is made up out of thin air.

Nobody has ever run across any "expanded" Mark or any reference to, or even hint of, any such thing.

"Expanded Mark" is a pure invention of the imagination.

What's worse, Mark is a relatively crude, and certainly early, document. It has been added to. But no reason is known -- or, to my knowledge, has ever been proposed -- why anyone would want to cut material from Mark.

The claim of equal validity here is simply false.

As for his comments on John, it's definitely gentile, and it certainly asserts the miracles, but it then consistently makes the point that seeing the signs isn't the important thing, it's faith in Jesus (and having your whole household join you, if possible).

There's really nothing remarkable there.

Piggy, I think you might want to be a little more careful. You call an expanded Mark a pure work of imagination (I agree, I think it is) but imply above this that the gospels were clearly written to sift through the various stories circulating about Jesus to provide a canon for each church -- with no evidence to support this claim. That claim is just as easily a pure work of imagination.

The only surviving writings -- the only writings we know about -- before Mark are Paul's letters.

Yes, the author of Luke refers to many who have "compiled a narrative of the things which have been accomplished among us", but it is not at all clear to what that refers. Does that mean lots of Jesus stories? Does it refer to stories about what the community had done -- ala Acts. And was that definitely the case when Mark was composed? Sure, it might have been, but we don't have good evidence of that. And we certainly have no evidence to suggest that sifting through these stories was the raison d'etre for any of the gospels in the first place.

If you have a better argument for why you think this might be the case I would like to see it because I think that would definitely be interesting.