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Was there a historical Jesus at all?

bluskool said:
Then why did Josephus and Tacidus think he was real?
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If they'd been asked I doubt either one would claim to be able to refute the notion that Jesus was an invention. They assumed he did based on what they knew of the Christian narrative.

Besides, if Paul just hallucinated the idea of Jesus, why did he write letters to churches he started telling them to not listen to other missionaries with alternative messages? Who were these other missionaries? Did they also have hallucinations of Jesus?
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Good point.

I find the Jesus never existed hypotheses difficult to swallow. I am not saying that the stories in Mark aren't legendary fiction or just made up comparisons to other figures like Julius Caesar, but I still think there was a real Jesus even if we can never really know much of anything about him.
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Many, even most, I think, Scholars agree that there was a real person known as Jeshua ben Joseph who seems to have been an itinerant preacher in Galilee in the early first century C.E. Based on what little we have that scholars think might well be his own sayings (albeit likely paraphrased) he was probably a member of the Jewish apocalyptic movement. And given that the region was crawling with holy men, healers, prophets and even a one true messiah or two at the time that Jeshua ben Joseph is said to have been active, it seems likely the Jesus of legend may be based on stories about more that one person. At any rate, it seems likely that the historical Jesus would have been quite upset to learn that a blasphemous faith bearing his name would proclaim him god and become the religion of the Roman Empire.
 
bluskool said:
It doesn't matter if it tells anything about Jesus. It only matters if it is a reliable testimony to his existence which is the question at hand. You say it is not reliable and I am asking why. It is obvious that some of the one passage was made up, but I don't think there is any reason to think the whole passage was made up. I just can't imagine a Xtian scribe saying "hmmm, Josephus never mentions Jesus, so I think I'll go ahead and add a passage here so that future historians will have a non-xtian source for Jesus's existence." It seems more plausible to me that a scribe was copying
Josephus, got to the passage on Jesus and decided to alter it to reflect a Xtian message.
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Yes, it is a testimony we are fairly certain has been altered.
It is really out of place, suggesting it was entirely made up, but even then.
We can't know it was there. We don't know it was not there. We can't know either way, hence, we can't rely on it, either way.



I don't think it bodes well for the apologist that Xtian scribes were altering Josephus. An apologist might mention it when rattling off a list non-Xtian sources, but like you said, this source tells us nothing accept that Jesus existed and was killed. The apologist is going to be hard pressed to turn that into support for his faith.
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Go to the thread (mis)named: "evidences for why we know that the new testament writers told the truth", over in the History sub section.

Anyway; yes, the whole quote is unreliable one way or the other, you can't bring it to the table of evidence one way or the other, as you can't trust what it says.
So, the only way one can use it is being lying about its level or reliability, lying is a common tactic of some apologetists...


Making a mistake seems more plausible considering the fact that, at the time, procurators were in control of Judea and the fact that the rest of the passage doesn't speak favorably of Xtians.
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Maybe, maybe not, I am not an expert on the subject, to be honest.


How can that be certain? It could be the case that Tacitus just knew that the Xtians worshiped some guy that Pilot executed. There is no a priori reason for saying that Tacitus must have gotten that information from Xtians.
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What?
Yes there is a very good reason... Nobody but the Christians remembered (or cared) about Jesus at the time.
There might have been reference to him buried deep into the reports Pilatus was sending Rome regularly (and I am not convinced the execution of one trouble maker would stand out enough to be considered worthy of mention) but there is no reason for Tacitus to go on and look for himself unless he was familiar with the story of Jesus.
He, pretty much, HAD to have learned about it from Christians and there is no reason to think he checked any deeper than that. Really, if Tacitus had cared about the subject enough to go out of his way to conduct independent research about it, one would have expected more than a throwaway line out of the 16 books of Tacitus' annals, especially considering the 5th book focussed on the Jewish rebellion...
 
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HansMustermann said:
Yes, I'm very familiar with the monomyth actually. But what is claimed on that site goes a bit beyond that. There are a ton of similar names, of events that happen in the same order, use of verbs and phrasings that suggest something very different from the standard image of the passion, etc.

Basically, let's put it like this. Let's say I write a novel about a guy called Fridi Sackins who got a neclace from his uncle Cilco Sackins and has to take it to Mount Murder to destroy it. And incidentally his friends Jollyadoc and Samsmart accompany him. And they fight their way through a mine, and whatnot on their way.

I'm guessing at some point you'd say I plagiarized LOTR, rather than merely "it's just the same monomyth structure."

That, in essence, is the take of that book. The similarities are way past the point of being merely the same monomyth.

Mind you, I'm not necessarily saying they're right. It's just an interesting hypothesis, as far as I'm concerned. And it's not like we have a shortage of hypotheses on the topic that proved to be dubious or outright loony, so, who knows, we might just have another Dan Brown on our hands. But, just saying, it's a bit more complex than that.
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Had a really quick perusal of the crucifixion section. First thing that jumps out: Equating the imperial succession after the murder of Caesar with Christ's resurrection is a really, really big stretch. The "passion play" equivocation is a force fit in general. I don't think the LOTR analogy holds.

The whole thing reads like The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail - i.e., a scattergun (fire buckshot at the barn, draw a circle around the scatter, conclude that you hit what you were aiming at) approach to quasi-academic heuristic "research" that is supposed to add up to...something.
 
NavyPack said:
I have actually switched sides on this issue, after reading this:
http://rationalrevolution.net/articles/jesus_myth_history.htm

I would appreciate others here views on the reasoning of the author.
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Geoff's book is the only Jesus Myther text which I give house room - as in his book sits on my shelf. I offered to formally debate him many times over on the RD forum, but he never rose to the bait - while it is an extraordinarily good book for a non-biblical studies writer, in fact I really think he should enter the field, there are several massive problems I percieve in his argument. But head and shoulders above almost anything else from that perspective, and worth buying and reading - well thought through, coherent, and valuably cites the texts he is referring to in the text. RR may be many things but he is not a fool or a woo, and I respect him greatly as a bloke and a an author. And I still fundamentally disagree with him for reasons i will happily discuss at length :)

cj x
 
Given all the errors in the NT (there was no census at the time, no record of an infanticide in Bethlehem, no custom for releasing a condemned prisoner on Passover just for starters) and the fact that none of the major writers alive in his time like Philo or Seneca mention him, I'm inclined to believe he's myth. And if there was a real person behind him he's been covered in so much myth that he's lost to history anyway.
 
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Darth Rotor said:
No.

A comparison of credibility between you and Ehrman on this particular topic. As I doubt you have income riding on this, no big deal. :cool:

DR
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If my personal credibility had anything to do with it, I'm sure I'd feel some way or another about it ;) But the question is more like whether someone else's theory has some merit or not. Seeing as you still don't seem to have actually read it... what, your opinion of a theory is based on who posted the link? Doesn't seem particularly logical or relevant to the discussion, but maybe that's just me.
 
Personally I tend to think that someone or several individuals existed to form the basis for the original followers of proto-Christianity, but much of what we have now has gone through the standard substantial changes any religious text is bound to go through in such days.

That being said, I tend not to be impressed with The God Who Wasn't There, and similar works because they tend to rely too heavily on Campbell. The fact that the life of Jesus follows a hero narrative not unlike that of previous gods isn't a proof in itself. The best way to illustrate this is to look at the tellings of the lives of several great historical figures, and find that they all tend to follow the hero narrative. So in many respects I see the hero narrative as less an evidence of myth, but instead more of a study in how we as humans tell our stories.
 
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D'rok said:
Had a really quick perusal of the crucifixion section. First thing that jumps out: Equating the imperial succession after the murder of Caesar with Christ's resurrection is a really, really big stretch. The "passion play" equivocation is a force fit in general. I don't think the LOTR analogy holds.

The whole thing reads like The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail - i.e., a scattergun (fire buckshot at the barn, draw a circle around the scatter, conclude that you hit what you were aiming at) approach to quasi-academic heuristic "research" that is supposed to add up to...something.
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In a sense, I can see a metaphoric link, given that Emperors ever after were called Caesar. Essentially we have a new Caesar presumably with a different face, vs Jesus appearing with a different face to his followers.

But yeah, I had the impression too that they're a bit over-zealous in finding connections.
 
Foster Zygote said:
Many, even most, I think, Scholars agree that there was a real person known as Jeshua ben Joseph who seems to have been an itinerant preacher in Galilee in the early first century C.E. Based on what little we have that scholars think might well be his own sayings (albeit likely paraphrased) he was probably a member of the Jewish apocalyptic movement. And given that the region was crawling with holy men, healers, prophets and even a one true messiah or two at the time that Jeshua ben Joseph is said to have been active, it seems likely the Jesus of legend may be based on stories about more that one person. At any rate, it seems likely that the historical Jesus would have been quite upset to learn that a blasphemous faith bearing his name would proclaim him god and become the religion of the Roman Empire.
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But those scholars essentially still have _no_ other evidence there than the Bible itself, i.e., a personal opinion of how much to believe from it and how much not to believe. And maybe an extensive knowledge of the personal opinions of other people, such as Irenaeus and Tertulian, but who also had no other knowledge about those events.

It's no different from, well, if I were to opine that Clark Kent must have existed (even if maybe he wasn't all that super after all) because otherwise the author wouldn't go to such great lengths to explain his origin and weaknesses. And quote as support the opinions of a few more fanboys from the past who happened to agree with me.

And maybe go into a bit more of an analysis of names at the time, and conclude that Clark Kent wouldn't be too unusal a name either. And, look, some of the towns mentioned there exist too.

But in the end it's still the same circular logic of using story X to find credibility in a proof of the same story X that the fundies are doing. Until someone can find some proof of Jesus that doesn't actually go through a bunch of fanfic by people who never actually knew him, believing that he existed or not, and picking which details you want to believe (like that he actually was a rabbi or came from Nazareth), still amounts to basically just personal opinion. Scholar or no scholar.
 
cj23:

I didn't have any idea whom that author was, someone in this forum linked to it one day. I read the entire thing, and find the bulk of his arguments plausible, many probable.
 
NavyPack said:
cj23:

I didn't have any idea whom that author was, someone in this forum linked to it one day. I read the entire thing, and find the bulk of his arguments plausible, many probable.
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Ah you read the website version? Might have been me, I sometimes suggest it to people. Yep he's a good bloke, well worth reading his book available from lulu. I'll write a review one day, and explain why I think he is sort of right, but ultimately wrong on the key issue of "was there a historical Jesus?"

In short his hypothesis is that the Christ Myth arose from Judaism, and can be seen presaged in Tanakh/OT/Apocryphal writings and is constructed from that. That he is correct that all the gospel writers frame Jesus in exactly those terms there is no doubt: indeed Christians have explicitly and very openly done so for centuries right back to the first generation who used these references and interpreting Jesus thus as a framework for the apologetic mission ot their fellow Jews - they cite Scripture to prove Jesus is the Messiah, and all the material we have in the gospels is written through that lens. Where Goeff and I strongly agree is on this, and the failure of most "pagan god" syncretism effects. Where we part company is when we get to the question of the historical basis for the events so mythologised-- I will cheerfully summarise my problems with his ideas if anyone interested.

Good book though.

cj x
 
HansMustermann said:
But if enough elements are confused, embelished, or outright invented starting from another myth, is it still a "historical Jesus" or is it on par with "historical Dorothy from The Wizard Of Oz", as Rasmus so aptly puts it?.
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Rasmus?

I thought I was the one who did "historical Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz"?

I even provide the basis: we know there was a girl named Dorothy who lived in Kansas who had an Aunt "M" (Maude Gauge Baum). She was clearly the inspiration for the girl Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz books. Granted, none of the stuff in the books actually happened to her, but as you note, this isn't all that much different from what some people claim about Jesus and the bibles.
 
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