Was there a historical Jesus at all?

[SpuriusMaximus]

Well, which interpretation of the OT? Not everyone was an OT literalist, and in fact the sect that won was already very liberal with interpreting the OT. To this day there are at least 3 competing versions of afterlife alone in Judaism, and back then there still a fourth: that there is none. Supported by none other than the major and powerful sect that were the Sadducees.

They disagreed on pretty much just about anything in there. E.g., while the Sadducees were taking "an eye for an eye" as literally sentencing the perp to get an eye poked out, the Pharisees were taking it as making him pay an adequate compensation to the victim for the loss of an eye. E.g., while the Sadducees were taking it literally that someone impure (e.g., has just handled the dead) be excluded from community life for X days, the Pharisees were busy devising cleansing rituals so that person can still be a part of their community. Etc.

And there were a lot of other ideas being imported, some successfully, some not, from Zoroastrianism and a few other cults and philosophy schools, again mostly via the Pharisees.

I'm saying this to put things into context: the old religion was in a state of flux, and doctrines were interpreted differently by each different rabbi. (Who incidentally was a Pharisee.)

The idea of a Messiah was one such. The dominant Pharisee version of a Messiah and of the end times, was, basically, that the Messiah will not just free Israel, but will also resurrect all the dead or mark the beginning of the age where the dead will be resurrected and live for ever. Or at least those deserving eternal life.

A Messiah capable of even resurrecting himself was very much in line with that. ETA: It would in fact be the ultimate proof that he _is_ that messiah.

And that a splinter group or a hallucinating guy would take it from there in an even more different direction, isn't actually all that unbelievable.

 

[Brainache]

Well, which interpretation of the OT? Not everyone was an OT literalist, and in fact the sect that won was already very liberal with interpreting the OT. To this day there are at least 3 competing versions of afterlife alone in Judaism, and back then there still a fourth: that there is none. Supported by none other than the major and powerful sect that were the Sadducees.

They disagreed on pretty much just about anything in there. E.g., while the Sadducees were taking "an eye for an eye" as literally sentencing the perp to get an eye poked out, the Pharisees were taking it as making him pay an adequate compensation to the victim for the loss of an eye. E.g., while the Sadducees were taking it literally that someone impure (e.g., has just handled the dead) be excluded from community life for X days, the Pharisees were busy devising cleansing rituals so that person can still be a part of their community. Etc.

And there were a lot of other ideas being imported, some successfully, some not, from Zoroastrianism and a few other cults and philosophy schools, again mostly via the Pharisees.

I'm saying this to put things into context: the old religion was in a state of flux, and doctrines were interpreted differently by each different rabbi. (Who incidentally was a Pharisee.)

The idea of a Messiah was one such. The dominant Pharisee version of a Messiah and of the end times, was, basically, that the Messiah will not just free Israel, but will also resurrect all the dead or mark the beginning of the age where the dead will be resurrected and live for ever. Or at least those deserving eternal life.

A Messiah capable of even resurrecting himself was very much in line with that. ETA: It would in fact be the ultimate proof that he _is_ that messiah.

And that a splinter group or a hallucinating guy would take it from there in an even more different direction, isn't actually all that unbelievable.

Do the earliest gospels talk of the resurrection? I know there are a couple of different versions of what was supposed to have happened at the tomb, but I'm not enough of a scholar to know what version came first.

Doesn't the old Testament contain some fairly specific criteria for a messiah? Criteria that anyone inventing a messiah would necessarily have to include in their story?

It seems to me that what you are saying about all of these various sects and things makes the historical Jesus even more likely.

 

[SpuriusMaximus]

The earliest Gospel is likely Mark, and even that was some time afterwards and likely preaching to the choir so to speak. The earliest mentions we have of Jesus are from Paul, and he seems to be more than a bit vague about who he was and exactly what he did.

In between we have a gap of some tens of years where likely some gentiles (Paul claimed to be the apostle to the gentiles, remember?) had time to figure out which parts from that OT ought to apply to their messiah and flesh out the image that way. Matthew is probably the clearest example of that, as he even misundestood most of the prophecies he claimed fulfilled. He clearly wasn't a scholar of the Jewish Tanakh.

Also, how do you figure that that supports a historical Jesus anyway?

 

[Brainache]

The earliest Gospel is likely Mark, and even that was some time afterwards and likely preaching to the choir so to speak. The earliest mentions we have of Jesus are from Paul, and he seems to be more than a bit vague about who he was and exactly what he did.

In between we have a gap of some tens of years where likely some gentiles (Paul claimed to be the apostle to the gentiles, remember?) had time to figure out which parts from that OT ought to apply to their messiah and flesh out the image that way. Matthew is probably the clearest example of that, as he even misundestood most of the prophecies he claimed fulfilled. He clearly wasn't a scholar of the Jewish Tanakh.

Also, how do you figure that that supports a historical Jesus anyway?

Well, the fact that there was something to "flesh out" in the first place. The "fleshing out" was only possible if the bones of the story already existed.

I imagine Saul of Tarsus meeting a little cult of Jews who tell him the tale of their dead founder. They tell him all about this heretic whose teachings they follow. Saul says "hmmm, love your neighbour? Forgive your enemies? Blessed are the meek? (etc etc) I like it!" He changes his name to Paul and says "I want to tell everyone about this! Look out Rome, here I come!"

The Jews that Saul met were just one of many little cults around in that time and place, but this particular group happened to be talking about a bloke called Jesus who was executed for being a heretic. Saul is an excitable rich guy who goes off the deep end proselytizing wherever he goes. He builds up a following telling almost the same story about this Jesus bloke to everyone he meets. Different places get slightly different versions of the story and the oral nature of the tradition ensures that the stories diverge over the ensuing decades. Eventually they are written down. Some are just copies of the earlier ones with bits added to boost circulation (miracles performed and prophecies fulfilled etc).



If there never was a heretic preacher called Jesus who was stoned for preaching on the sabbath or nailed to a cross or whatever, then I guess we have to conclude that it was all invented by Saul/Paul. Maybe he was just a bored rich kid who should have got himself a better hobby, or a wife.

I'm not too fussed either way, it won't make religion evaporate even if I did get my time machine and video-taped Saul inventing the whole thing. People would still believe it and I'd probably end up burned at the stake, or something.

 

[SpuriusMaximus]

Well, in the end that's the whole point of this thread: there may have been _something_ to flesh out, but that "something" doesn't necessarily have to be "a wandering rabbi from Nazareth called Jesus."

You know, because that's the implied false dichotomy in the argument that goes "it must be based on the real guy, because otherwise they could have made a wholly invented story a lot simpler." The false dichotomy is that either it was either based on a historical Jesus, or it was invented from scratch. What dawned upon me when reading that Julius Caesar claim (even though it itself may well be false) was basically that there are other possibilities than those two. They could have started from anything whatsoever.

We just don't know what happened there, and some seem to be just too eager to fill in the blanks with something that's just another unsupported piece of imagination.

 

[Brainache]

Well, in the end that's the whole point of this thread: there may have been _something_ to flesh out, but that "something" doesn't necessarily have to be "a wandering rabbi from Nazareth called Jesus."

You know, because that's the implied false dichotomy in the argument that goes "it must be based on the real guy, because otherwise they could have made a wholly invented story a lot simpler." The false dichotomy is that either it was either based on a historical Jesus, or it was invented from scratch. What dawned upon me when reading that Julius Caesar claim (even though it itself may well be false) was basically that there are other possibilities than those two. They could have started from anything whatsoever.

We just don't know what happened there, and some seem to be just too eager to fill in the blanks with something that's just another unsupported piece of imagination.

OK, I get that.

What were the other options again?

 

[SpuriusMaximus]

- They could have just started from one or more other myths, for example, and changed a few names.

- They could have made a mish-mash of sayings and legends about several different Jesus/Joshua guys, so there is no single one of them that was "the historical Jesus". As was said repeatedly, it was very common name, so the possibility of name clashes is also very very high. There were literally tens of thousands of Jesuses running around at any given time.

Think about my example about hallucinating about a Russian messiah called Ivan. Now think that two centuries later some idiot scribe has that _and_ some completely unrelated text with some smart-ass parables from some completely other Ivan. But he has not much clue about Russia and russian names, and thinks there must be just one guy called Ivan. So he merges them into the other text.

What does it have to do with Jesus? Well, for example: do we know that _if_ a Q document existed at all, it actually was about the same Jesus? Nope, not really.

- They could have simply started with a list of stuff to fulfill, not only from their own religion, but from the guys they were trying to convert too, and built the story from there. And it ended up so convoluted simply because it had a mile long list of bullet points to touch.

Etc.

 

[pgwenthold]

If 1st Century Jews decided to invent a Messiah from whole cloth, they would have made sure he was the one their book was telling them to look for.

But aren't there absolutely examples of the bible doing this? For example, didn't Luke make up that whole "everyone had to register for the census" crap just as an excuse to get Jesus born in Bethlehem, because that is where everyone thought the Messiah was supposed to be born?

So there are stories going around, but they don't sufficiently correspond to what the Messiah is like, and Luke, trying to make Jesus into a messiah, makes up some story about a non-existent census.

Similarly, Jesus is supposedly claimed to be born of a virgin, because that is what the translated version the gospel writers had was saying, despite the fact that the actual old testament didn't say virgin, it said "young woman." So Jesus is given properties to conform with a mistranslated version of the old testament.

There are other examples, too.

Finally, I have to wonder about your friend's claim. The usual christian approach is to challenge others to explain "how Jesus satisfies so much of the old testament prophecy" or some such nonsense. Apparently she is unfamiliar with Josh McDowell.

 

[Simon39759]

The apostle Paul, former Christian hater and subsequently probably the greatest evangelist in history, felt the exact same way.
http://bible.cc/1_corinthians/15-17.htm

Not really.
There is no real evidences that Paul ever considered Jesus existence as more than spiritual and metaphysical (aka, we don't know for certain that Paul believed Jesus to have been a physical human being, read the thread, 'ktxbye).

But because of the information available to him at the time it looks like the well educated former Christian hater came to believe it did happen which was why he tirelessly risked his life to preach it and wrote the 13 letters that make up a large portion of the greatest selling book in history.

We don't really know that Paul was well educated either, we only have, Paul (and his travel assistant's) testimonies and it seems pretty clear to me that Paul was never above a wee bit of self-aggrandizing embellishment.
Indeed, while I lack the knowledge to make my own judgement on this matter, I have read several times scholars commenting on how crude Paul's Greek and/or knowledge of the Bible was, which suggests that he was not so well educated after all.
Of course, we only have the Christian mythology to tell us that he previously hated Christianity and converted...

Also, while 13 epistles are indeed attributed to Paul, they, by no means, "make up a large portion" of the Bible. They are a small portion of the New Testament, itself a small portion of the Bible.
Furthermore, only 7 of these epistles are now considered authentic.
Finally, the Bible DOES NOT consitute the biggest selling book in history. A fact that would be irrelevant anyway and a blatant appeal to popularity.

What is annoying is that you were corrected on several of these mistakes in your own thread.
Yet you repeat them here in a blatant illustration of your intellectual dishonesty...

 

[Kapyong]

Gday,

I was talking about this thread to a friend of mine and I was taking the side of the folks here who say there was no historical Jesus. She countered with the argument that if he was fictional, his teachings would have been different. By which I mean that what the stories say Jesus said and did, doesn't match up with the kind of Messiah that the Old Testament predicts. If 1st Century Jews decided to invent a Messiah from whole cloth, they would have made sure he was the one their book was telling them to look for.

Unfortunately, your friend has no idea what the Jesus Myth theory actually claims.

It is NOT claimed it is made from whole cloth at all !
That is almost the exact OPPOSITE of the real claim.

The main thrust of the Jesus myth theory is that the story is crafted, NOT from whole cloth, but from episodes in the OT, (and some pagan cites also.)

Many elements of the Jesus story are clearly lifted from the OT, and it SAYS SO many times "to fulfil the scriptures".

Your apologist friends' argument bears no similarity with the actual claims and evidence.


K.

 

[Kapyong]

Gday,

Finally, I have to wonder about your friend's claim. The usual christian approach is to challenge others to explain "how Jesus satisfies so much of the old testament prophecy" or some such nonsense. Apparently she is unfamiliar with Josh McDowell.

Yes, Brain's friend seems to have no idea what Christians claim, nor what Jesus Mythers claim.


K.

 

[bluskool]

bluski...

What positive evidence are you refering to?

We have numerous, independent sources all claiming that Jesus was a real person. Paul, Mark, Q, M, L, John, possibly Tacitus, possibly Josephus and possibly the Gospel of Thomas.

There are, of course, problems with the sources. They aren't as close to the event as we would like, they aren't disinterested, they contradict each other, etc... But this is the only evidence we have so we must take it for what it is and try to apply rigorous historical scrutiny in order to see if there is any real history that can be extracted. For now we will stick to Paul since he is our earliest source. But I do think that Mark would be another good source to consider since we have no evidence that Mark had read Paul.


a. Paul claims to have come to believe in Jesus because of a vision (Galatians 1:11-12), but to have been persecuting the church prior to this (Galatians 1:13-14, Philippians 3:4-6). If Paul made the whole thing up, who was it he was persecuting?

b. Paul claims he met with Jesus's disciples including his brother James. (Galatians 1:18-19). If Paul didn't think Jesus was real, why did he claim that Jesus had brothers? (We also see this claim in the less controversial passage from Josephus.)

c. Paul recites what is considered to be a pre-Pauline creed in 1 Corinthians 15:3-8 where he states that Jesus died, rose from the dead and was then seen by his followers. In order to believe that someone died, you would have to believe they were once alive.

d. Paul indicates that Jesus preached to the Jews while he was alive in Romans 15.

e. Paul says that Jesus preached guidelines for divorce. (1 Corinthians 7:10-14)

f. Paul describes the last supper and Jesus' betrayal in 1 Corinthians 11.

g. Paul claims that Jesus was crucified in 1 Corinthians 2.

All of these show that Paul at least believed and spoke about Jesus as if he was a real person. We also have evidence that Paul was concerned about other evangelists with alternative gospel messages which further makes it difficult to believe that Paul just made Jesus up or hallucinated him. The best explanation for these facts is that Jesus actually was a real person. I think that any other explanation is going to require hypothesizing beyond the evidence.

 

[Kapyong]

Gday,

We have numerous, independent sources all claiming that Jesus was a real person. Paul,

False.
Paul does NOT claim Jesus was a "real person" anywhere.
He makes religious claims about a spirit-being.
But believers insist they IMPLY a real person.

Mark, Q, M, L, John,

False.
None of these books (one a speculated set of SAYINGS) has a actual claim that Jesus was a "real person".
They are STORIES about a man-god.

possibly Tacitus,

False.
Tacitus does NOT make any claim that Jesus was a "real person".
He merely repeated 2nd century Christian BELIEFS.

possibly Josephus

Josephus is corrupt, perhaps totally forged.

and possibly the Gospel of Thomas.

False.
G.Thomas does NOT make any claim that Jesus was a "real person".
It's a book of SAYINGS, with NOTHING historical at all.


bluskool - sayings and stories ABOUT a spiritual God-man ARE NOT 'claims he was a real person' anymore than the Greek Myths about Hercules are claims Hercules was a real person.

There are, of course, problems with the sources.

Damn right.
NONE of them stand up to scrutiny.
NONE of them contain a CLAIM that Jesus was a real person at all - not one.

They aren't as close to the event as we would like, they aren't disinterested, they contradict each other, etc... But this is the only evidence we have so we must take it for what it is and try to apply rigorous historical scrutiny in order to see if there is any real history that can be extracted.

We have.
There is no history of Jesus there to be extracted.

For now we will stick to Paul since he is our earliest source.

Yah, claims about VISIONS of a timeless God-man.
NO claims about a 'real person' at all.


K.

 

[Complexity]

It doesn't matter at all if there really was a man on whom the jesus myth was hung.

There isn't a 'god', there is no 'son of god', communion wafers remain crackers, and there are better hobbies available than promulgating jeebus stuff.

 

[pgwenthold]

We have numerous, independent sources all claiming that Jesus was a real person. Paul, Mark, Q, M, L, John, possibly Tacitus, possibly Josephus and possibly the Gospel of Thomas.

What about the other gospels? Judas? Mary Magdalene? Aren't those gospels, too? Do they not talk about Jesus as a real person?

Why do people completely focus only on those gospels selected by the early church because they best represented the message the church wanted to convey, including coherency?

From a historical perspective, non-church endorsed are just as legitimate sources about Jesus those endorsed by the church. Lack of agreement among them would only reflect the fact that the gospels as we know them are carefully selected.

 

[154]

It doesn't matter at all if there really was a man on whom the jesus myth was hung.

There isn't a 'god', there is no 'son of god', communion wafers remain crackers, and there are better hobbies available than promulgating jeebus stuff.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIvxqUCu41Q

 

[Brainache]

Gday,



False.
G.Thomas does NOT make any claim that Jesus was a "real person".
It's a book of SAYINGS, with NOTHING historical at all.



Yah, claims about VISIONS of a timeless God-man.
NO claims about a 'real person' at all.


K.

Ummm...

http://www.gnosis.org/naghamm/gthlamb.html

These are the secret sayings which the living Jesus spoke and which Didymos Judas Thomas wrote down

(13) Jesus said to his disciples, "Compare me to someone and tell me whom I am like."
Simon Peter said to him, "You are like a righteous angel."
Matthew said to him, "You are like a wise philosopher."
Thomas said to him, "Master, my mouth is wholly incapable of saying whom you are like."
Jesus said, "I am not your master. Because you have drunk, you have become intoxicated from the bubbling spring which I have measured out."
And he took him and withdrew and told him three things. When Thomas returned to his companions, they asked him, "What did Jesus say to you?"
Thomas said to them, "If I tell you one of the things which he told me, you will pick up stones and throw them at me; a fire will come out of the stones and burn you up."

A lot of these sayings just read like the ravings of schizophrenic to me, but the author of this gospel does claim to have spoken with a living man who said a lot of the same things generally attributed to Jebus. There are also sayings that aren't in the usual NT stories.

Thomas does seem to be talking about a living person. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying he was the son of God or that he rose from the dead or did any miracles, but I don't understand why it is so important to you to believe that there was no one person behind the myths.

Again, if there were no historical Jesus, there wouldn't have been any need to change the story to match the OT prophecies.

 

[Hokulele]

I was talking about this thread to a friend of mine and I was taking the side of the folks here who say there was no historical Jesus. She countered with the argument that if he was fictional, his teachings would have been different. By which I mean that what the stories say Jesus said and did, doesn't match up with the kind of Messiah that the Old Testament predicts.

I'll use this bit as the jumping off point, as I may be the friend in question here.

One thing that seems a bit unclear in the OP and very unclear in this last page of points is the issue that Paul and other early Christians most likely did not see themselves as inventing a new religion, which seems to be the assumption when talking about inventing a Jesus as a starting point for something other than Judaism. Judging by Paul's letters, which seem to be the center point of this discussion, he wasn't so much creating something to replace OT Judaism, but to expand or enhance it.

If this were the case, why invent a vision that would pretty much be viewed as nonsense by the majority of the Jews of the time? Although Paul is specifically addressing gentiles the majority of the time, it is clear he is aware he is working within the framework of Judaism judging by his commentary on the church in Jerusalem, and not one of the other religions prominent at the time or as the establishment of something novel.

 

[Kapyong]

Gday,

Ummm...
http://www.gnosis.org/naghamm/gthlamb.html

Not quite.
The author does NOT identify himself as Thomas.
He does not say "he" heard it, he does not say "I".
He implies it, at best.

This is no different from the anonymous Gospel authors putting word in the mouths of Jesus and others.

NOT ONE of your listed "claims" actually have a clear and specific claim to have met a historical Jesus personally.

Ummm...
A lot of these sayings just read like the ravings of schizophrenic to me, but the author of this gospel does claim to have spoken with a living man who said a lot of the same things generally attributed to Jebus. There are also sayings that aren't in the usual NT stories.

He makes NO SUCH claim.

The claims actually are :
"Jesus spoke"
"Thomas wrote down"

The author does NOT claim to have "spoken to Jesus", nor to have heard Jesus.

You are reading your beliefs into the text.

Ummm...
Thomas does seem to be talking about a living person.

The author does not clearly claim to be Thomas.

Ummm...
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying he was the son of God or that he rose from the dead or did any miracles, but I don't understand why it is so important to you to believe that there was no one person behind the myths.

It is important to me to get to the truth.

Why is it so important to YOU for there to be a person behind the myths?

Again, if there were no historical Jesus, there wouldn't have been any need to change the story to match the OT prophecies.

What?
If there was no historical Jesus, there was no story to change.

The story we have DOES match the OT, we can see many examples where the Jesus story is clearly echoing episodes in the OT. The writers remind us time and time again that Jesus "fulfilled the scriptures".

It's exactly what we expect of a story which is crafted from elements from earlier scripture, not from history.


K.

 

[Kapyong]

Gday,

If this were the case, why invent a vision that would pretty much be viewed as nonsense by the majority of the Jews of the time?

Invent a vision ?
Who said that?

(Why do people have so much trouble grasping what the Jesus Myth claims actually are? No-one argues Paul "invented a vision" at all.)


Paul seems to have really had a vision. A life-changing vision which filled him with inspiration to preach to others, and convince many. Because people BELIEVED in visions back then.

But so what?
Visions means nothing to US, no matter how real they were to Paul or his followers.


K.