What counts as a historical Jesus?

[eight bits]

Hans

The question is just how much a person can differ from the legend, and still count as the historical X. So if we had a time machine and IF it turned out that Alexander is indeed the best match ever, would you think he's close enough to count as the HJ or not? Just hypothetically and conditional of that big if, and all that.

At the risk of being mechanical, I'll just go down my list to make an answer to your question.

Creedal

(1) That he was an individual man.
(2) That he was born to a Jewish woman.
(3) That he was killed by the authority of Pontius Pilate.

OK on (1) and (2), but then so is Mortie, my next door neighbor. No on (3). That's what eliminates Mortie next door, too. Partial credit if you squint and say "some Romans were involved, sort of?" OK, half a point, moving on:

Gospel story points

(4) That he was a preacher for at least a few months full time.
(5) That he had some affiliation to John the Baptist (Josephus seems to think John was real).
(6) That he had disciples of his own, or shared some with John the Baptist.
(7) That some of those disciples survived him.
(8) That some of those survivng disciples preached John or Jesus in Judea at mid-century.

I saw that you claimed (7) in the other thread, if we overlook the difference between disciple and political supporter. OK, your guy needs the points.

Finally, linkage via Paul

(9) is no contest, because it concerns only Paul and the authenticity of his writings.

(10) Among Jesus' teachings was a restriction on remarriage after divorce.

Not that I know of on (10), but I'll entertain appeals. There was an 11th criterion that I endorsed before, and dropped, but to bring us up to 10, and give your guy a much-needed point:

(11) That Jesus' final custody followed soon after the defection of one or more disciples.

Well, if we let "disciple" be a code word for "political supporter," what are the odds that one or more of them didn't defect in timely fashion?

Final score: 4.5/10, where the lowest score possible for any Jewish man by birth is 2, and all of the remaining hits require an explanation about why they're hits.

I think not. Other views are possible.

 

[Belz...]

Maybe they did, or maybe it's just a bunch of coincidences. But that's not what I'm asking. What I'm asking is if, purely hypothetically, it turned out that Jesus is based on some increasingly distorted stories about Alexander over almost a century (in fact, it is about a century between his execution and the traditional dating of John)... would you say he's the historical Jesus, or that it's been distorted too much for someone as different as Alexander to count as a HJ? Remember, the question isn't whether the premise is true, since it's just a hypothetical scenario, and those work for false hypotheses just as well. The question is just how much can some original figure differ from the gospel Jesus, before they stop being the same person.

I'll tell you what. As far as I'm concerned, the "historical Jesus" is just the source of the Jesus myth. If it happens that it's a composite of some Rabbi with Alexander, then those are the historical Jesus. If it's legends cobbled together and no real person is linked to that, then those legends are the historical Jesus. Otherwise we can pretty much say there was NO historical Jesus because no one can do the miracles that were attributed to that guy, and we have no record of his existence.

 

[davefoc]

Hmm... well, just for narrowing down what margin of error we're willing to accept, would Alexander son of Herod qualify as the historical Jesus? I've mentioned him before in the thread, but here's the most complete version I've don so far, from TB's thread.

http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showpost.php?p=9210777&postcount=159

I mentioned two general criteria that an historical Jesus needed to meet above.
1. That he was the individual whose life story served to initiate the formation of the Christian Jesus mythology.
2. That his life story would bare enough resemblance to the Christian Jesus that he could be recognized.

Is there any evidence to suggest that the Alexander, son of Herod met criteria 1?

Even if an historical Jesus was just required to meet criteria 2 it seems like there are some problems. The fact that he was the son of Herod wasn't mentioned in the Gospels and that alone suggests that regardless of similarities between his life and the life of a hypothetical historical he would not qualify as the historical Jesus to me. While I meant criteria 2 to be aimed mostly as a requirement for similarities, I think it also precludes some individuals because they had identifiable characteristics that were so significant that if the Gospels didn't mention those characteristics the individual would not qualify as the historical Jesus as I envision the term.

Now in the interest of full disclosure, _I_ don't believe there was a historical Jesus, nor that Alexander is close enough to qualify. ...

This seems to be a change in position for you. When I described your position as such previously, you objected and said that your view was that there was insufficient evidence to base even a guess as to the existence of an historical Jesus. Has your view changed, or was my understanding of what you said previously wrong?

If your view is now that you don't believe there was an historical Jesus, which theory or theories do you favor about the writings of Paul? My question here is not so much about why you believe the writings of Paul are poor evidence for the existence of an Historical Jesus, but more about what theory about the writings of Paul that you believe that leads you to believe there is a positive case that an Historical Jesus didn't exist.

 

[HansMustermann]

Well, as usual, it's more complicated.

I still don't think we have a way to support it either way, so that much hasn't changed. Yes, I don't think we have evidence that would say there was one or there wasn't one.

And I still think that in that situation, the version with less entities, i.e., the more Occam conform one, is the one without a HJ. As I've said several times before, the HJ version needs the extra Jesus entity, where just belief in one (which is present either way) explains it all. So I fail to see why I'd pick the version with one extra entity.

But it's not just that. It's that the HJ version involves hundreds or even thousands of entities: the people involved in transmitting those oral stories. If Mark heard some Jesus story from Tom, who head it from Dick, who heard it from Harry, who actually knew Jesus, then all those are extra entities. You actually need entities Tom, Dick and Harry for the information from Jesus to reach Mark. Otherwise Mark isn't actually having any real information to write, i.e., we're back to his just making it up.

If even one single person in a chain is missing, then Mark just doesn't have any real information about that particular story. So they're all needed as extra entities.

So the HJ version has LOTS of extra entities, and fails Occam in a spectacular way. It's EPIC FAIL. "Shaka, when the walls fell" kinda failing.

So until we have more information that needs those entities to explain, I'm simply falling back to the provisional assumption that the version to go with is the one without them. Just taking the standard null hypothesis, really.

This is, of course, not the same as saying that there is any evidence he didn't exist. I don't have a "positive case" for Jesus's non-existence. There just isn't evidence to assume that he did exist, so I'm simply falling back to the default provisional assumption, really. That's all.

And this again, is something I've said before, so it isn't really a change either.

As for Paul's writings... well, think about it. A guy who, if taken literally, describes half a dozen standard paranoid schizophrenia symptoms in himself, believes that he can do miracles, AND admits he got it all from a hallucination... well, I don't think I have a "positive case" against Jesus in there, but you have to admit, he's not exactly making the point that we need a HJ to explain what he wrote either. There is nothing in there that would really be at odds with falling back to the null hypothesis, until such time as better evidence presents itself.

But, as you undoubtedly know, it being just a provisional default fallback position means I'm keeping an open mind for any evidence, and have nothing against exploring the other possibilities.

 

[HansMustermann]

Anyway, thanks everyone for the answers. Now I have some better idea of what kind of match would make a historical Jesus for other people.

 

[Belz...]

But it's not just that. It's that the HJ version involves hundreds or even thousands of entities: the people involved in transmitting those oral stories. If Mark heard some Jesus story from Tom, who head it from Dick, who heard it from Harry, who actually knew Jesus, then all those are extra entities. You actually need entities Tom, Dick and Harry for the information from Jesus to reach Mark. Otherwise Mark isn't actually having any real information to write, i.e., we're back to his just making it up.

I'm not sure I agree that it requires that many more entities. The MJ hypothesis requires just as many people to transmit and alter the various parts that will eventually make up the first gospels. Perhaps even more so. To me, Jesus or no Jesus, just one guy, is not an 'entity' in the sense that it makes the HJ hypothesis less probable. We simply have nothing to go on, either way.

"Shaka, when the walls fell" kinda failing.

Fascinating.

 

[Craig B]

Anyway, thanks everyone for the answers. Now I have some better idea of what kind of match would make a historical Jesus for other people.

I suppose for me the HJ has to have a biography that can be reconciled with the Christian image, indeed the Christian doctrine. The veracity of the birth stories isn't necessary, nor of the resurrection. These are mythical accretions on the original story, whether it was authentic or not. But we need a Jesus who really existed in or around the days of Pilate, and was put to death by the Romans. If we don't have that, we have nothing. There is NO historical Jesus. Because it was this death that allegedly reconciled God to humanity, and has atoned for our sins. Of course the real Jesus if there was one, did lots of other things too, like pick his nose or spout apocalyptic tosh. But the details of this are less important, since the apocalypse hasn't arrived. Christians can "wait" for it; but if the atoning sacrifice hasn't taken place, they have nothing to wait for, so the death at the hands of Pilate is absolutely essential to any HJ.

 

[HansMustermann]

I'm not sure I agree that it requires that many more entities. The MJ hypothesis requires just as many people to transmit and alter the various parts that will eventually make up the first gospels. Perhaps even more so. To me, Jesus or no Jesus, just one guy, is not an 'entity' in the sense that it makes the HJ hypothesis less probable. We simply have nothing to go on, either way.

Not really. Actually you just assume the stories would come through as many people. That's not a given.

If there is no HJ, then you don't need a transmission chain at all. The gospel of Mark needs exactly one guy: Mark. You don't get to sneak in that he did use oral stories, when that's exactly what's unsupported in the first place.

A fictive Jesus gospel needs exactly one person to explain: the author. No more, no less.

Just think of Count Pierre Bezukhov from War And Peace. If he's not fictive, and the author did know the deeds of opinions of a historical Pierre Bezukhov, then we need the persons who transmitted that. But if he's fiction (which incidentally we know it is), we need just one person: Leo Tolstoy. AND he's there in either version of interpreting the story, so he doesn't count as extra in one of them.

But, mind you, even if it did came through as many people, it would still have one more entity: the HJ.

So, yes, HJ is failing Occam. Epically.

 

[Belz...]

Not really. Actually you just assume the stories would come through as many people. That's not a given.

Yeah I expected you'd say that. I thought about it, too. Maybe Mark made it all up... but then don't we have other gospels that are entirely independent on Mark, including Thomas and the hypothetical Q ?

But, mind you, even if it did came through as many people, it would still have one more entity: the HJ.

I don't think that one more guy really invokes Occam, personally.

 

[HansMustermann]

Actually, even one less entity is enough to invoke Occam. E.g., between a universe explained by the laws of physics, and a universe that has the same laws plus God, we routinely choose the former because of Occam.

The presence of more gospels also doesn't really do much there. It still takes less people to make those up, than to have a chain of information between the author and Jesus, so...

And we know that one person can make up a whole gospel of those. E.g., the Infancy Gospel Of Thomas (not to be confused with the sayings gospel called the Gospel Of Thomas), for example, seems to be written by just one guy who got his general (and wrong) ideas about the zone from Luke. In fact, it's generally accepted to be written shortly after the Gospel Of Luke. And again, by only one person who, armed with a copy of Luke, proceeded to pull a George Lucas stunt and write a prequel to it. (Jesus Episode 1: The Phantom Menace)

(Hmmm... come to think of it, Luke WAS actually Lucas in the original Greek... are you pondering what I'm pondering?)

So, yeah, we still have a case of

A) four dozen or so authors writing their own BS, vs

B) the same four dozen or so authors PLUS the few hundreds or thousands of people who'd transmit the information between Jesus and those authors.

Seems to me like A clearly needs less entities than B.

 

[Belz...]

Actually, even one less entity is enough to invoke Occam. E.g., between a universe explained by the laws of physics, and a universe that has the same laws plus God, we routinely choose the former because of Occam.

One human and one omnipotent god-thing are very different, though,

The presence of more gospels also doesn't really do much there. It still takes less people to make those up, than to have a chain of information between the author and Jesus, so...

Yeah but they _are_ all talking about the same guy, presumably.

A) four dozen or so authors writing their own BS, vs

Where did they get that BS, though ?

 

[eight bits]

Greetings, HF. Welcome aboard.

One of the main points biblical scholars make is that stories about the historical Jesus have to have multiple attestations. Two, three, four people tell the same story. This is more important than any other aspect of New Testament Historical Jesus Scholarship.

Yes, but that is because there is so little else to talk about in historical Jesus scholarship. And generally, even among those "same stories" there are differences.

Sometimes the differences are minor, like the entry into Jerusalem. The Gospels disagree on how many beasts Jesus mounted. Matthew says two (in the later Gospel according to Hans, that becomes a circus trick-riding stunt, not otherwise attested).

These comparisons are valuable, because they show us a mechanism besides antecedents (in Jesus' case, mostly the Tanakh, of which he was a teacher by trade, and then-recent stories circulating about Jesus) to account for the writing in hand. Matthew handles some of the antecedent material incompetently. In this case, he has frankly misread the entry prophecy

It follows that this author might incompetently introduce other elements into the canonical stories. For example, nobody else among the early writers except Matthew says that Mary of Nazareth gave birth before having had sexual intercourse, nor is this a traditional Jewish motif for miraculous births. Sure enough, Matthew ties his misreport to a prophecy, and sure enough, he has misread that prophecy, too.

In this case, we also get to see how one other writer handles the same theme. Luke, the only other Gospel to discuss Mary's sex life, portrays her as virginal when she is with Gabriel. What Gabe tells her is something vaguely like that lack of sexual experience isn't a problem.

What's that supposed to mean? It means what you want it to mean. Those who like their motherhood naturalistic (in other words, those who would prefer Jesus to be a real human being, which requires two human parents, duh) can interpret it as "God wouldn't mind, just this once, if you and Joe got around to getting it on." Those who prefer something more supernatural can see it as an endorsement of Matthew... just different. Anyway, after a rousing song and dance number, Luke cuts to a census that never happened, which has successfully diverted discussion from the ungentlemanly question of the lady's virtue for millennia.

So, comparing the versions helps us to understand the relationship between the writings and a supposed oral tradition, and among the writings themselves, which were produced over the course of two, maybe three, generations. That is wonderful for reconstructing the oral traditions. Alas, and contrary to your

Of course there was a Jesus, a person. We know this because in fact multiple attestations do exist.

it isn't dispositive about the historical reality of the subject of the oral traditions. And, what with everybody copying off of everybody else's paper, and "paraphrasing," the degree of agreement to which you point may simply be an artifact of the process by which the traditions reach us.

Maybe everybody liked the idea that Jesus would die under (or was he above?) a sign, and his name and the epithet "King of the Jews" has a certain poignancy, irony and grandeur. Unable to think of anything better, all of Mark's imitators left it in, with John adding a writer's credit to Pilate himself, with the Sanhedrin trying to play editor.

That doesn't mean there actually was a sign, and it surely doesn't settle whether there was a Jesus of Nazareth.

 

[catsmate]

One of the main points biblical scholars make is that stories about the historical Jesus have to have multiple attestations. Two, three, four people tell the same story. This is more important than any other aspect of New Testament Historical Jesus Scholarship. Of course there was a Jesus, a person. We know this because in fact multiple attestations do exist.

I'm sorry but this is simply nonsense.

 

[Craig B]

I'm sorry but this is simply nonsense.

Surely its not nonsense to assert, as a matter of fact, that

One of the main points biblical scholars make is that stories about the historical Jesus have to have multiple attestations.

Is that not so? If Mark and Q and John were to agree on anything, that would be a multiple attestation, that should be taken seriously. On the other hand, we can't go as far as

Of course there was a Jesus, a person.

 

[HansMustermann]

Yeah but they _are_ all talking about the same guy, presumably.



Where did they get that BS, though ?

The most simple explanation is that they got their character from Paul and then Mark, and made up the rest themselves.

Reusing someone else's characters in one's own story still happens to this day. See, fanfic, for example. Nobody assumes there must be a historical Captain Kirk even though hundreds of people write more stuff about his deeds and smart sayings.

And it happened in the ancient world too. E.g., Virgil reuses Odysseus and other characters from Homer to write his own Aeneid. And not just reused, but he works on creating a different image of Odysseus. In his case, a radically different one, as he changes the smart and tricky Odysseus of Homer into a rather dishonourable and cruel villain.

Did Virgil know some extra facts about a historical Odysseus? Well, no, after so much time we can be pretty damn sure he had nothing. He just made stuff up.

Really, I don't know why some people seem to assume that there must be some information passed through an oral tradition for person X to write about person Y. We have almost 5000 years of people writing fiction and being perfectly able to come up with fictive stuff about fictive characters. I'd say that humans' ability to write fiction has been already supported beyond any reasonable doubt.

Heck, even about Jesus, on the entertainment board and in the ST thread, Tragic Monkey wrote his own funny SF Jesus piece. You know, in case anyone still thinks it's not possible for Jesus.

 

[HansMustermann]

One of the main points biblical scholars make is that stories about the historical Jesus have to have multiple attestations. Two, three, four people tell the same story. This is more important than any other aspect of New Testament Historical Jesus Scholarship. Of course there was a Jesus, a person. We know this because in fact multiple attestations do exist.

Wrong. Yes there are those with a bad enough case of cognitive dissonance to insist that if a story was copied by Matthew from Mark, almost word for word, that means double attestation. Or that if both Matthew and Luke copied the same story from the hypothetical document Q, that means double or even triple attestation. It doesn't.

As even Ehrman puts it, if you have 20 guys telling a story, but they all copied it from 1 guy, then you don't have 20 sources, you only have one.

ETA: Multiple attestation is only worth anything if it's INDEPENDENT attestation.

 

[Craig B]

Wrong. Yes there are those with a bad enough case of cognitive dissonance to insist that if a story was copied by Matthew from Mark, almost word for word, that means double attestation. Or that if both Matthew and Luke copied the same story from the hypothetical document Q, that means double or even triple attestation. It doesn't.

As even Ehrman puts it, if you have 20 guys telling a story, but they all copied it from 1 guy, then you don't have 20 sources, you only have one.

ETA: Multiple attestation is only worth anything if it's INDEPENDENT attestation.

Do the HJ biblical scholars referred to by HonoluluFilly not take this into account when deducing whether or not there is indeed a multiple attestation? If something is in both Matthew and Luke, and is a saying of Jesus, would they not assume they had a unique attestation - from Q - picked up independently by the authors of the later Synoptics?

 

[HansMustermann]

If Mark and Q and John were to agree on anything, that would be a multiple attestation, that should be taken seriously.

The first problem is that we don't really know much about Q. We don't know who wrote it, when, what were his sources, etc. For all we know, Q could just be a collection of fanfic by someone who read Mark, as opposed to someone who actually knew anything about Jesus independently.

Again, we actually have examples of gospels and such which just took their information from other gospels, rather than being independent works.

The second problem is the way the material in at least the synoptics is parcelled. Whatever is in Matthew, but not Mark or Luke, is hypothetical source M. Whatever is in Luke, but not Mark or Matthew, is hypothetical source L. Whatever is in both Matthew and Luke, but not in Mark, is source Q.

To see what I'm getting at and why it's important for this argument, you can draw (or imagine) a Venn diagram of 3 circles that overlap substantially. I.e., you have a big fat common curvy triangle in the middle. The three circles are the three synoptic gospels, and the intersecting domains are traditionally given names like M, L, Q, "double tradition", "triple tradition", etc. The "triple tradition" for example is that curvy triangle in the middle, on that diagram.

What you need to understand though, and if you even tried to imagine that Venn diagram, it should be bleeding obvious, is that they're distinct domains. A point can't be in two domains. That's the whole point of a Venn diagram, right?

So to cut the story short, the very idea that there could be something that's both in Q and in Mark is by definition nonsense. Unless we actually find the Q document and see that it does contain stuff common with Mark, I suppose. But until then, Q is pretty much defined as the intersection of Luke and Matthew, minus Mark. There can't be material where Q confirms Mark, by definition.

 

[Belz...]

Really, I don't know why some people seem to assume that there must be some information passed through an oral tradition for person X to write about person Y.

Well, I'm not saying that. I am just trying to get more information since I don't know that much about this subject.

 

[HansMustermann]

Do the HJ biblical scholars referred to by HonoluluFilly not take this into account when deducing whether or not there is indeed a multiple attestation? If something is in both Matthew and Luke, and is a saying of Jesus, would they not assume they had a unique attestation - from Q - picked up independently by the authors of the later Synoptics?

Exactly what they'd assume, is hard to tell, because I don't know which scholars he means, and there is a LOT of bad pseudo-scholarship on the domain. Some people go full tilt into "proving" Christianity right, even if they have to do stupid things like, for example, claim that something has three attestations because it's in Matthew, Luke AND Q.

That said, that's exactly not an independent attestation.

- If a story is in both Luke and Matthew, and it's in Mark too, then it comes from Mark. That's not three guys confirming the story, it's just one guy.

- If a story is in both Luke and Matthew, but not Mark, then it's from Q. Again, it doesn't mean that two guys copying verbatim from Q are confirming Q. It means you have exactly one attestation of that story: Q. The guys copying from it aren't independent attestations.