What counts as a historical Jesus?

[HansMustermann]

And quite unsurprisingly there were mainstream Christians who thought that John shouldn't be in the Bible.

Though I guess John isn't that bad either way. It's vague enough so you can find just as well a purely divine Jesus, a human Jesus, a mix, or whatever.

 

[Belz...]

Do we know why these 4 gospels were selected and not others ?

 

[HansMustermann]

Not really. We can take a guess, though, as I was saying in the other thread.

What we do have is that they suddenly appear as the canon and the only possible canon in the work of the good bishop Irenaeus of Lyon, circa 180 CE.

Previously, they may well have existed and been in circulation, but virtually everyone who quotes scripture, isn't quoting from them. (Exercises in proving that, say, Justin Martyr or Clement were quoting from those just produced lists of very unconvincing matches, usually no more than a couple of common words.) Or when someone like Papias goes around and collects some parables from various churches, they're not what's in our gospels. So I'd say it's quite plausible that every church had its own "gospel", written or not.

But back to the good bishop of Lyon, he's the same guy who mediated uniting a couple of churches under the authority of the church in Rome.

And at least for two of those gospels, we can take a pretty good guess where they come from.

Irenaeus himself goes by John pretty obviously, for example. So you don't need much imagination to guess why John made it into the canon of that coalition of churches.

And Mark was probably the gospel of the church in Rome, so again it's doubtful he'd get that coalition going if he tried to exclude Mark.

 

[IanS]

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?

.

That’s a common argument. But I think it’s a false one.

It’s a question of degree or extent to which the persons life is characterised by the claimed miracles.

It may be true that various Roman emperors were claimed to be gods and even that they had performed miracles. But that is only the tiniest fraction of what those emperors were known for throughout their lives. They were far better known as normal human individuals who made laws, argued with their political advisors, lead armies into all sorts of battles, had numerous monuments erected, had coins minted, got married (numerous times), had numerous children, murdered all sorts of people, and were often eventually murdered themselves etc. etc. Only the most microscopically small element of their known lives concerned anyone’s claims of miracles or supernatural status.

With Jesus the entire opposite is the case. Jesus is only known from the devotional biblical accounts which describe him constantly and almost entirely in terms of his numerous miracles. The miracles and the supernatural status characterise his entire being. The same is true for all the other well known gods of ancient history. But of course, everyone believes they are fictional.

 

[tsig]

Do we know why these 4 gospels were selected and not others ?

They agreed with the teachings of the church.

 

[Slowvehicle]

I agree with you entirely. The question is whether Paul thought Jesus had been a man living recently on earth, and it is evident that he did. Romans 1 A recent person? Yes that too, because he lists as witnesses to the risen Lord, people who were his contemporaries. 1 Corr 15. Here the appearances have obviously occurred recently - "most of whom are still living" - and are associated with the burial and raising. The words naturally mean that there was a real person who died recently and to whom these events occurred. Any other interpretation strains to breaking point the expressions used by Paul, and seems quite untenable. Of course the belief that a real Jesus appeared in this way is false, and thus "fictional", but the physical human being existing recently prior to the appearances may well be real. We know that many (at least) of the stories told about Arthur are false, and that he was therefore a "fictional" character. But was there really such a warrior resisting the Saxons in the sixth century? The false stories do not exclude that as a real possibility. One can be fictional and real at the same time, as was Alexander the Great, and other semi-mythical heroes. But who is making that assertion? It is only being stated that Paul believed Jesus to have been a recently living physical person. That does not prove that Paul's belief in Jesus' postmortem perambulations is true! Who is saying that it does? All that is being said is that the falsity of these beliefs doesn't disprove that the person holding them also believed in the prior existence of a man, or that such a man may indeed have existed. Speaking for myself, I don't admit it. There is a separation between alleged post-death activities and prior physical existence. If I hear that in a certain castle the ghost of the deceased Mary, Queen of Scots, appears from time to time with her head tucked under her arm, that doesn't disprove that she physically existed as a living person prior to the removal of that head. And, contrariwise, belief in that physical Mary doesn't require me to give credence to ghost stories about her.

I do not disagree that a case can be made that Paul wrote as if he believed that the Jesus of whom he spoke was real.

I do not agree that this is evidence for the actual existence of HJ, whom Paul met only in post-mortem visions.

Juan Diego's experiences and testimony provide an illustrative parallel.

 

[IanS]

Here the appearances have obviously occurred recently - "most of whom are still living" - and are associated with the burial and raising. The words naturally mean that there was a real person who died recently and to whom these events occurred.

The Miracle of Fatima (see link below) was apparently witnessed by no less than 30,000 to 100,000 people on 13th October 1917.

Yet the reported event could not possibly have happened (such movement of the sun would cause the gravitational destruction of the earth, apart from all sorts of other scientific impossibilities).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracle_of_the_Sun

 

[Craig B]

I do not disagree that a case can be made that Paul wrote as if he believed that the Jesus of whom he spoke was real.

I do not agree that this is evidence for the actual existence of HJ, whom Paul met only in post-mortem visions.

Juan Diego's experiences and testimony provide an illustrative parallel.

I do not offer Paul's visions as proof of HJ. I offer Paul's statement about a Jesus living "kata sarka" as evidence that Paul believed in the existence of Jesus as a real physical person. "Pre-mortem". For evidence of the factual existence of such a person I offer, tentatively, the accounts of Paul's interactions with the Jerusalem community.

 

[davefoc]

This thread has moved on quite a bit from when I last saw it and I wanted to comment on a few things:
1. Piggy not looking at the video
I thought his response was completely reasonable. I looked at part of the video and it was clearly aimed at people far less aware of the issues than Piggy is. Maybe there was some argument there that Piggy wasn't aware of but slogging through an hour of video that is mostly a regurgitation of the standard arguments about why the New Testament is an unreliable historical source doesn't sound like a good use of time to me. If Carrier makes a new argument some place in the video, great, but the onus is on the person linking to the video to explain what that is.
2. Definition of Historical Jesus
Once again, this thead went down the Dorothy and the wizard of Oz path. If by historical Jesus one uses the term very broadly as Maximara likes to, then perhaps there is some relevance to this line of discourse. The point being that when the HJ is defined broadly enough the existence of an HJ is almost certain and the Dorothy/Oz analogy makes sense to indicate that the existence of a broadly defined historical Jesus isn't particularly significant. However, almost everybody in this thread uses the term, historical Jesus, in a more restricted sense so constantly bringing up the Dorothy/Oz does not contribute anything to the discussion.
3. Evidence for the existence of an HJ
Most of the arguments that Piggy has made in this thread are related to his belief that Paul's letters have the ring of plausibility. I agree that they are the best evidence for the existence of an HJ and they do have the ring of plausibility. I don't agree that the evidence they provide is as strong as Piggy suggests. I am running out of time right now but I plan to explain why I disagree with Piggy on this issue in a later post.

 

[Craig B]

The Miracle of Fatima (see link below) was apparently witnessed by no less than 30,000 to 100,000 people on 13th October 1917.

Yet the reported event could not possibly have happened (such movement of the sun would cause the gravitational destruction of the earth, apart from all sorts of other scientific impossibilities).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracle_of_the_Sun

Why do you keep attributing to me a belief in the reality of the postmortem Jesus events mentioned by Paul? OK, let me spell it out for you. By "the words naturally mean that there was a real person" I intend to imply: "Paul's saying that there was a real person means that he believed there was a real person."

 

[HansMustermann]

I do not offer Paul's visions as proof of HJ. I offer Paul's statement about a Jesus living "kata sarka" as evidence that Paul believed in the existence of Jesus as a real physical person. "Pre-mortem". For evidence of the factual existence of such a person I offer, tentatively, the accounts of Paul's interactions with the Jerusalem community.

Well, actually that Jesus was real for Paul is pretty clear. I don't think we need to debate that.

That he had a human or human-like body, I suppose we could split hairs, but it's pointless because you can rest assured that Doherty's and Carrier's cosmic Jesus version has a human body too. They're not talking about some ghostly ethereal energy being that was crucified.

The only question is where did Paul imagine it happening. Their version is that someone with a human body was crucified in one of the lower planes of Heaven.

The idea may seem ridiculous to us, but (at least as their argument goes) to a lot of the ancients there was nothing ridiculous about having an actual body in heavens or, depending on the religion, in the underworld. And at the very least, there are plenty of myths where someone took their actual body to the afterlife and back (e.g., Inanna's descent), so obviously a human body somewhere else than on Earth was no problem for a lot of people.

Ditto for the idea of someone dying in heavens. It was actually rather common for myth to have that possible. E.g., Inanna doesn't die and go to hell, she goes to hell alive and is killed there, once they make her remove her magical artefacts of power. (Well, not really to hell, but you get the idea.)

So, yes, nobody denies that Jesus may well have had a human body. That theory isn't about denying that. It's about where he was incarnated and nailed.

 

[Piggy]

There is a difference between making the claim that there was a man named Saul Tarsi who wrote letters under the name Paul, on the one hand, and makiing the claim that the letters attributed to Paul prove that Jesus was 'god' and appeared to that Paul in a vision.

The fact that you have missed a half-century or more of critical scholarship does not mean that your pretended unaniimity among scholars actually exists.

What in the world are you talking about?

We're not discussing God, and nobody's claiming that Jesus really did appear to Paul in a vision, although he might well have believed it.

And that last bit is just bizarre. There is unanimity about the reality of a person who founded the Jesus movement, who was from Galilee, baptized by John, preached the imminent arrival of the Day of the Lord, and was crucified by Pilate.

If you think the last half century of scholarship doesn't include that consensus, then you're the one who is unaware of the state of the field.

 

[Piggy]

The hilited sums up your entire argument.

Cranks, fools, ignorant, uneducated, holocaust denialists, moon hoax believers are all names you have called your opponents. Sad.

If you don't want to be called a crank, and don't want to be compared to other cranks, then don't use crank tactics, such as dismissing a global scholarly consensus with appeals to "argument from authority", or taking pot-shots at details without proposing a coherent theory, or cherry-picking, or getting facts dead wrong (see Paul's views on Jesus above, for example), or seeking solutions to non-existent problems, or painting all mainstream scholars as idiots who can't tell that miracles don't really happen, or insisting on quoting a tiny number of outsiders along with self-promoting contrarian non-scholars while ignoring altogether the mainstream scholarship which produced the very body of knowledge which the fringers cite but misinterpret.

I point out that "Jesus myth" stuff is crank non-scholarship because that's what it is, and folks reading this thread deserve to know that that's what it is.

It saddens me that this particular brand of crank thrives on a forum dedicated to skeptical thinking, and I hope to make some headway in changing that.

If folks are going to come here and start spouting debunked theories and casting aspersion on mainstream scholarship without being able to refute it, and often not even knowing what it is, then they can't expect a whole lot of respect for their views or their methods.

 

[Piggy]

Piggy, seriously, answering with "I know what I'm talking about, you do not" is not very useful for lurkers or other readers of this thread.

I know, but seriously, who goes onto a physics thread and says, essentially, "I've never read any real physics, but let me tell you why I think it's wrong and you're a sap for falling for it"?

When folks do that, what kind of response is warranted?

But people seem to think that's OK for this topic. I don't know why.

I'm happy to have a discussion, but I don't care much for it when folks attempt to call me on the carpet for agreeing with mainstream scholarship as they propose theories they can't possibly defend.

It's not up to me to dispute random potshots at the scholarship which are based on nothing.

 

[Piggy]

Ok, but can you understand that for people like me, determining what's crank and what's not in this field isn't easy, and your say-so doesn't really help ?

I see your point.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that when you've studied in a field, you simply know enough to know what the crank ideas in that field are.

It's not a simple question to ask how you know that, because it's based on years of study. To answer it, you'd have to have the other person study what you've studied, until they know, too… then they wouldn't have to ask.

But I do get frustrated, because I thought I'd made that clear, although perhaps not.

If you recall, I pointed out that the biggest evidence is no single thing, it's convergence and context.

Once you see the big picture, the errors in the Jesus myth stuff jump out at you right, left, and center. But to someone without that perspective, who's down in the weeds of all the detail, those pictures don't emerge.

Tell you what, I'll give you an example in a new post in a moment.

Thanks for being patient, by the way, and taking the trouble to suggest that I do a better job. It does help.

 

[Slowvehicle]

I do not offer Paul's visions as proof of HJ. I offer Paul's statement about a Jesus living "kata sarka" as evidence that Paul believed in the existence of Jesus as a real physical person. "Pre-mortem". For evidence of the factual existence of such a person I offer, tentatively, the accounts of Paul's interactions with the Jerusalem community.

I think a case can be made that Pual believed that he had experienced a mystic encounter with what he believed was a real person. At best, Paul's account is evidence of what Paul believed. Paul's accounts of what he believed do not, cannot, provide corroboration of whether what Paul believed was true.

It is difficult to support the claim that Paul referred to Jesus as human and nothing more, given the nature of the experiences Paul claimed to have had...

 

[Piggy]

Then try me, then. Could you link to the citations again ?

I reposted them here, although I didn't cite the passage where he discusses Jesus eating and drinking with his disciples, but it's well known. I can give you the cite for that, too, if you like.

 

[Slowvehicle]

What in the world are you talking about?

We're not discussing God, and nobody's claiming that Jesus really did appear to Paul in a vision, although he might well have believed it.

And that last bit is just bizarre. There is unanimity about the reality of a person who founded the Jesus movement, who was from Galilee, baptized by John, preached the imminent arrival of the Day of the Lord, and was crucified by Pilate.

If you think the last half century of scholarship doesn't include that consensus, then you're the one who is unaware of the state of the field.

The only way you can pretend that there is "unanimity" about the very existence of Jesus is to dismiss everyone with whom you disagree as cranks.
You would know that, since, after all, you taught this stuff...

 

[Piggy]

...because, of course, clearly and unambiguously human persons have power from 'god' as attested to by being "resurrected" from the dead...

ETA:


So much for that unanimous concord, eh?

Good luck.

 

[IanS]

This thread has moved on quite a bit from when I last saw it and I wanted to comment on a few things:
1. Piggy not looking at the video
I thought his response was completely reasonable. I looked at part of the video and it was clearly aimed at people far less aware of the issues than Piggy is. Maybe there was some argument there that Piggy wasn't aware of but slogging through an hour of video that is mostly a regurgitation of the standard arguments about why the New Testament is an unreliable historical source doesn't sound like a good use of time to me. If Carrier makes a new argument some place in the video, great, but the onus is on the person linking to the video to explain what that is.

I agree that it's not unreasonable for Piggy to say he doesn't want to spend an hour looking at a video that anyone links. I would probably have the same response myself.

The reason I did not try to summarise the video is that it packs a huge amount in. So even omitting 90% of it entirely, just picking out the 10% which I found most interesting (and which might not be the most interesting to Piggy) would still be a long job of summary. Far easier for anyone to just start watching the first 15 min. and see if you think it's leading to some interesting things.

However, .... what I found most interesting in the video was Carriers explanation of how in the time leading up to Christianity, say roughly the DSS period of circa.200BC to 70AD, traditional Jewish OT beliefs in that region were becoming more and more influenced by, and mixed with, Hellenistic beliefs in "Mystery" religions where the believers choose to join a particular religious movement rather than being born into it, and where different stages of initiation lead to increasing revelations about what the truth of God was actually supposed to be. That was the start of the interesting part, though it's so far stuff we all know .... however,...

... he then proceeds to explain, with references, how this mixing of Hellenistic Mystery beliefs also brought with it the ideas of Euhemerism, whereby the faithful interpreted their existing belief in gods of various types, such as the prophesised messiah of the ancient Jewish OT going back to 600BC, and proclaimed those existing beliefs of gods, messiahs, angels, devils etc., to be real living beings and not just beliefs, by a process of believing that their dreams or imaginings or visions of their ancient gods were in themselves actual proof that the visions were really happening on earth.

IOW - if you had some sort of imagined vision in which you imagined the promised messiah to be performing a miracle of some kind, then that became actual reality simply because that was gods way of communicating the reality and truth of the messiah to men on earth, AND in the telling of that truth of the vision, the story would be given a realistic setting in the local region. So for example, a dream of Jesus performing a miracle, would then be told with a realistic setting of it happening in a real place with real people as witnesses.

This was not thought to be a fraud or make-believe of any kind, but actually thought to be the correct way to tell of the communicated visions from God.

Now, Carrier says that all of that is in fact fully supported by the academic literature and can be fully and convincingly referenced. He gives a number of such referenced sources in the video, and the rest are said to be the subject of the imminent book.

But, be that as it may. What carrier did not mention, is that the above description of Euhemerising dreams into real events in real settings, is very similar indeed to what has already been apparently discovered in the Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS). This is something I described to you many pages back, if you recall.

In the DSS, the religious community of so-called Essenes, in that precise same region as the later Christians, were apparently practicing precisely that sort of dream-reality interpretation in the period circa.170BC through to 70AD. That is, apparently, quite clearly shown in the translations of the DSS.

So what you had with that DSS community, which looks very much like what could be called a "proto-Christian" sect., was the practice of deliberately and constantly imagining visions of their OT religious prophecies and beliefs, and then interpreting those visions as absolutely real events where the imagined "god" was placed on earth as a real living figure in a real local setting amongst real local people and events.

IOW - they were deliberately mixing up fact and dream-like fictions, precisely because they thought that the dreams were gods way of revealing literal truth. So to the DSS sect, their religious dreams were actually more real than any actual reality, because the dreams were revelations from God himself.

So in summary -what’s interesting in what Carrier says, is that he says this practice of deliberately Euhemerising dreams into reality, is actually fully supported by many references in the pre-Christian literature, and it took hold mainly as a result of the Jewish OT religion becoming increasingly mixed with Hellenistic mystery religions of the time.