What counts as a historical Jesus?

[Piggy]

Well, other than the fact that people do lie all the time, I don't think you give B enough credit.

In fact, Paul is the only one who mentions such a meeting, right ? I mean, the gospels don't mention Paul of course, etc. So if, in fact, Jesus was a celestial being who, after his demise, appeared to a select few to give them the 'good news', according to the story Paul was workig from, then he could claim to have met them even though they really, you know, didn't exist.

No, people do not do this all the time. People do not "all the time" believe that someone who never existed was their brother or teacher. In fact, they never do that, with the exception of folks who are insane, which these people obviously are not.

Paul's conversion is really irrelevant to all this, btw, because obviously Paul was converted after the crucifixion, so the fact that he never met Jesus in person isn't surprising.

 

[Piggy]

Well, you know like Q is a previous version for Luke and Matthew, supposedly. You think Paul was the originator of Christianity ? Then, if he didn't have a real vision from god, then he must've gotten that from somewhere.

Anyway, what I mean is that if you're writing a text by using in part a previous set of myths, sayings or works, then you may feel you have to make some corrections because of the questions it raises or the 'plot holes', so to speak. You know people are going to spot them so you alter your own version to make sure to cover them without making too major alterations that might people go "hey, where did that other part go ?", maybe.

What myths?

Q was deduced by careful analysis of the text, which revealed a shared source. There were too many verbatim parallels to draw any other conclusion, once it was determined that neither book was the source for the other.

But if you want to say that Jesus was some myth that people came to believe was real, you have to tell me what myth you're referring to.

You cannot simply imagine such a myth for which there is no evidence, and say that it might be the reason that people believed something which it's clear the original Christians did not believe.

Especially in order to solve a non-existent problem.

 

[Slowvehicle]

It would be, but since this thread concerns the historical Jesus, not the legendary Jesus, and since I was clearly (CLEARLY) referring to the latter, this is irrelevant.



No, it is not. Just as the reality of the Holocaust and evolution and human-caused global warming aren't really controversial.

In fact, a greater percentage of climate scientist disagree with human-caused global warming than the percentage of scholars of the ancient Near East who disagree that there was a historical Jesus.

The question of whether any god is real, that's totally tangential and irrelevant. But fyi, it's not just the scholars who happen to be Christians or Jews who agree about a historical Jesus -- the scholars who are Muslim, Buddhist, Agnostic, Atheist, and everything else agree with them!




Please, read the thread and understand what it's about.

We're not arguing whether the miracle stories, for example, are accurate. They're not.

So the question is, would the followers of a historical Jesus as I described come to write such stories about him. The answer is: Absolutely.

And there's nothing weird or strange or miraculous about that.

You pretend to a concord that does not exist.

You also equivocate the fully-human apocalyptic preacher for whom there is some evidence with the "wonder-counselor god-hero eternal prince" for who there is no evidence other than faith.

Claiming that a being who Rose form the Dead^TM, Worked Miracles^TM, and wanted to Save us From Sin^TM is not describing that being as a human being.

 

[IanS]

The breaking point for me was when he kept saying that Paul never says Jesus was human, and I showed him the actual citations (this was on another thread) and he simply ignored the unequivocal evidence that yes Paul says unambiguously that Jesus was human, and went on with his crank claim.

You cannot talk to people like that, you cannot reason with them.

Can you give a link to the relevant post in that other thread where you cite the papers/books/whatever that show Paul believed Jesus was a real human in the same sense that we mean today (ie not just Paul "Euhemerising" his visualised figure of Jesus)?

I don't actually know what Paul really said about a real human Jesus, and strictly speaking none of us can know, because we don't have anything ever actually written by Paul. However, whilst I'm quite prepared to believe that the Pauline Letters do say that Jesus was a real person, as you may know, Alvar Ellegard's book (Jesus 100 years before Christ) also says that Paul's descriptions of Jesus are in fact always descriptions of a visionary nature and not ever descriptions of what can be clearly determined as a real living figure in the sense that we'd use that concept today.

You need to bear in mind here what Carrier explained in that YouTube clip about so-called "Euhemerisation", and what has since been discovered in the Dead Sea scrolls about proto-Christian groups in that region circa.200BC through to 70AD, being in the common practice of interpreting their religious dreams, visions, and dream-like imaginings, as identical with real events. To them, their dreams and visions of gods/angels/messiah's/etc were more real than reality itself ... more real, because the dreams were thought to be direct communications from God, and therefore more certain that any earthly reality.

 

[Slowvehicle]

No, I'm saying that when you go around reading crank lit and refuse to read the actual scholarship and when faced with an explanation by a top academic you simply dismiss it by (erroneously) claiming that the citation is an argument from authority, then you're being willfully ignorant.

Then you should stop doing that. Reading Carrier will help you with perspective.

 

[Piggy]

Why did who not cite them ?

Anybody. Everybody.

Why do we find no trace of any such myths in any Jewish literature from any time?

We know that some sayings of Jesus which are not from Biblical sources, for example, are later echoed in the targumim which preserve earlier Aramaic paraphrases of and commentary on the Hebrew Bible.

And that's not surprising, because Jesus would have been working in that lay-rabbinic tradition (prior to the establishment of the formal Rabbinic schools) so either Jesus was rehashing standard rabbinic commentary, or some of his sayings entered that tradition and stuck, or his earliest followers attributed common rabbinic sayings to him and later writers recorded those traditions.

So if there was some pre-existing myth that Jesus was based on, where are those myths? What are they?

You can't simply imagine that they might exist. That's not scholarship, and it's not skepticism.

And more to the point, how in the world did it come to pass that people came to think that a mythic figure was real, not in the ancient past, but in their time, to the point that Paul is writing about people in Jerusalem who say they knew the man personally. How COULD that happen? Has it ever happened? I don't think so.

It makes no sense.

 

[HansMustermann]

The breaking point for me was when he kept saying that Paul never says Jesus was human, and I showed him the actual citations (this was on another thread) and he simply ignored the unequivocal evidence that yes Paul says unambiguously that Jesus was human, and went on with his crank claim.

You mean the part where I and a couple of others were discussing the meanings of the words and expressions in Koine Greek, while you were doing the same act of just insisting that we just trust what it really means? Yeah, I can see how that would be the breaking point for someone who can't keep up with that kind of discussion

 

[Aepervius]

How do you determine that a Truther video is crank without watching it?

Prior evidence. But see , this is the problem. there is no independent evidence to the bible.

You might as well take the Sanksri writing on Shiva and says it is evidence for the ape king.

Religious fanfic are NOT evidence.

Otherwise there are alien thrown in volcanoe which are in our soul.
And some moroni angel gave golden plate to some guys.

 

[Piggy]

But there is a problem: absolutely no evidence that Jesus was a real person.

Wrong.

The strongest evidence is that there was a movement of his followers, the earliest of whom -- as attested by well studied artifacts -- said they were followers of a real man who lived in their time, among them.

Given what we know about that day and time, that fact alone makes it overwhelmingly likely that there was an apocalyptic Jewish holy man called Jesus whom these people followed.

I don't know of a single parallel of any Jewish group claiming to be followers of a non-existent person who they believed was a man who recently died.

Do you?

In fact, we really don't require any alternate explanation for the formation of this group at all. There simply is no need for exotic scenarios.

And to date, nobody has ever proposed any other coherent explanation for the formation of this group to which Paul converted in the early 1st century, who claimed to be followers of a recently executed holy man, except that they really were followers of a recently executed holy man.

Nobody.

Sure, anyone can take any snapshot in time, any single event in history, and start offering less likely alternative scenarios. That's cake.

It's another thing to construct a complete and coherent scenario that all adds up and is probable.

No Jesus Myth proponents have come close to that.

So either he was entirely nonimportant, to the point that he probably wasn't even executed by Pilate, and he was just godified by his followers, or he was just made up to fit the times. On the one hand, one feels more likely, and on the other, we remove a needless entity. Both are fine for me, but nobody can say that it's a done deal issue.

Yes, it's a done deal, as far as history can ever be said to be done.

Jesus was unimportant, just another charismatic end-timer, but one did not have to important to be crucified.

It makes perfect sense that if Jesus were preaching the coming of the Kingdom at the Temple complex at the Passover festival, which involved God smiting all those in power and leaving him and his followers -- whom the crowd would be entreated to join -- as the righteous remnant in the New Jerusalem, that's enough to get you crucified right there, whether you get into a scrap with any vendors or not.

It's also telling that only Jesus was crucified. Which makes sense. These were not Zealots or Dagger Men. They were not insurrectionists, because they believed God was coming to take care of that, and they had to be righteous in order to prove that they were the saints to be saved when it happened, which meant being loving and forgiving.

Pilate probably figured that crucifying Jesus would end the problem, and for his purposes he was right.

So that pans out fine.

But as far as I know, there is no coherent story that involves his followers "making him up".

 

[Piggy]

Maybe you should watch that video.

No, maybe you should read Paul's letters so that you understand what he actually did say, which is that Jesus was a Jew born of woman under the Law who ate and drank and died.

That's a human being.

 

[Piggy]

First, there are precedents of made-up gods being made into historical people. Hercules, for instance.

Hercules was supposed to be someone who lived in the mythic past.

So it's comparing apples and bicycles.

Because that's nothing like the scenario that's being proposed for "Jesus myth", in which people supposedly believe that a divine being -- whom nobody ever references in any literature or tradition of the time! -- wasn't some ancient hero, but a dude they knew.

And oh, by the way, in their writings about this guy, they never bothered to mention that they believed this about him, and instead for some reason pretended that they believed he was actually a Jewish man.

Then later, when some pagan converts did come to believe that Jesus wasn't human, they were hounded from the group. Perhaps that was a cover-up?

It makes no damn sense.

 

[Slowvehicle]

No, maybe you should read Paul's letters so that you understand what he actually did say, which is that Jesus was a Jew born of woman under the Law who ate and drank and died.

That's a human being.

...and, having died, came back to life (that's a Zombi) and went to prepare an eternal place of reward for his believers (that's a 'god').

Equivocate much?

 

[tsig]

Anybody. Everybody.

Why do we find no trace of any such myths in any Jewish literature from any time?

We know that some sayings of Jesus which are not from Biblical sources, for example, are later echoed in the targumim which preserve earlier Aramaic paraphrases of and commentary on the Hebrew Bible.

And that's not surprising, because Jesus would have been working in that lay-rabbinic tradition (prior to the establishment of the formal Rabbinic schools) so either Jesus was rehashing standard rabbinic commentary, or some of his sayings entered that tradition and stuck, or his earliest followers attributed common rabbinic sayings to him and later writers recorded those traditions.

So if there was some pre-existing myth that Jesus was based on, where are those myths? What are they?

You can't simply imagine that they might exist. That's not scholarship, and it's not skepticism.

And more to the point, how in the world did it come to pass that people came to think that a mythic figure was real, not in the ancient past, but in their time, to the point that Paul is writing about people in Jerusalem who say they knew the man personally. How COULD that happen? Has it ever happened? I don't think so.

It makes no sense.

The myth of the messiah permeates Jewish literature.

 

[Piggy]

Well, ... Paul is of course famous for have met an already dead Jesus in a vision on the road to Damascus. That was clearly fiction, was it not.

Paul never claimed that. The author of Luke/Acts writes two fictional versions of Paul's conversion, which are contradictory.

Paul just says he saw a vision -- which may well be true -- but is shy about the details.

I suspect, although this is pure speculation, that he was converted in the way he went on to convert others, by a charismatic baptism experience.

He takes great pains to insist that he didn't learn about Jesus from James or the Twelve, because if he had then he would be subordinate to them, and if there's one thing Paul wants you to know, it's that he's not subordinate to anyone else in the Jesus movement.

If he were converted by the method he used for conversions (which makes the most sense) then it also makes sense that he would choose not to explain the details of that event beyond his vision, because according to him it was Jesus who recruited him… if that happened during a baptism, well, it wasn't because of the power of the baptizer, but because Jesus chose him.

But like I said, that's just my speculation about how he might have actually been converted.

In any case, he doesn't say what happened. Only that Jesus converted him directly, somehow.

In Corinthians, I believe Paul also refers to a vision he had when transported to the what he claimed was the third heaven. That too would of course be fictional.

Not necessarily. People do have ecstatic experiences, which are real, even if they aren't actually indicative of anybody being transported to any other plane.

In that passage, Paul is presenting his bona fides, against a charge that he wasn't the real deal because he didn't have visions, which a true apostle should have.

Everything that Paul tells us about Jesus was apparently revealed to him directly by the lord himself. That is fictional isn’t it.

Well, the claim you're making there is fictional.

Paul says he was familiar with the Christians and what they said about Jesus before his conversion, and of course he talks with James and John and Simon Peter who all knew Jesus and would have learned about his life from them.

From what Paul write in Corinthians, it’s seems clear that Paul is preaching the same message found in the books of Enoch and Proverbs, where Paul associates Jesus with the notion of God’s “Wisdom” presented as a “hypostasised personified figure”. That sort of belief is fictional, isn’t it? (see for example Ellegard, Jesus, One Hundred Years Before Christ, p17).

The accounts of Paul, in so far as they make mention of Jesus, are not historical earthly records, but fictional visionary beliefs.

You've got it backwards. Paul warns AGAINST those who preach "wisdom"

There is a passage in which Paul recites an early Christian hymn, and that passage is often glommed onto by the mythicists, but it can't stand up against his clear statements that Jesus was born of woman as a Jew under the law and he ate and drank and died.

But in any case, back to the question of whether his letters are "pure fiction", keep in mind that most of the letters are discussing church policy, sending greetings, discussing travel arrangements, settling disputes, answering charges, explaining his mission work, asking for support, and so forth.

So no, his letters aren't works of fiction, even though not everything in them is true.

 

[Piggy]

What are these Letters from Jews where the extant copies are actually dated to the middle of the 1st century AD? You don't mean the Christian copies of Paul’s letters? Because those are not contemporary with the life of Paul. The earliest copy we have of anything from Paul, is afaik at least circa.200AD, and since that is not scientifically dated I would not be surprised to find even that date turns out to be very optimistic.

Don't even try to give me that.

You are not a scholar on such matters, and you have no reason whatsoever to question the conclusions of, for all intents and purposes, the entire community of scholars of the ancient Near East.

Seriously.

If you really do have an objection to make, then by all means, explain why the current scholarship is wrong.

You'll probably get an honorary doctorate for it.

 

[Piggy]

But whether or not Paul believed that Jesus had once been a real living person, would not of course mean that Paul’s belief was correct. And especially not at that time and from someone who apparently could not tell earthly fact from celestial religious fiction.

So, IOW - I don’t think Paul’s Letters can possibly be taken as reliable historical accounts as far as evidence of Jesus is concerned.

Then why do the letters exist, and why do they say what they do?

What is your world in which there are letters between leaders of a group of people who say they follow a holy man who recently died, but they're either wrong or lying?

You can't simply say, "Well, these letters might not really indicate what they clearly seem to indicate… cause… you know, they might not!"

To counter the academic consensus, built upon an immense body of rigorous study in several fields from linguistics to archaeology, you have to provide a coherent scenario that explains why these letters were written and preserved despite the fact that this holy man who supposedly started the group and who was supposedly personally known to James and Peter and John, people who apparently are known to both Paul and his congregations, actually never existed.

That's your challenge.

In the end, your argument comes down to "Paul was a Christian, so whatever he said, we must think it might be false, and that hypothesis is equally valid or more as is the view that anything he wrote about was real."

And that isn't an argument worth spending time on.

 

[Piggy]

A letter that may have been written by the author to which it is attributed by faith, addressed to a church that may or may not have existed in the form, number of members, location, or confession attributed to it by tradition, is neither independent evidence of the existence of the author or the recipient. And none of it is evidence that the salvific rites and rituals embodied in the superstition are "accurate", much less reflective of reality.

Do you go around talking about the moon landing which may or may not have happened?

Anybody can sit there and say that any historical event may not have occurred or any source may not be accurate. Can do it all day.

Of course, that has already been done by scholars in many fields for well over a century now, and conclusions have been reached.

Scholars do not doubt that Paul lived, that the churches he mentions were real, that the people he refers to were real, and that the original letters date to the mid 1st century.

You can't just say "Nuh-uh!" and expect me to care.

 

[Piggy]

Second, do consider figuring out why the argumennt form authority is a logical fallacy.

I know why it's a fallacy.

I taught the subject for years.

Now you need to figure out why the consensus of legitimate scholars, based on decades of research, cannot be avoided merely by crying that citations of scholarship are an argument from authority.

 

[HansMustermann]

Then you taught a subject you don't even understand (now that's something new), since you obviously don't understand logic at all.

Also, nobody 'expects you to care.' The only expectation is that you actually support your claims with evidence.

 

[Piggy]

You pretend to a concord that does not exist.

You also equivocate the fully-human apocalyptic preacher for whom there is some evidence with the "wonder-counselor god-hero eternal prince" for who there is no evidence other than faith.

Claiming that a being who Rose form the Dead^TM, Worked Miracles^TM, and wanted to Save us From Sin^TM is not describing that being as a human being.

Oh, God, you are confused.

The historical Jesus is not the literary or legendary Jesus.

You do know, don't you, that miracle stories were told about all sorts of historical figures whom no one doubts were real flesh and blood humans?

The fact that Jesus's followers told miracle stories about him IN NO WAY indicates that he wasn't a real person.

All kinds of false stories circulate about everyone from Thomas Jefferson to George Carlin. So you think those folks weren't real?

The way you're thinking about this is totally backwards.

Again, the real question here is this: What group did Paul convert to, and why did they say they were followers of a holy man called Jesus?

When all the evidence is examined, the most boring explanation turns out to be not only the most likely, but also the only explanation which coherently fits all the facts we know, including the writing of the miracle tales: That these people really were followers of a holy man called Jesus.