If Carrier tells us what's in Acts, please cite the relevant chapter and verse -- of Acts, that is, not Carrier.
The Historical Jesus II
- Thread starter dejudge
- Start date
- Status
What makes you think that Acts is a reliable history in this matter? The first half of Acts is full of pro-Paul propaganda and fairy-tale miracles. I don't think it can be relied upon to give an accurate picture of who was in charge in Jerusalem at that time.
This is why Scholars don't rely solely on Acts, they look at other sources and all of those other sources only ever mention the one "James The Just" who led the early church after Jesus died, until he died in the 60s CE.
Later on in Acts the narrative style changes into a first-person account called the "we document" which is where the famous "Jerusalem Conference" between Paul and James appears. In that "we document" James describes his thousands of followers as "Zealous for the law", which was not a popular thing to be after the revolt against Rome. It doesn't surprise me that the later Roman-Christian editors who compiled Acts would want to distance their "Christ" from such disreputable "Zealots".
But I guess if it isn't what Carrier says, it can't be true...
JaysonR
Graduate Poster
- Joined
- May 16, 2013
- Messages
- 1,816
That's not what I meant by reference - I'm well aware of these verse citations.
When I wrote reference, I hoped I was clear in that I was referring to the identity of the cultural peoples explicitly; that is the missing reference frame - I wasn't stating he did not provide citation for his thinking.
This is why I wrote the rest of the post which directly belongs with the section you quoted - that section wasn't a stand alone thought:
And didn't just stop and claim he didn't provide references; I stated that he is making conjecture without reference - two very different ideas in the context of the full post.
To be even more clear - in the vast majority of Carrier's hypotheses, he derives them from examining comparable cultures or events, as well as examining the general culture of Hellenism, and at times Judaism, itself to derive those hypotheses.
He doesn't just rest on verse citing to build an anthropological hypothesis...except here.
This is why I consider it his weakest argument - because it only rests upon Bible verse reading and interpreting without an extra-Biblical reference frame for comparison, and it also assumes the texts should be considered as related to each other and that they are authentic in earnestness and dating.
His other hypotheses don't rest so much upon the texts so if the dates are off, or content turns out to not be authentic, the arguments he provides are still valid considerations.
By the way; keep in mind that because I think this cannot be proven or sustained as a strong hypothesis due to lacking a cultural identity to compare against, does not then mean that I think James is inherently the biological brother, or that Jesus is proven as historically evident.
No; it means that I think the data is grossly incomplete and incapable of sustaining a hypothesis regarding an alleged social structure of a people we can't find, in a region we have no idea where.
We have nothing to look at; we can't go digging in their graves to find out more about them.
Hell - we can even do that with Egypt, Asia, Aztec, even Hittites!
Hell; we have more to physically dig up and examine regarding the enigmatic builders of Stonehenge than we do have available to dig up regarding the early following of Christianity!
We don't even know WHERE to dig!
By the way, Carrier himself is rather open about this and his whole point in this tangent is to show that the terminology is so variously employed that we cannot inherently rule out other possibilities than biological; which is true - we can't.
The possibility for either to be the case must be recognized, and that is Carrier's point; because Ehrman was taking the term to inherently refer to a biological tie without conceding other possibilities - which shouldn't be the case; just as it shouldn't be the case that we align to any one specific standing on the matter.
Carrier's point is that it doesn't stand as evidence for Jesus being historically evident by proxy of a passage referring to James as the brother of the Lord because multiple possibilities exist as to the employment of that phrase.
Again, which is true and will remain true until we can actually identify the peoples and their culture and can examine their social behavior anthropologically and can then determine which possibility is in line with their anthropology.
Last edited:
Fine by me. I don't think you have anything useful to produce here as evidence of Jesus anyway. Though of course it was you (not me) who decided interject to tell others what to do in that conversation (which did not even involve you).
In fact you have done that throughout all these HJ threads; ie repeatedly complained about how insulted you feel and how you are going to flounce off taking your bat and ball with you. Which hardly seems very constructive or useful to the discussion.
The point here is that so far neither dejudge nor anyone else appears to have found any biblical author claiming that others had preached Jesus as the messiah before the date that you and bible scholars give as the date of Paul's letters (i.e. pre-dating the canonical gospels, circa 50-60AD).
And as we all know, the very insistent words of "Paul" in those letters, come as close as anyone might reasonably expect (given that the writer certainly could not have expected that 2000 years later people would be disputing any existence of a human Jesus), to ruling out the idea that he learnt about Jesus as the messiah from the teaching of an earlier group that he had apparently been "savagely persecuting" for many years before his vision.
The mere fact that any biblical writing says that others had believed in a "Christ" (ie a "messiah"), actually says nothing at all about Jesus ... people in that region had believed in the coming of Gods messiah since at least 1300BC (apparently ... according to their OT).
The fact that a group called the "Church of God" were said in a c.200AD copyist rendering of “Paul’s letters” to be “in Christ”, says precisely zero about any human person named “Jesus”.
Last edited:
The point is that you and bible scholars have NOT found any evidence that the Pauline Corpus was composed c 50-60 CE.
You are engaged in a CIRCULAR argument--a logical fallacy.
You are relying on ASSUMPTIONS without evidence the Pauline letters were composed before the Gospels and then fallaciously argue Paul was the first to name Jesus the messiah.
You have admitted that you are NOT agreeing with those dates and don't know when the Pauline Corpus was written.
Ians said:
Your claim that Paul was the first to name Jesus the messiah is hopelessy illogical.
When you produce the evidence from Acts and only Acts that either James is the biological brother of Jesus.
As you yourself stated "you have no occasion to take exception, or tell people how to manage their own arguments."
There is a word for what you are now doing; it is called hypocrisy.
If you can dictate to us then we can dictate to you!
We are still waiting for anything Acts and only Acts that any James after Acts 2 is the biological brother Jesus. So for you have avoided this like the plague because there isn't anything there.
And we are asked to believe that even if these accounts did say Jesus was crucified for sedition the Christians couldn't spin doctor as being the fault of the Jews?
I would like to point out this idea flies in the face of the whole argument of embarrassment theory.
Wouldn't the first thing the Romans who had a "group of persons already hated for their crimes" suggest be that their leader was executed by the Romans for sedition and therefore the whole movement was potentially dangerous?
And yet in what the Christians did take the trouble to preserve we have a clueless Pliny the Younger and a vague reference by Suetonius, and supposedly Tacitus; not what you would expect regarding a group connected with sedition.
If the Nero account was true wouldn't Nero want to strengthen his claim that Christians set fire to Rome by claiming their leader was executed for sedition regardless of its factuality?
Compare this to reaction to the ideas of Karl Marx. Even before the Russian revolution of 1917 labor movement were connected to Marx, Anarchism, or both as dangerous radicals who threatened to overthrow the US government (If you look far enough you will find Grant Administration political cartoons regarding the danger of the 'Red Flag')
Last edited:
And we are asked to believe that even if these accounts did say Jesus was crucified for sedition the Christians couldn't spin doctor as being the fault of the Jews?
Obviously they could, because that is what they did. That is why the stories we have now blame the Jews. Did you miss that?
No it doesn't. The crucifixion is still there. No matter how you spin it, crucifixion was not something that Jews did, it was a Roman punishment for sedition.
Well, yes they did just that. But by the time Christianity became the state religion several centuries later, the stories had changed somewhat.
Really? Pliny wasn't torturing and executing them for the crime of being Christians?
Are you serious?
I think that is kind of what Tacitus says, isn't it? He wasn't saying Jesus was a great guy for being killed by Pilate...
OK. Totally irrelevant to our discussion, but OK...
19th century USA was not 1st century Rome. Karl Marx was not executed by General Grant for claiming to be the rightful King of America...
JaysonR
Graduate Poster
- Joined
- May 16, 2013
- Messages
- 1,816
Not to butt in, but I still don't think the "embarrassment" gauge is a good gauge because it relies on both identifying a cultural value set we can't identify, it remains possible that it wasn't "embarrassing" but something entirely different, and it is also possible that "embarrassing" events were prized (see the entire lineage of Hebrew leadership, for example).
You very well know that the term "Christianity" does not refer only to the Jesus cult.
The mention of people called Christians cannot inherently refer to people who believed the Jesus story.
There were Christians of antiquity who argued that their Jesus was on earth WITHOUT birth.
The very NT claimed many Deceivers would be called Christ.
In fact, Christian writers exposed that there were CHRISTIANS who did NOT BELIEVE the Jesus story.
Since the time of Claudius, the followers of the magician Simon Magus were called Christians. Simon Magus claimed he was God and that he would not die.
Brainache said:
Tacitus does not mention a character called Jesus in the ENTIRE Annals 15..
In Histories 5, Tacitus claimed the Jews believed their Jewish Messianic rulers would appear around c 70 CE which is also attested by Suetonius and found in the writings of Josephus.
Tacitus' Annals with Christus is a confirmed forgery and it is also noticed that the word "ChrEstian" was tampered with in the extant copy.
Tacitus' Annals is fundamentally useless to argue for an historical Jesus or for a cult called ChrIstians.
Plus, if it is argued that the historical Jesus was an OBSCURE preacher man then then the CHRISTUS in Annals is NOT HJ the OBSCURE.
If it is argued that Jesus did go on a trial under the Sanhedrin and did GO on a PUBLIC trial under Pilate where WITNESSES were present then there was NO OBSCURE HJ.
If it is argued that the Romans crucified Jesus to stop a NEW Religion from spreading then there was NO OBSCURE HJ.
OBSCURE HJ is a product of fiction if it is argued that the Christus in Tacitus' Annals 15 is Jesus.
OBSCURE HJ is a Myth/Fiction.
Not even the forgeries in Tacitus and Josephus mention an OBSCURE HJ.
Who told people of ANTIQUITY that HJ was an OBSCURE preacherman?
Can we get the name of the ancient writer??
I can't find any!!!
HJ the OBSCURE must be a modern WHOLE CLOTH invention!!!
Last edited:
It's not one of my favourites, but Max's argument that the fact that a lot of early anti-Christian works have been lost or destroyed, is not really an argument against it.
I'm not telling you how to manage your own arguments at all. I am asking you to tell me your source forWhen you produce the evidence from Acts and only Acts that either James is the biological brother of Jesus.
As you yourself stated "you have no occasion to take exception, or tell people how to manage their own arguments."
There is a word for what you are now doing; it is called hypocrisy.
If you can dictate to us then we can dictate to you!
We are still waiting for anything Acts and only Acts that any James after Acts 2 is the biological brother Jesus. So for you have avoided this like the plague because there isn't anything there.
Where does Acts do this? That's not commenting on any argument. It's asking for your source. I'm interested. There is nowhere in Acts that says James is "biological brother" of Jesus, so your question to me is unanswerable. There are other NT places where James is called or referred to as the Lord's brother, and two synoptic sources for lists of Jesus' brothers, including a James. But you know this, and you know the verses.
Now I am not familiar with what you state to be in Acts, that it explicitly rules James out as Jesus' biological brother, and it would be helpful if you could cite the verses.
I can not in return cite verses that you know do not exist.
JaysonR
Graduate Poster
- Joined
- May 16, 2013
- Messages
- 1,816
I think it's hard to argue against something that isn't itself argued really to begin with.
The embarrassment tangent is just the result of someone sitting around and thinking, "Hey! Come to think of it! This would be embarrassing and I wouldn't put something embarrassing in, neither would the Egyptians, so clearly that means it's something that actually happened!"
No.
It's just a random thought without actual merit and it sounds neat and logical on the surface so folks run with it.
Arguing against it, aside from pointing out that it is an invalid argument due to lacking a frame of reference to gauge values upon, is just wasted air blowing on air.
Why even address it?
It's like arguing a negative! Firstly, the proposing side needs to PROVE that it was embarrassing for the folks who wrote it down!
Secondly, they then need to PROVE that this same group of peoples retracted accounts of embarrassing events elsewhere!
Can anyone do that without knowing who the hell followed these ideas, who wrote them down, or where in the world they were located?
I HIGHLY doubt it.
Last edited:
The criterion of embarrassment may frequently be misapplied. I don't think one can argue, the ancient writers would have felt bad about x, so it must be true. That's absurd. But there are passages that indicate reticence about a statement, and do display retraction.
An example is the baptism of Jesus. Mark is explicit about the occurrence of this event, and moreover that the function of John's baptism was
Now it is "embarrassing" to later Christian doctrine that Jesus should submit to such a procedure, not in the trivial sense that later Christians feel uneasy about it; no, in the philosophical sense that it bluntly contradicts their doctrines about Jesus. Why should the earliest account written by a Christian do this?
As to its being "retracted", well yes it is, progressively. Matthew has John apologising and denying the necessity for the procedure.
No remission of sin of course.
Luke hides Jesus among a crowd.
The Fourth Gospel: does it have its divine Jesus being baptised for the remission of sins? No, of course not.
In this account the Baptist is dunking other people to prepare for Jesus to come and take away their sins. A very different procedure.
So yes, retraction is demonstrated here. But the principle can I think be applied only to explicit accounts of events, to be included in an assessment of their probability; it should not be applied to pure expressions of doctrine, for the reasons you cite. What doctrine would be embarrassing? We don't really know.
Moreover the thing being "embarrassed" is not necessarily the authors of the sources under study, but the account of events which the sources themselves relate. One of the original French meanings of the word may be considered here
Thus, we have the expression "embarrassment of riches". Do we feel bad about the riches? No it means that we have so many riches that we are distracted from giving thought to the original purpose for which these resources were obtained. It's "embarrassment" in that sort of sense.
Another good example. Who killed Goliath? Well, David did that. But not according to 2 Samuel 1:19. Here's various versions.
Now, ask this. If the story of the slaying of a mighty warrior called Goliath has any historical basis, who did it? If David did it, why attribute the deed to an obscure person like Elhanan? It is an "embarrassment", an impediment, to the David story that the Elhanan account exists at all. Why is it there? The AV redactors even falsify the text to remove this obstacle to the David story.
How does the AV/KJV deal with that one? Easy.
Now, ask this. If the story of the slaying of a mighty warrior called Goliath has any historical basis, who did it? If David did it, why attribute the deed to an obscure person like Elhanan? It is an "embarrassment", an impediment, to the David story that the Elhanan account exists at all. Why is it there? The AV redactors even falsify the text to remove this obstacle to the David story.
Last edited:
That may be true for the 1st century CE but NOT true for the 1st century BCE.
Remember that Judea did not come under Roman rule until 63 BCE. Alexander Jannaeus (103 BCE to 76 BCE) a Jewish King crucified 800 rebels at the end of the Judean Civil War.
Also, remember their have been claims going all the way back to the 4th century CE that the Jews themselves put Jesus death in or near the time of Alexander Jannaeus.
Why the Jews would supposedly put Jesus death at the hands of one of their own leaders a century early then the Gospel account has never really been intelligently explained.
Last edited:
There has been discussion of this before. It is intelligently inexplicable indeed. What sources are you using for this assertion?
Sadly it pops up even in scholarly published works:
"all other things being equal of such material in a document should increase our confidence in its historical veracity. In Gospels research this est offen had been termed the "criterion of embarrassment."" - Boyd-Eddy Jesus Legend Baker Academic pg 408
Scholars who support this nonsense include Louis Gottschalk, John Paul Meier, G Stanton, G Theissen-D Winter, and M.E. Boring. Some try to hide what it is by calling it "resistance to tendencies of the tradition" but by any name it is a package of silly nonsense.
Like or not criterion of embarrassment is ranked high by many HJ scholars as a key criteria for determining historical accuracy (Meier puts it in the top five). As mentioned before Carrier quickly shows how much garbage such an argument is by using comparing the astonishing stupidity of the Disciples to the equally unrealistic stupidity of the crew of Odysseus in the Odyssey.
Oh for the record Boyd-Eddy also present the over 5000 Greek manuscripts nonsense on page 382 ignoring such facts as
* The often quoted over 5000 Greek manuscripts actually covers a period of time from the 2nd century to the 16th ie 14 centuries!
* The over 5000 Greek manuscripts also cover all 27 books of the New Testament.
* Just 6.29% of these 5000 distinct pieces of evidence have been dated before the 9th century and only 48 supposedly predate our oldest intact Bibles
* Most of the really early manuscripts are actually fragments no larger then a modern credit card and in many cases not even forming complete words.
* "Comparing the above-named seven major critical editions, from Tischendorf to Nestle-Aland, we can observe an agreement in wording of only 62.9% of the verses of the New Testament."
* "The percentage agreement of the verses when all the four Gospels are considered is 54.5%."
So the Gospels, the key point of the Jesus story, has verses that have about the chance of a coin toss of matching or being different over the course 14 centuries!
The fact such twaddle as criterion of embarrassment and over 5000 Greek manuscripts appears in a work published by Baker Academic shows that HJ scholarship is a total joke.
Last edited:
We'll be seeing Serapis again any minute now...
I have never relied on any such assumption. I have made no assumptions about when anyone called “Paul” wrote any letters”. You have been told that at least ten times now.
Instead of any assumption, I have talked only about the FACT that bible scholars and HJ supporters here, are themselves saying that Paul’s letters were written circa.50-60AD. Are you claiming they have not given those dates for Paul’s letters.
It’s not about anyone “admitting” things. “Admitting” is an entirely misleading and wrong word to use in that context, which you keep using in reply to everyone, as I expect you very well know. All I have said about it is that I have no particular belief about the dates when anyone called “Paul” wrote any letters. I do not know what date any such letters were written. And neither do you!
Well that statement from you is not merely "hopelessly illogical", it is completely 100% wrong. I have not said Paul was the first to name Jesus ... what I have explained, at least 10 times to you on the past few pages alone, is that if people claim that Paul's letters were written around 50-60AD (and they do all claim that) then Paul in those letters is apparently the first person we know of to name Jesus as the messiah.
But you have been told that in words of one syllable at least a dozen times now, and apparently you cannot understand that others here, NOT ME!, are saying that Paul wrote those letters circa 50-60AD and before any gospels were written.
Why can't you just quote Galatians 1:17, showing where you say it says that people had named Jesus as the messiah before Paul did? Why can’t you just support your own insistent claim about Jesus in Galatians 1:17 by quoting it? It’s only two lines ... just quote it, it‘s not difficult ... then we can see if it says what you have claimed.
- Status