Arg, the quote thing isn't working... again.
IanS, thanks again for the thoughtful reply.
Unfortunately, you got hung up on the hypothetical, and didn't address the actual point I was questioning. The hypothetical was only an attempt to illustrate why dismissing scripture in the search for HJ is flawed.
The point is that in the search (or anti-search) for a HJ, scripture is dismissed because it talks about a Mythical Jesus. I'm suggesting that dismissing scripture for this reason seems flawed..
Well the reason I did not proceed further than that first paragraph was, as I explained in the previous reply, that the first paragraph was presented as the first building block of an argument, but where that first step itself was invalid anyway. However leaving that issue aside ...
.... the biblical writing is not dismissed simply because it talks about a mythical Jesus. It's dismissed for numerous quite unarguable reasons,
amongst which is the fact that almost every significant mention of Jesus describes a miraculous, or supernatural, or otherwise unbelievable event. That constant repetition of untrue claims alone, makes that biblical writing very unreliable indeed (to put it mildly) and not a credible of source of events which it's anonymous authors certainly had not known themselves anyway.
There is already a legal precedent for deciding things like this in all modern educated western democracies. That is - it has already long since been decided in law how such claims of evidence should be treated. And in law you would never allow a jury to consider evidence from a witness who was already known to be lying in almost every significant claim he/she made, but where it was argued that the jury might like to hear this witness anyway to see if such a proven untrustworthy witness might say something which could not immediately be proven untrue. No judge would ever allow a witness like that to be put before any jury.
And this is actually a case where that proven massively unreliable constantly lying witness is not even a known person and is not even available to appear before any jury to make any such claims anyway. It's case where the lawyer would be appealing to the judge asking to read a witness statement from an unknown person who was not actually himself/herself the witness, but where this unknown unavailable witness was apparently claiming that some other unknown unnamed unavailable person had once been the witness to all of this ... but where no such witness could never be named or produced to say anything at all.
If anyone thinks a source like that is credible as reliable evidence then there is something very seriously wrong with their thinking.
HJ could have been a fakir, a charlatan, a 2000+ year old man (See:
The Man from Earth), an alien, or the writers of scripture could have exaggerated, or could have made it up from whole cloth.
I'm sorry but it is not credible to argue that Jesus might have been a fakir, a charlatan or a space invader.
This would have to be a "fakir" "charlatan" who walks on the sea directly in front of people, talks to them whilst he is doing it, and gets into a small boat with them to talk about it. That is not something that a fakir, or faith healer, or magician or any such human could possibly have done, even as a "trick", in the 1st century.
And it is no use anyone claiming that perhaps people were simply mistaken about what they kept seeing from Jesus, or that it was all just an exaggeration of real events. You cannot mistake or exaggerate a story in which Jesus walks on the sea, and then gets into a small boat with 12 disciples, has a conversation with them about how to walk on water, then persuades one of them to get out and try it for himself, and credibly suggest that perhaps something happened that just looked like all of that, but that people were mistaken about what they saw or that they exaggerated it when they told of what they had actually seen of a real event.
If you say that perhaps something quite unlike such overt walking on water really happened , but that with successive telling of the story, after many years, it became untruthfully said that he walked on the seas, then all you are doing is just inventing another entirely different claim without any evidence for your different invented claim at all. Anyone could offer a worthless un-evidenced excuse like that for absolutely every dishonest claim ever made about anything. If you take that route, then that is a way of claiming that perhaps Elvis is still alive, and that president Kennedy was never really shot by anyone at all, because the stories were just exaggerated and people were just mistaken about what they thought they saw, so those things never happened and without evidence we then say that Kennedy and Elvis are still alive and living on the Moon with Shergar. That's just not a credible excuse-argument I'm afraid.
However, when you say the stories might have just been "made up from whole cloth", we should ask what is the evidence for that. And the answer is that genuine academic authors such as Randel Helms (Randel Helms, Gospel Fictions, Prometheus Books, 1990) have shown how all four gospel writers certainly were "making it up out of whole cloth" by what is called "fulfilment citation" to create Jesus stories from various passages in the OT.
So that certainly is known. They most definitely were using the OT as a source for Jesus stories in the gospels.
Which is why historians looking for an HJ are not looking for a miracle working demigod, they are looking for a standard issue human. Accounts of miracles are not used as evidence (or shouldn't be), but there are other aspects that speak to the possibility of a standard issue human as the seed of the myth...
Well again there are multiple things wrong with that statement. First please do be very clear, that we are not talking here about what
"historians" say about Jesus and the bible. Academic secular historians in normal university history departments, do not normally study Jesus and the bible. The people who are being constantly misrepresented here as "historians", are most definitely biblical scholars (and quite a large proportion of the people who are being inadvertently lumped in with those HJ academic writers, are actually theologians as well as Christian religious writers in general).
But when you say that these "historians" are not looking for a miracle working demigod when they read the bible, you ought to ask yourself -"Why Not??" Why are they not looking for a supernatural miracle worker? Because up until about 1800 (which is actually very recent in this subject), they certainly all were doing exactly that!
The only reason they stopped claiming that Jesus was definitely the miraculous son of god, is that by about 1800 science was beginning to prove to educated people that the constant miracles could not have ever been true. Until that time, all these "historians", had claimed that the miracles were indeed all literally true. And by about that same date (c.1800), early sceptical writers had compared the four gospels side-by-side and found that they were all copying from one-another, and that they were not in fact the four independent genuine accounts that had always hitherto been claimed. Also around that time it was being revealed that contrary to nearly 2000 years of insistent church teaching, that in fact not only were those gospels not independent sources, but that none of them were written by any eye-witness disciples at all ... and further it was shown that all of those gospels were actually written instead by entirely unknown anonymous people who in their own words admitted that they had never known any such person as Jesus, and where even worse (if that is imaginable), they were doing no more than reporting beliefs apparently handed down to them as legend from other earlier unknown people! ("apparently" handed down, except that, as we now know, those gospel writers were certainly using the OT as a source of their Jesus stories).
That really is not credible as a source of trustworthy factual information about Jesus. In fact it is manifestly obvious as the complete opposite of a trustworthy source for what it's own authors admitted they had never known at all.
But, saying someone worked with the fleshy brother of Jesus specifically makes no claim about a Mythical James or Mythical Jesus. Why would this be dismissed because MJ couldn't exist? It seems to be throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
But nobody did ever say they had worked with "the fleshy brother of Jesus". Who ever claimed that? Paul did not ever claim, even dishonestly or falsely claim, any such thing!
You are now repeating the same standard pro-HJ fallacy of saying that Paul had claimed to know the actual family brother of Jesus. But that is certainly not what is said in that one never-again repeated minimal remark in one of Paul’s' letters. And we must have been over that here at least 200 times before.
Again, my claim is that dismissing all scripture because MJ could not exist is flawed. There are other, better reasons to dismiss scripture, not the least of which is they were not written when Jesus or James would have been alive.
I don't mean to sound argumentative, I'm trying to address the dismissal of a source of evidence for a poor reason. I don't know nor really care if there is a historical seed for MJ. It seems pointless. But I do care about good or rational argument.
If there is a better reason to dismiss the biblical writing than the fact that it is so filled with what eventually, courtesy of science and after nearly 2000 years, has now been proved to be untrue fiction from completely unreliable anonymous religious fanatics who were using the OT to provide messianic "fulfilment citation", then I don't know what is a "good reason" ever to dismiss any sort of barking mad frivolous proposals that anyone could make about anything. You'd be on safer ground claiming that the Moon really is made of green cheese, but that we were all guilty of simply not checking it in the right way, or not defining properly what green cheese is, and that all we had to do is to change all the evidence, rub out 90% of it, and hey presto we are left with some remnants that are so vague and so inconsequential that anything at all might be true of the artificially generated remains of the story.
But here is the caveat (or whatever the correct term is for the following) - does all the above mean that I am saying Jesus could not have existed? No it does not mean I am saying that, and I have never said that here.
Does it mean I am saying he probably did not exist, i.e. less than 50% likelihood? No, it does even mean that - I have never suggested any such probability numbers, not even tentatively.
So what do I think about the possibility of a real Jesus? What I think is that it needs something vastly better than the utterly hopeless biblical writing if any reasonably sensible positive probability is to be suggested for his existence. At present, on the known sources claimed as the evidence, the best that can be said is that he might have existed in some sense or other, but there is no good genuine evidence of him as a human person ever known to anyone, and on that basis I could not put any probability figure on possible existence, either close to 0%, or close to 100%, or any other number in-between.
So whilst he might have existed, it will require something vastly better than the biblical writing as evidence. And unfortunately at present it seems there is nothing except for the biblical writing.
) arguments for: