The Historical Jesus II

[Craig B]

Waters,

I wrote

Now tell me if that is Philo Judaeus attesting to his own belief in the existence of Heracles, or whether he is merely noting that a pagan imitated the traditionally-attributed virtues of one of his own gods?

To prove the truth of that, look at the next paragraph.

XIII. But the madness and frenzy to which he gave way were so preposterous, and so utterly insane, that he went even beyond the demigods, and mounted up to and invaded the veneration and worship paid to those who are looked upon

By pagans, not by Philo the Jew

as greater than they, as the supreme deities of the world, Mercury, and Apollo, and Mars. And first of all he dressed himself up with the caduceus, and sandals, and mantle of Mercury, exhibiting a regularity in his disorder, a consistency in his confusion, and a ratiocination in his insanity. Afterwards, when he thought fit to do so, he laid aside these ornaments, and metamorphosed and transformed himself into Apollo

 

[dejudge]

So now you've been forced to dilute the Nazareth condition in defining Jesus in the early notices. Good.

I use your own post to show that Jesus of Nazareth was a Ghost/God/Man.

"The Father is God"
"The Son is God"
"The Holy Spirit is God"

"God is the Father"
"God is the Son"
"God is the Holy Spirit".

Jesus, the son is God AND God is the Holy Ghost.

If you don't want to identify Pliny's Christ with Jesus, that's up to you. But to say it isn't evidence of people worshipping a messiah as a god is ridiculous. And that is a peculiar Christian thing. Jews, even messianic ones, don't do that.

You have already shown that Jesus the Son is GOD and shown that God is the Holy Spirit so your HJ argument is dead.

The Son is God--God is the Holy Spirit.

God is the Son--the Holy Spirit is God.

Jesus the Christ is Ghost/God/Man in and out the Bible.

You have completely forgotten that the "Christ" in Pliny was worshiped as GOD--NOT as a man.

Pliny's Letter to Trajan about the Christians.

They asserted, however, that the sum and substance of their fault or error had been that they were accustomed to meet on a fixed day before dawn and sing responsively a hymn to Christ as to a god..

The Christ in Pliny does NOT refer to an historical Jesus of Nazareth.

HJ is a modern fiction character derived from Ghost/God/man stories in the Bible [a fundamentally discredited source riddled with forgeries, false attribution, fiction and falsehood.

You cannot separate the man from the TRINITY.

Jesus, the Son, the Father and the Holy Ghost are ONE INDIVISIBLE God.

Jesus, the Son the Father and the Holy Ghost are ONE and the same substance.

Jesus, the Son, the Father and the Holy Ghost are INDIVISIBLY THREE MYTHS in ONE.

 

[Craig B]

I use your own post to show that Jesus of Nazareth was a Ghost/God/Man.

Jesus, the son is God AND God is the Holy Ghost.

The principle that two things that are equal to a third thing are equal to each other applies in maths but not in theology, dejudge. That's why I can quote

"The Son is not the Father"
"The Son is not the Holy Spirit"

As indeed I have done already.

You have already shown that Jesus the Son is GOD and shown that God is the Holy Spirit so your HJ argument is dead.

Doesn't work that way. These math axioms don't work here, as shown umpteen times.

You have completely forgotten that the "Christ" in Pliny was worshiped as GOD--NOT as a man.

You must HAVE completely forgotten your own name and WHAT day it is to say that! Has your brain fallen OUT OF your ears? I have just written the VERY opposite!

... But to say it isn't evidence of people worshipping a messiah as a god is ridiculous. And that is a peculiar Christian thing. Jews, even messianic ones, don't do that.

 

[IanS]

Once again: dejudge claims that gospel writers consistently described Jesus as a ghost. CraigB pointed out a place in Luke where the text explicitly states that Jesus was not a ghost but was flesh and blood. I would think that that piece of text is evidence that the whoever wrote the book didn't consistently describe Jesus as a ghost. This doesn't have anything to do with reliability or lack of it of the text. Whether Jesus really existed or not or if he was a seven-feet tall alien lizard from planet Gbrhs doesn't matter the slightest bit what reads in the text. .

I was not asking Craig about his dispute with dejudge on Jesus as a ghost or God in g-Luke. And I made that specifically clear in my questions to him. My question to him was whether he was claiming that g-Luke provided evidence of a human Jesus.

What is difficult to understand about that as a question? What is difficult to understand about why I would ask him that question?

Because it's the simpler explanation for the start of Christianity than him never existing at all. I don't think that the texts of the Bible are reliable (if I thought that, I certainly wouldn't be an atheist). There might be a little authentic stuff sprinkled in somewhere there, but there is no single thing that I would be willing to definitely declare as the real deal.

The main thing is that historical Jesus is not an extraordinary claim. A preacher fermenting some sort of rebellion before getting executed in the first century Judea is not something so unheard and impossible that we would need to apply stricter criteria for his existence than for other historical persons.

The things that are in my opinion the most convincing ones are those where Jesus clashes with scriptures or early Christianity. If he was invented from thin air to fulfill prophesies, why was he Jesus and not Immanuel as prophesied? Why John denied that Jesus had claimed that the 'beloved disciple' would be alive to see the coming of the kingdom of god if the story was concocted long after the disciple's death or supposed death if he too was completely mythical? It's simpler if he was Jesus because that was his actual name and shoehorning him into the prophesies had to take that into account. And perhaps there was a common belief in the early church that Jesus had told that the disciple would see the kingdom of god, and a natural way for that kind of belief to appear would be that Jesus did say that.



My standards for the existence of historical Jesus are about as low as they are for other historical persons. For example, I believe in historical Pythagoras even though all sources about him postdate him by at least decades (most by centuries) and are derived from Pythagorean sources. But I don't believe that he was a son of Apollo who had wondrous powers since my atheism extends also to the ancient Greek gods and goddesses. Most people accept the existence of historical persons with far less evidence for them than Jesus without blinking.

When you look at folklore, there are lots and lots of cases where supernatural stories get attached to real persons and in some cases the stories completely cover the underlying man or woman. This has happened even quite recently. I was very surprised when I found out that the mythical Finnish lumberjack Nätti-Jussi was actually a real man who died as late as in 1964. In the folklore he is quite similar to the internationally better-known Paul Bunyan, he's a man who can do anything with no regards to the laws of nature. In the real life he was a bit lazy guy with a deformed foot who liked sitting around campfire spinning yarns more than wading in knee-deep snow with a saw and an axe. A real person got turned into a legend in just a few decades.

In my experience, most people who go around strictly denying historical Jesus can be divided into two groups: those who are against him because against Christianity in general, and those who have gotten themselves involved in some form of gnostic mysticism and who think that Christians are misguided fools who don't know the real truths.

I don't think his claimed existence is a "simpler explanation". And afaik, none of the sceptical authors who have written books and articles about it think it's a simpler explanation either.

It's an "explanation" which crucially lacks any evidential support. And which to the contrary ignores a mountain of evidence showing that the biblical accounts are certainly mythical and highly unreliable to say the least.

But without going item by item through everything that you mention above, all of which I think we have been through before countless times - when you draw comparison with figures like Pythagoras, you presumably are aware that such comparisons are a standard argument always presented by any HJ side in all these internet threads (and probably in many pro-HJ books too), and we have actually discussed those comparisons in many hundreds if not thousands of posts here.

You presumably do know that? And you want to try re-running the same bogus comparisons again for the 180th time?

 

[dejudge]

The principle that two things that are equal to a third thing are equal to each other applies in maths but not in theology, dejudge.

Again, you write fiction. In theology Three Persons are ONE. The Son, the Father and the Ghost are INDIVISIBLE ONE.

Church writers of antiquity have explained the doctrine of the Trinity.

1. Augustine of Hippo "On the Holy Trinity---therefore they are not three Gods, but one God.

2. Thaumaturgus "On the Trinity"---All (the persons) are one nature, one essence, one will, and are called the Holy Trinity.

3. Gregory of Nyssa "On the Holy Trinity"-----the identity of operation in Father, Son, and Holy Spirit shows plainly the undistinguishable character of their substance.

"The Son is not the Father"
"The Son is not the Holy Spirit"

You forget that you already stated the Son is GOD.

You forget that you already stated that God is the Holy Spirit.

You are totally confused.

You don't make sense mathematically, theologically or logically.

Your argument is hopelessly absurd and contradictory.

"The Father is God"
"The Son is God"
"The Holy Spirit is God"

"God is the Father"
"God is the Son"
"God is the Holy Spirit".

The Son is a tri-mythical character--the Son, the father and the Ghost.

The Son, the father and the Ghost are INDIVISIBLY ONE and the same substance.

Jesus of Nazareth is Ghost/God with Flesh.

Jesus of Nazareth is TOTAL FICTION/MYTH/THEOLOGY.

 

[IanS]

No, in fact I have written before that whether any of the evangelists or any other writer claimed personally to know Jesus is not conclusive as regards his historicity, and I have also repeatedly stated that (as you know perfectly well) there is no such passage anywhere. Do you understand that? It is therefore unnecessary for you to keep restating in every sentence something I have already responded to as plainly as I can.

It's much more than merely "not conclusive"! The fact is that none of the people who wrote the gospels ever claimed to meet Jesus at all. And nor did they quote anyone else who ever claimed to have met Jesus.

What appears in the gospels, are anonymously written stories about belief in a supernatural messiah of earlier times fulfilling the OT divine prophecies from God!

What appears in those gospels are religious beliefs, not any evidence that the beliefs were ever true.

Again, having repeated this; I would prefer that you respond to my previous request for comment.

You mean, asking me what date I think g-Mark was written?

I truly have no idea at what date that was written. And I have said that from the very start of these HJ threads stretching back 6 or 7 year now. And I have never said anything different to that......

... was it originally written around 70AD as one single copy identical or nearly identical to what we have as the first/oldest readable extant copies? I truly have no idea if it was written at that time or not.

Do you want me to say more about that? More of all the same things I have consistently said many hundreds of times before here?

Do you want me to say that according to Wiki, the earliest extant relatively complete and more-or-less fully readbale extant gospels, date from about the 4th to 6th century, and most are later than that. I have quoted that from Wiki at least 20 times here. And so far, nobody has seriously disputed those quoted dates from Wiki.

Those are supposed to be "copies". And we do apparently have fragments of parts of documents which have the same sentences as parts of those 4th-6th cent. extant copies, which are thought by palaeographers, bible scholars and others to be significantly earlier than 4th century ... perhaps as early as c.140AD.

But where we have only fragmented remains or badly damaged and partly illegible remains from the earliest dated pieces of any gospels, you cannot simply assume that the extensive missing parts would have said exactly the same about Jesus as appeared in those later extant "complete" copies. It would only need a few very small changes and very small differences to just a few words, in order to completely change what any such "original" versions said relative to what finally appeared several centuries and more later in those "complete" extant copies.

If you wanted me to make a complete guess about the dates - I suspect versions of the 4 gospels probably originated from much simpler and shorter oral preaching as "pericopes", designed to instruct the faithful on how they should behave in various situations. That may stretch back to centuries BC! And may have once been similar to what was being preached amongst people in the DSS community of that region.

Whether that evolved into something like early prototype written versions of the 4 gospels, and whether there were at that time numerous other gospels, and what date that might have been, I have no idea.

And I don't think there is anything more anyone can honestly say about it; except that what we now have, and all that remains, as relatively complete and relatively readable extant copies, i.e. the copies that we are actually relying upon for detail (presumably), seem to date from 4th-6th century, and mostly from 6th century onwards.

But the most important thing about all of those gospels, whatever any original date or any original contents, is that they contain absolutely no evidence of their authors or anyone else ever meeting a human Jesus. What they contain as “evidence” is purely and entirely evidence of the authors religious beliefs ...

... and as Randel Helms has shown, those beliefs about Jesus were certainly being taken from what had been written centuries before in the OT.

Once you know that, and you do know it!, and once you accept that the gospel stories of Jesus have been shown to be filled with impossible fiction in almost every mention of him on every page, then it should be obvious to you why it becomes untenable to believe that the gospels are a reliable source of actual evidence of a human Jesus ever known to anyone.

As I have said here countless times - Jesus might have really existed, but the problem is that (a)there is no actual evidence of him, (b)that there is a mountain of evidence to show that the written accounts of him are fictional, and (c)if we are to use actual evidence (as we objectively must) then it requires something far more credible than the books of the bible.

 

[Craig B]

... anyone else who ever claimed to have met Jesus ...
they contain absolutely no evidence of their authors or anyone else ever meeting a human Jesus ... untenable to believe that the gospels are a reliable source of actual evidence of a human Jesus ever known to anyone.

Very well. I get the point. You're just going to keep on and on with this. What I asked was

The passage I have cited seems to state that Mark was writing in c 70 CE about a person, not personally known to him, who lived in and after the reign of Augustus. The Gospel writers included in their accounts of this person, material derived from their understanding of OT prophecies. I agree with all of this, but I'm surprised that you agree with it. If this passage is not typical of Helms' work, or gives a misleading impression of his real views, I will be glad to hear from you on that score.
I also wrote to indicate that some of the Jesus material doesn't look like OT prophecy, and if you wish to comment on that too, I will read your words with interest.

But you don't wish to comment, and that's your absolute right.

 

[Marras]

You don't want to present any actual evidence for an historical Jesus. You don't want to address the subject of this VERY thread.

It has been posted dozens of times but you reject it. And you do that because you demand the kind of evidence for historical Jesus that you don't demand for other historical figures. That's double standards. There's no point for me to climb on a carousel horse hoping that this time it will go somewhere instead of going around in circles.

Your HJ argument is the very worst kind of argument.

Thank you, I will add that to my list of unlocked achievements. "Presented the very worst kind of an argument".

Surpise, Surprise!!! People here have presented the evidence from antiquity that Jesus was described as a myth in hundreds of manuscripts and there is NO record that you have said "COOL".

The thing is that the way that your interpretation of the manuscripts is not the only possibility, and you are in a minority with your opinion. With this I'm siding with the consensus.

The simplest thing that someone could do to convince me that Jesus was purely mythical would be to find archaelogical evidence for a Jesus cult that could be placed to somewhere around the mid first century BC or earlier. That would be a death-knell to historical Jesus as it would show that he was worshipped as a god long before his supposed lifetime. There are probably other things that would convince me, too, but an argument by vehement assertion isn't one of them.

Why are you on this "random" forum if you already know that your random posts are not going to be enough??

You may have noticed, that I haven't written long posts where I would have gone through my reasoning in detail. That's because I know that over 10000 posts have been made on this thread and its predecessor and I'm pretty certain that everything that I could post on the subject itself has been posted over and over again without it making any difference. There's no reason for me to spend hours of my life writing detailed posts that get ignored and lost in a mammoth thread.

Instead, I came to post one specific example that illustrates the double standards or deniers of historical Jesus better than the examples that are usually used. Though, I admit that someone may have posted it earlier but I have missed it as over 10000 posts is quite a lot of stuff. Pythagoras is nice example because his case is so similar to Jesus: son of a god, founding figure of a religious cult, no physical evidence for existence, and no contemporary written sources. Still, people who dismiss Jesus happily accept Pythagoras. Double standards.

 

[IanS]

A reported religion is as much a historical fact as a reported mathematical theorem, even if the religion is false and the theorem true.

This is becoming utterly absurd, and begins to look as if you, and Marras, and other HJ believers are wilfully blind to the transparently obvious facts.

Do you really not understand why Pythagoras is not comparable to Jesus?

As has been explained here many hundreds of times (50 times by me alone, at least 50 times!) - whoever it was that discovered what became knows as Pythagoras Theorem, and whoever it was that presented the ideas of the philosophical movement that became knows as the "Pythagorean School", those mathematical and philosophical ideas did not materialise out of thin air! They had to be stated by some human person or persons, whether their name was Pythagoras or not ... some real human person/persons must have produced those ideas at a fairly early date (pre-AD).

You agree with that?

OK, so what about Jesus then - well someone certainly produced the ideas of Christianity and the sayings ascribed to Jesus. Some human person or persons certainly produced that. The gospel writers and Paul in his letters, certainly preached or wrote about those beliefs. But that does not mean it must all have come first from some earlier believed human called Jesus. That does not follow at all.

For that matter it is not certain that people like Pythagoras existed, or that he was definitely the originator of Pythagoras Theorem or Pythagorean Philosophy. But nobody actually cares if it was actually Pythagoras that produced it. Because nobody today is worshipping Pythagoras worldwide in their billions as the son of almighty God!

All that's claimed for Pythagoras is that historically people said that he was indeed the originator of those ideas. And there is no particular reason for people to question that ... because if it was not Pythagoras but some other human originator, then it does not matter at all .... what matters is that those ideas were current by about 400BC.

The same applies to Christianity - the ideas of NT Christianity and the beliefs in Jesus were current and being written as gospels and letters by about say 100AD to 400AD, i.e. beginning somewhere around that date (or perhaps as early as 30AD to 70AD if you prefer, the actual date does not matter) ... the IDEAS and BELIEFS were real, and they were preached by humans around that date .... but that does not mean the believed but unknown messiah Jesus was actually real!! ...

...he might have been real, but the problem is there is no evidence of him. And unlike Pythagoras, or Caesar, or Socrates, or Alexander the Great etc., in the Jesus case it's essential that Jesus himself really did exist ...

... in the case of Pythagoras all that we care about is the legacy of the ideas in his name ... in the case of Caesar all we care about is the historical details of his empire, it's battles, it’s architecture etc ....

.... but in the case of Jesus what matters is the existence the individual himself! ... that is the entire 100% requirement here ... the argument here is "did Jesus exist?", not did Christian religious belief exist!

 

[Craig B]

...he (Pythagoras) might have been real, but the problem is there is no evidence of him. And unlike Pythagoras, or Caesar, or Socrates, or Alexander the Great etc., in the Jesus case it's essential that Jesus himself really did exist ...

... in the case of Pythagoras all that we care about is the legacy of the ideas in his name ... in the case of Caesar all we care about is the historical details of his empire, it's battles, it’s architecture etc ....

.... but in the case of Jesus what matters is the existence the individual himself! ... that is the entire 100% requirement here ... the argument here is "did Jesus exist?", not did Christian religious belief exist!

You have lost sight of something. Mythicists say in effect: HJ proponents believe Christianity to be valid, so we'll show it's not valid by demonstrating the non-existence of Jesus. But the HJ people in fact DO STATE that Jesus really did exist! We state, of course Christianity exists, and it indeed would not exist if Jesus had never existed. But it exists and it exists because, exactly as you state, there necessarily was some kind of Jesus, or it would never have evolved. It seems to HJ thinkers most improbable that such a religion could have developed so quickly in its observed form if no HJ had ever been.

What you state in your post is quite right. Of course it is. You seem to be arguing with someone who is saying, "Christianity would not be valid if there was no HJ, so I believe in an HJ." That is not the secular HJ position, for even with an HJ, the actual factual beliefs of Christians about that figure are mostly nonsense.

 

[IanS]

Very well. I get the point. You're just going to keep on and on with this. What I asked was -

The passage I have cited seems to state that Mark was writing in c 70 CE about a person, not personally known to him, who lived in and after the reign of Augustus. The Gospel writers included in their accounts of this person, material derived from their understanding of OT prophecies. I agree with all of this, but I'm surprised that you agree with it. If this passage is not typical of Helms' work, or gives a misleading impression of his real views, I will be glad to hear from you on that score.
I also wrote to indicate that some of the Jesus material doesn't look like OT prophecy, and if you wish to comment on that too, I will read your words with interest.

But you don't wish to comment, and that's your absolute right.

I have no objection whatever to “commenting” on any of that. But you are taking us off the current topic .. whereby you were citing things from g-Luke, and I was asking you if you were claiming g-Luke as credible evidence of Jesus.

And by the way although you failed to highlight it in your above quote of your own post, this dispute about your requests, began with you asking me bluntly for dates of g-Mark; here is your actual entire post -

When was Mark written, in your opinion?

And then you repeated it with this quote where you highlighted in bold your request for my opinion on the date of g-Mark-

How much of this writing of Helms do you accept?

When the author of Mark set about writing his Gospel, circa 70 A.D., he did not have to work in an intellectual or literary vacuum. The concept of mythical biography was basic to the thought-processes of his world, both Jewish and Graeco-Roman, with an outline and a vocabulary already universally accepted: a heavenly figure becomes incarnate as a man and the son of a deity, enters the world to perform saving acts, and then returns to heaven. In Greek, the lingua franca of the Mediterranean world, such a figure was called a "savior" (soter), and the statement of his coming was called "gospel" or "good news" (euangelion). For example, a few years before the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, the Provincial Assembly of Asia Minor passed a resolution in honor of Caesar Augustus ...

And I just told you in great detail what I thought about the possible dates of g-Mark. To which you responded by failing to even acknowledge that I had just explained all about that date of g-Mark, even though it was not something I ever asked you about at all!


Before all of that you also asked me what I thought about something you quoted from Helms (something you found on an internet site). And I replied to you with an answer on that.

If you want more discussion from me on what I think about the contents of various passages in Helms book, or in some internet article, then you can quote the passages that you want to dispute and ask me to explain those passages ... but that will again be taking us even further completely off the current question to you of whether you are seriously trying to claim g-Luke as evidence of Jesus?

Are you seriously trying to claim that we should believe the bible as evidence of Jesus??

 

[IanS]

You have lost sight of something. Mythicists say in effect: HJ proponents believe Christianity to be valid, so we'll show it's not valid by demonstrating the non-existence of Jesus. But the HJ people in fact DO STATE that Jesus really did exist! We state, of course Christianity exists, and it indeed would not exist if Jesus had never existed. But it exists and it exists because, exactly as you state, there necessarily was some kind of Jesus, or it would never have evolved.my added line spacing here, for clarity
It seems to HJ thinkers most improbable that such a religion could have developed so quickly in its observed form if no HJ had ever been.
What you state in your post is quite right. Of course it is. You seem to be arguing with someone who is saying, "Christianity would not be valid if there was no HJ, so I believe in an HJ." That is not the secular HJ position, for even with an HJ, the actual factual beliefs of Christians about that figure are mostly nonsense.

No, no, and again No lol! virtually everything you began to say there in the opening few lines is just about as wrong as its possible to be lol.

Mythicists Sceptics (most of whom are not denying that Jesus could have existed) are not typically saying anything about the existence of Christianity or the "validity" or otherwise of Christianity ... I don't think anyone has ever put it those terms of the word "validity" in any HJ thread I've ever seen ...

.... we are not talking about some subjective notion of "validity" or what makes anything "valid". We are just talking about where this claimed mass of evidence for a human Jesus is supposed to be.

To your next point - YOU may think "Christianity would not exist if Jesus had never existed" ... you may think that .... but it's certainly not true. There are any number of ways that a belief in Jesus could arise without him ever being a real figure. For a start, almost every one of the many thousands of religions ever known, inc. dozens of different religions at the time of Jesus, all grew out of beliefs about central figures who certainly never existed!

Added to which - that Helms book very clearly shows, and it is well known fact & not seriously disputed by anyone, that from the time before the NT bible was written preachers like Paul were scouring the OT for anything they could interpret as the "hidden" meaning of divine prophecy about the coming of Yahweh's messiah (Paul actually says "hidden so long" in scripture) ... AND, by the time the gospels were being written and preached, those gospel writers were certainly creating their Jesus stories from what they believed they had found in various books of the OT. And those are "FACTS"!

So it's complete nonsense for you to say you cannot understand how a belief in a messianic “Yehoshua” = “Iesous” (which is the name/word they actually wrote, not the modern English name “Jesus”) could have ever arisen unless Jesus was real ... as if every religious believed figure must have been real, or else people would not have believed in them or created mythical religions around them.

Your next point saying " exactly as you state, there necessarily was some kind of Jesus, or it would never have evolved. " - you are trying to use words that I wrote in a recent reply in an entirely different context which I never implied at all .... when I wrote something like "a Jesus of some sort", you know very well I was referring to a believed Jesus, i.e. a Jesus of religious faithful belief, and not a human Jesus of any kind. If you are going to say that I had said such things, then please either quote my post in full so that anyone reading this can know what I really said, and not what you would like them to think I had said, or have the decency to explain that you know very well I did not mean a human Jesus known to any of those biblical believers.

You next remark " It seems to HJ thinkers most improbable that such a religion could have developed so quickly in its observed form if no HJ had ever been. " ... You may think it is "most improbable", but you are certainly wrong to think that. Because as I just pointed out - among thousands of religions, many existing during the time of Jesus, ALL of them centred around belief in figures that were 100% fictional ... even though, just like Jesus, every single one of those fictional figures was at the time thought absolutely certain to be real!

But beyond that - the fact that you think it "most improbable" is actually just a statement of belief by incredulity. You are openly admitting that you are simply incapable of understanding how a religious belief could arise around a religious figure that was fictional, even though from at least 1000 years before Christianity began, religious Jews in that region had been certain of the coming of Yahweh's saving messiah.

And before you say that throughout all that time, from the time of Abraham and Moses, the people thought the messiah would be a normal human kingly or military leader - by the time of the DSS in that same small region of Judea, and according to Hodge (The Dead Sea Scrolls, Piatkus Press, 2001) probably from as early as 200BC, the DSS apparently show that messianic preaching had changed to show a diverse range of beliefs about what the messiah would be, inc preaching the belief that the messiah would be an apocalyptic messenger of Yahweh sent to gather the faithful ready for God's day of imminent final judgement ... that was no longer the kingly or military messiah of old who lead the nation to conquer it's enemies in battle ... it was a preaching priestly messiah very much like Paul's version of Jesus (according to the book by Hodge at least).

And that's apart from the fact that as Helms has shown, the gospel writers were certainly creating their Jesus stories from the old testament and/or other ancient texts known as "scripture". And pre-NT Jews were certainly scouring the OT "scripture" in attempts to discover the true meaning of the messiah prophecies of Yahweh.

And if you ask Max about what Carrier has written in his most recent book, I’m pretty sure Max will tell you that Carrier explains (with full references), how by the beginning of the 1st century AD there were numerous competing religions brought into that region of Judea by Greeks, Persians, and Romans, and how various elements of those religions, inc. ideas of “dying and rising” gods, certainly also made their way into the “new” religion of Christianity with the NT biblical stories. Which is again (as well as the OT/scriptures) quite clear evidence of where the influences and beliefs of Christianity came from.

I have not read whatever else you say next after that lot, because frankly this is becoming an absurd farce of the same repeated bogus HJ claims hundreds of times over & over. Just get to the point please and either present genuine evidence of a human Jesus ever known to anyone, or else admit there is actually no evidence of him.

 

[maximara]

Thank you Craig.

Help me, here, will you? I had the impression, without citing a source, that neither Tacitus nor Josephus had mentioned a Jesus, by name, in a work which had not been acknowledged to have been "interpolated".

You are correct. In fact we have actual evidence that BOTH sources have been tampered with.

Am I in error on that point? Is not the designation, in Tacitus, at least, if memory serves me, Annals 15:44 to chrestiani, not to "the Christ", and in Josephus Antiquities, to an ambiguous Jesus of unidentified parentage, in a passage claimed to represent a much later insertion, into the text, on the basis of (I don't know which fraudulent characteristics)?

No you are NOT in error. The reasons the Testimonium Flavianum in Josephus is suspect are:


* The first thing one notices about this paragraph is that it breaks the flow of the chapter. Book 18 (“Containing the interval of 32 years from the banishment of Archelus to the departure from Babylon”) starts with the Roman taxation under Cyrenius in 6 CE and discusses various Jewish sects at the time, including the Essenes and a sect of Judas the Galilean, to which he devotes three times more space than to Jesus; Herod’s building of various cities, the succession of priests and procurators, and so on. Chapter 3 starts with sedition against Pilate, who planned to slaughter all the Jews but changed his mind. Pilate then used sacred money to supply water to Jerusalem. The Jews protested; Pilate sent spies into Jewish ranks with concealed weapons, and there was a great massacre. Then in the middle of all these troubles comes the curiously quiet paragraph about Jesus, followed immediately by: “And about the same time another terrible misfortune confounded the Jews ...” Josephus would not have thought the Christian story to be “another terrible misfortune.” It is only a Christian (someone like Eusebius) who might have considered Jesus to be a Jewish tragedy. Paragraph three can be lifted out of the text with no damage to the chapter; in fact, it flows better without it.

* Then there is the issue of how many people do not mention it even when it would have been in their best interests to do so: Justin Martyr (c100 - c165), Theophilus (d. 180), Irenaeus (c120 - c203), Clement of Alexandria (c150-c215), Origen (c185-c254), Hippolytus (c170 - c235), Minucius Felix (d. c250), Anatolius (230-280), Chrysostom (c347-407), Methodius (9th century), and Photius (c820-891). There are many places in Origen's Against Celsus where he should have mentioned such a passage but didn't.


* Structurally there is much wrong with the passage. Josephus doesn't explain things as he does in passages of other would be messiahs. Things such as what deeds and to what Jesus won over people are missing.

* The term "Christ" only appears in the Testimonium Flavianum and in a later passage regarding James “brother of Jesus”. But the purpose of the work was to promote Vespasian as the Jewish Messiah (ie 'Christ') so why would Josephus, a messianic Jew, use the term only here. More over the Greek word here used is the same as in the Old Testament but to Josephus' Roman audience it would read as the ointment rather than anointed one resulting in many a Roman scratching their head in befuddlement.

* Josephus was in Rome from 64 to 66 CE to petition emperor Nero for the release of some Jewish priest that Gessius Florus sent there in chains.
Josephus makes no mention of the further misfortune of Jesus' followers that Tacitus and Suetonius record. If the Testimonium Flavianum was genuine in any way Josephus certainly have mentioned the further misfortune of Jesus followers under Nero since he was right there in Rome for two years when it was supposedly going on. So either the Testimonium Flavianum is a fake or the Tacitus and Suetonius accounts are repeating an urban myth--both sets of accounts cannot be true.

 

[maximara]

But we know that Jesus was being worshipped as a divinity a few decades after his reputed existence, and that a religion developed from this.

Mister Rogers like voice: "Can you say John Frum? I knew you could."

This fact is reported in trustworthy sources from an early date.

WHAT "trustworthy sources"? Paul who is babbling about the Jesus in his own head? The Gospels which the best we have were written sometime between 70 to 130 CE by (bad pun time) heaven knows who?

If you say, that doesn't necessarily require a historical Jesus, then neither do the discoveries of Aristarchus or Archimedes require a historical Pythagoras. Aristarchus was born c 310 BC; Archimedes c 212 BC. Pythagoras is dated to c 570-405 BC. Centuries earlier.

Strawman. We thanks to system theory we know that you can have independent development of ideas as a result of culture factors. Ideas can also be lost only to be independently rediscovered centuries later (a heliocentric solar system, the idea that the stars are very far away suns, and many others)

Yet Jesus was being worshipped after a shorter delay.

"Unlike the cult of Jesus, the origins of which are not reliably attested, we can see the whole course of events laid out before our eyes (and even here, as we shall see, some details are now lost). It is fascinating to guess that the cult of Christianity almost certainly began in very much the same way, and spread initially at the same high speed. [...] John Frum, if he existed at all, did so within living memory. Yet, even for so recent a possibility, it is not certain whether he lived at all." - Dawkins Richard (2006) The God Delusion pgs 202-203

We are told by Pliny in his letter to Trajan written 111-113 AD that Christ was even then being worshipped as a god.

Considering Christ was a title this proves nothing. Even Christian writers accept two people who used the title before this time: Dositheos the Samaritan (before or after Simon of Peraea d 4 BCE) and Simon Magus.

Never mind all the other would be Christs Josephus lists:

Simon of Peraea (d 4 BCE)
Judas, son of Hezekiah (4 BCE)
Matthias, son of Margalothus (during time of Herod the Great) - thought by some to be the "Theudas" referenced in Acts 5.
Athronges (c 3 CE)
Judas of Galilee (6 CE)
The Samaritan prophet (36 CE) killed by Pontius Pilate.
Theudas the magician (between 44 and 46 CE)
Egyptian Jew Messiah (between 52 and 58 CE). Supposedly led an army of 30,000 people in an attempt to take Jerusalem by force which the Romans drove back killing 400 and capturing 200.
An anonymous prophet (59 CE)
Menahem, the son of Judas the Galilean (66 CE)
Jesus ben Ananias [Ananus] (66-70 CE) [73] Suggested by Carrier as being the raw template for the Passover event for Jesus in "Mark"
Menahem ben Judah (sometime between 66-73 CE)
John of Giscala (d c70 CE)
Simon bar Giora (69-70 CE)
Jonathan, the weaver (73 CE)

Pliny the Younger clearly has no clue regarding these people or what to do with them. Very strange for a movement that according to Tacitus was regarded as an "abominable superstition" in Nero's time and this is being written within a decade as Pliny's letter. Of course Tacitus account doesn't jive with that of Suetonius who has Nero removing Christians as part of a general housecleaning of Rome.


I certainly doesn't help the Christian case that major works that could have helped support the existence of Jesus either were poorly copied or not copied at all:

Three of the five books that made up Philo's Embassy to Gaius (c40 CE): the volume that covered Pontius Pilate's rule of Judea in detail at best survives as mangled fragments.

Clovius Rufus' detailed history of Nero

Pliny the Elder's history of Rome from 31 to then present day (sometime before his death in 79) with a volume for each year

Annals of Tacitus: entire section covering 29-31 CE

Cassius Dio's Roman History - sections covering 6 to 2 BC and 30 CE

Why were these works not copied and saved for later generations?

A reported religion is as much a historical fact as a reported mathematical theorem, even if the religion is false and the theorem true.

Both John Frum and Ned Ludd show the problems with that line of logic.

 

[dejudge]

It has been posted dozens of times but you reject it. And you do that because you demand the kind of evidence for historical Jesus that you don't demand for other historical figures. That's double standards. There's no point for me to climb on a carousel horse hoping that this time it will go somewhere instead of going around in circles.

Your statement is an established fallacy. You have not presented any historical data for your assumed Jesus.

We already know that there is none so historical evidence could not have been posted dozens of times.

 

[dejudge]

You have lost sight of something. Mythicists say in effect: HJ proponents believe Christianity to be valid, so we'll show it's not valid by demonstrating the non-existence of Jesus. But the HJ people in fact DO STATE that Jesus really did exist! We state, of course Christianity exists, and it indeed would not exist if Jesus had never existed. But it exists and it exists because, exactly as you state, there necessarily was some kind of Jesus, or it would never have evolved. It seems to HJ thinkers most improbable that such a religion could have developed so quickly in its observed form if no HJ had ever been.

It does not logically follow that Jesus did exist because of a religion.

The Jewish religion exists but their God is a myth.

Christians worship the Son but the Son is God and God is a Ghost.

"The Father is God"
"The Son is God"
"The Holy Spirit is God"

"God is the Father"
"God is the Son"
"God is the Holy Spirit".

 

[dejudge]

No, no, and again No lol! virtually everything you began to say there in the opening few lines is just about as wrong as its possible to be lol.

Mythicists Sceptics (most of whom are not denying that Jesus could have existed) are not typically saying anything about the existence of Christianity or the "validity" or otherwise of Christianity ... I don't think anyone has ever put it those terms of the word "validity" in any HJ thread I've ever seen ...

Anyone can ARGUE that Jesus of Nazareth NEVER existed once there is NO historical data for Jesus of Nazareth.

The belief that Jesus of Nazareth might have existed has ZERO negative effect on the argument that Jesus of Nazareth NEVER did exist and is a fiction/myth character.

An argument is sustained by supporting data.

The HJ argument is not supported by historical data for Jesus of Nazareth.

The argument that Jesus of Nazareth NEVER did exist is supported by the EXISTING data.

All stories of Jesus are from the 2nd century or later and all are fiction from conception to ascension.

My argument that Jesus of Nazareth NEVER existed cannot be overturned because NO evidence exists to do so.

 

[Craig B]

IChristians worship the Son but the Son is God and God is a Ghost.

They don't worship the Father? The Holy Ghost? You can't read?

"The Father is God"
"The Son is God"
"The Holy Spirit is God"
"God is the Father"
"God is the Son"
"God is the Holy Spirit"
"The Father is not the Son"
"The Father is not the Holy Spirit"
"The Son is not the Father"
"The Son is not the Holy Spirit"
"The Holy Spirit is not the Father"
"The Holy Spirit is not the Son"

In trinitarianism, unlike school maths, things that are equal to other things are not equal to each other. It's a "mystery" dejudge. I can see it's beyond your power even to enunciate it. So, the Son is God. Right. The Holy Ghost is God. Right. Therefore the Son is the Ghost. Not right. It's all very confusing, I know.

 

[Craig B]

"Can you say John Frum? ... John Frum ...John Frum and Ned Ludd ...

What about "Richard Carrier says Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh"? You missed that argument.

 

[dejudge]

They don't worship the Father? The Holy Ghost?

Christians do worship the Son and claim the Son was God and that the Son was born of a Ghost.

We have manuscripts dated to the 2nd century or later.

See gLuke, gJohn and the Pauline Corpus.

Papyri 4, Papyri 75 and Papyri 46 PREDATE your LATE MEDIEVAL [Shield of the Trinity] nonsense dated to the 12th or 13th century.


Why don't you read your sources before you post.

The precise origin of this diagram is unknown, but it was evidently influenced by 12th-century experiments in symbolizing the Trinity in abstract visual form..

You have presented 12th or 13th century nonsense which is void of logic, maths and history.

You accept the 12th or 13th century contradictory nonsense as credible!!!

God is a Holy Ghost!!!

God is the Son!!!

What stupid 12th or 13th century Ghost stories!!!

Jesus of Nazareth is just a Ghost story from the 2nd century or later.

In trinitarianism, unlike school maths, things that are equal to other things are not equal to each other. It's a "mystery" dejudge. I can see it's beyond your power even to enunciate it. So, the Son is God. Right. The Holy Ghost is God. Right. Therefore the Son is the Ghost. Not right. It's all very confusing, I know.

Now, you admit that your post is confusing.

We knew all along that you didn't know what you were talking about.

What mystery??

What mathematical, logical and theological absurdities you post from the 12th or 13th century!!!

Jesus of Nazareth NEVER had any real existence.

Jesus of Nazareth can NEVER be explained historically or biologically based on his mythological anatomy.

"God is the Father"
"God is the Son"
"God is the Holy Spirit"

1. [Augustine of Hippo "On the Holy Trinity---therefore they are not three Gods, but one God.

2. Thaumaturgus "On the Trinity"---All (the persons) are one nature, one essence, one will, and are called the Holy Trinity.

3. Gregory of Nyssa "On the Holy Trinity"-----the identity of operation in Father, Son, and Holy Spirit shows plainly the undistinguishable character of their substance.

God is the Father, Son and Holy Ghost.

Jesus of Nazareth, the Son was God and God is a Ghost.

Jesus of NAZARETH is ONE and the same substance as God and the Ghost.

The TRINITY is a stupid Ghost/God/Jesus doctrine --NOT history.