What counts as a historical Jesus?

[Craig B]

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

Here is where. In the place where the seed of David is to be located.

the gospel he promised beforehand through his prophets in the Holy Scriptures 3 regarding his Son, who as to his earthly life was a descendant of David.

OK, the original is "in the flesh", but Messiahs and Davids are earthly figures in the Tanakh. To stress the earthly quality of the living Jesus, Paul then goes on to counterpose to it "Jesus Christ our Lord"

who through the Spirit of holiness was appointed the Son of God in power by his resurrection from the dead

No clear sense can be made of this, except: There was a physical earth-bound Davidic-messianic living Jesus. The apostles knew him and Paul didn't, so he was secondary to: the resurrected "in power" celestial Jesus, whom Paul knew just every bit as well as these pretentious apostles did, and he didn't need any apostle to give him information about him. He got it direct from Jesus in the sky. And that Jesus is the one who counts. He's counterposing this super powerful heavenly Jesus to what? A previous earthly Jesus, of course. I can't read it any other way.

 

[Piggy]

Why "Jesus Myth" won't work, and why it's a bad idea to look at things through a soda straw

As I've mentioned before, the central fatal flaw with mythicism is that it doesn't cohere into an actual alternative explanation.

The mythicists love to pick at details, think up unlikely alternative scenarios to particular points, and speculate about the imagined influences of far-away cultures. But in doing so, they miss larger patterns that disprove their smaller points and provide evidence against them which they fail to deal with.

For example, consider the issue of Paul's credentials.

Now before I get into this, I'll just say that if anyone wants to argue against the solid historical consensus that Paul's known letters aren't fake, you'll need to take it up with the folks at Princeton and Yale, in Israel and Germany, etc. I don't have time for that.

Paul repeatedly states his bona fides, asserting that he is a true apostle with status as high as any other, having received his mission directly from the resurrected Jesus (he says he was the last to whom Jesus appeared) and certainly not from any of the brothers of Jesus or the Twelve.

In fact, he says it was years after his conversion before he even met the guys in Jerusalem, so they couldn't have converted him, and he adds "I swear I'm not lying".

We know from this and other references he makes to the accusations that some other apostles were saying he didn't have any authority.

OK, so what was so important about the guys in Jerusalem, the "Pillars", a group made up of some among the inner circle of relatives and students? What was so significant about the brothers of Jesus and the Twelve that gave them authority?

Well, if you're familiar with the culture, the answer is very clear -- they knew Jesus personally.

If they had given Paul his mission, he would be subordinate to them. Only if he can claim direct contact with Jesus can he claim to be on a par with them. And obviously, not everyone accepted him. The Pillars accepted him as a missionary to the gentiles, but it's not at all clear that they had as high an opinion of Paul's authority as Paul had.

So here we have a group which claim to be followers of a Galilean holy man called Jesus, and we see that those who claim close personal contact with Jesus are the power center.

Like I say, par for the course for such a group.

Now, was Paul making all this up?

No.

First of all, nobody would invent accusations against oneself that are hard to defend against, to the point where you have to say "I swear I'm not lying". Second, because the apostles were constantly traveling and visiting each other's congregations, such a ruse simply would have been impossible.

So we're confident that the power center in Jerusalem really were these guys who said they were among the brothers of the Lord and the Twelve. (We know from later writers that the Twelve were Jesus's disciples -- not because the stories they told about them were true, but from the fact that they bothered to tell stories about them in the first place.)

Next question, then… why did they say that they were the brothers and disciples of this guy Jesus?

Of course, the mostly likely answer, historically speaking, is that they were the brothers and disciples of Jesus.

But wait… couldn't they be lying or mistaken.

I'll dismiss that last bit as absurd. It's impossible that a whole group of people were somehow mistaken about who their brother or teacher was.

OK, so are they lying?

Well, we have two options here, according to the mythicists.

What if Jesus were a folk figure and they told everyone he was real?

That doesn't pan out, because… well, first of all, there is no such figure that we know of… but more importantly, that would only work if the folk figure were known because claiming to be the followers of someone nobody knows gets you nowhere.

But look at the stories in Daniel. The author tells it the way you have to… in the past.

These guys COULDN'T have gone around saying they knew a known folk hero, for the same reason I couldn't tell you I knew Johnny Appleseed and expect you to believe me.

After all, as another poster noted above, Paul says clearly that Jesus was crucified within the lifetimes of people who are still living.

OK, so that leaves the other option -- they were lying to gain power as movement leaders. They made up a messiah leader so they could pose as his posse.

But that can't be true either.

Why? Simple. Nobody in their right mind would try to gain power and prestige in first century Jewish culture by claiming that they were followers of a messiah who was from Nazareth, was baptized by John, and was crucified by Pilate, and failed to bring the Kingdom of God or anything else.

That obviously wouldn't work, and it didn't work.

These were fringe people, meeting in houses (that's what Paul's "churches" were, groups meeting in each other's homes), eventually getting hounded out of the synagogues.

In short, Paul's own account of his feud with other apostles over his status only makes sense if there really were guys in Jerusalem who really did get their authority within the group from personally knowing Jesus.

But as long as anybody cares to keep looking at the issue through a soda straw, asking for some tiny scrap of evidence that proves it all and ignoring the big picture, this is not going to become apparent.

And of course that's not all. For example, the early Christians have to explain why Jesus was not known for performing miracles in his hometown in Galilee, only in other places. What an odd thing to bother with if nobody from anywhere actually met the fellow and he didn't even have a hometown.

And how odd that among all the criticism which the early Christians defend themselves from, they never have to grapple with locals who say "We're from Nazareth and never heard of him!" even though they do deal with objections by folks who say they knew him and he didn't seem like a Messiah to them.

Viewed in widescreen, mythicism simply isn't coherent, much less plausible.

 

[Piggy]

Thank you for presenting your opinion.

It's not my opinion, but you won't know that unless you look up their bios and actually read some scholarship to see if anybody takes this stuff seriously or not.

I can't do that for you. Sorry.

 

[Piggy]

Piggy -I know you believe what you are saying, but it doesn't help if you keep presenting things as if it were certain fact (see the highlighting above).

Nobody will ever get to the bottom of any of this biblical stuff if the faithful keep insisting that what's known about biblical characters like Paul, Jesus, or James as the brother of Jesus, is all known definite "fact".

We, all of us, should try to keep at least something of an open mind on all this. It is after all, not absolutely certain that Paul even existed (let alone Jesus). Much less that Paul actually did any of things written in his Letters ... it's not impossible that the letters were written by someone else after Paul had died, for example. I'm not saying we should believe that as likely, but we should not in all honesty regard any of these ancient religious sources as absolute certain fact ... not if we are being at all serious about any of this.

I don't know what the opinions of "the faithful" have to do with our discussion.

And the stuff you say is all up in the air? It's not.

I'm sorry, but as I said just above, I can't make you go find out what the mainstream scholarship is. You have to do that, or not.

But I also can't sit here and agree with you that issues which are not controversial somehow are.

How many historians do you know of, publishing in the field, who doubt that Paul lived? None, I suppose. So where's this controversy you imagine?

Look, I know you're not someone who's studied all this, but you have to understand, because I do read about this stuff, I can't honestly come on here and say, "You know, you're right, it's a big mystery" when I know it's not.

I just can't do that.

 

[HansMustermann]

@Craig B:
Well, seed had multiple meanings. It could mean metaphorically the descendants of David or it could mean literally the sperm of David. That's what I've been trying to tell you.

And that paragraph still doesn't actually say "as to his earthly life" in Greek. There is no word that means "earthly" in that Greek text. You're using an artefact of the English translation to judge what Paul might have meant in Greek.

And the problem with arguing what would be saner for Paul to find in the Tanakh is that none of what he finds is a very sane interpretation in the first place. I mean, it's the same guy who finds a message and reference to his church in a phrase said by Sarah, that wasn't even in a prophecy or anything, but a straightforward part of the narrative in Genesis.

Or the same guy who thinks that a promise made by God to Abraham about his seed, actually means specifically Jesus Christ, and even more stupidly: thus that promise is actually to his (Gentile) followers, and not, you know, the descendants of Abraham.

So there's a bit of a problem if you're going to argue that it would have made no sense for Paul to deviate from the strictest normal reading of the Tanakh. He does it all the time, and most of the time not very sanely

 

[Piggy]

Wait, how do we even know that, except from Paul himself ?

I'll say it again… if you want to propose some alternate scenario in which Paul is lying about that, and you can get it to fit all the evidence, then there's something to talk about.

But really, I'm tired of "What if it was a lie?!" being trotted out constantly for no reason.

If you have some cause to believe it's a lie, and you can make sense of everything under that rubric, well, great, but please understand that this is quite a task, and nobody's accomplished it yet.

 

[HansMustermann]

Why would he lie is irrelevant. People lie for all sorts of reasons. People lied in a study even to shave off a few cents off their share of a restaurant meal.

The question is whether you can support an entity or event as actually happening, not whether you disbelieve that someone would lie about it.

 

[IanS]

The question is, WHY did people tell those miracle stories about Jesus?

.

Han’s gives a perfectly logical and believable answer in saying “because they were trying to convert others”. That’s quite obvious really. And I’d be surprised if you did not realise and accept that yourself.

But also of course, since long before Jesus, and since long after him, religious people have always claimed to witness countless miracles and claimed divine knowledge etc.. The claims are all fictional of course. But the motivation is that, apart from trying to convince others in their religious belief, they are also trying to convince themselves by imagining that they have some direct communication with God/Jesus/Mary/Other.

Unfortunately some of them also convince themselves that they are possessed by evils spirits of the devil, and even go to very extreme lengths to display all sorts of physical signs of the imagined possession. Often ending in tragedy.

 

[IanS]

Look, I know you're not someone who's studied all this, but you have to understand, because I do read about this stuff, I can't honestly come on here and say, "You know, you're right, it's a big mystery" when I know it's not.

I just can't do that.

This is a field you have studied? Why?

Do you now, or did you at one time, believe in the Christian faith?

 

[Piggy]

Han’s gives a perfectly logical and believable answer in saying “because they were trying to convert others”. That’s quite obvious really. And I’d be surprised if you did not realise and accept that yourself.

But also of course, since long before Jesus, and since long after him, religious people have always claimed to witness countless miracles and claimed divine knowledge etc.. The claims are all fictional of course. But the motivation is that, apart from trying to convince others in their religious belief, they are also trying to convince themselves by imagining that they have some direct communication with God/Jesus/Mary/Other.

Unfortunately some of them also convince themselves that they are possessed by evils spirits of the devil, and even go to very extreme lengths to display all sorts of physical signs of the imagined possession. Often ending in tragedy.

It should be clear that telling miracle stories about Jesus to convert others doesn't in any way provide any support for the notion that Jesus never lived.

The miracle stories simply do not cast doubt on Jesus's existence as a Jewish holy man of the early first century.

That's because telling such stories is exactly what we would expect if these people really did follow such a holy man. Others at the time did much the same.

 

[Piggy]

This is a field you have studied? Why?

Do you now, or did you at one time, believe in the Christian faith?

I got into it first as a matter of curiosity, because I was interested in religions and what people believed.

Ended up studying it formally at the undergraduate and graduate levels as part of my literature studies, because you can't understand literature in English without reference to Biblical literature.

And after that I've just continued to read, because I'm interested in it. The real history of the Bible is a lot more fascinating than what you'll hear in church!

I'm not a Christian and never have been.

Some of my profs were Christian or Jewish, as well as agnostic and atheist (or sometimes Jewish AND agnostic or atheist). And if I'm not mistaken there's a gay atheist lecturing on Biblical literature at Yale.

Even the Christians knew the real history of the Bible and would freely discuss the bogus books and the changes and the contradictions and factional infighting and all that.

Perhaps that's why it gets under my collar when folks here start talking about these scholars as though they were from Bob Jones University or Liberty University or somewhere.

But they're not, they're serious academics who know that Jesus never turned water into wine and the Jews never made an exodus from Egypt and nobody was raised from the dead or talked with a burning bush.

As a group, they are meticulous, detail-oriented, skeptical people.

They don't deserve the scorn they get here, from people who've never read their work.

 

[Belz...]

I'll say it again… if you want to propose some alternate scenario in which Paul is lying about that, and you can get it to fit all the evidence, then there's something to talk about.

I'm not proposing anything. I'm asking you a question:

How do we even know that, except from Paul himself ?

 

[HansMustermann]

It should be clear that telling miracle stories about Jesus to convert others doesn't in any way provide any support for the notion that Jesus never lived.

The miracle stories simply do not cast doubt on Jesus's existence as a Jewish holy man of the early first century.

That's because telling such stories is exactly what we would expect if these people really did follow such a holy man. Others at the time did much the same.

Nobody said it proves he didn't exist. But it also doesn't support your idea that it shows there was one and his disciples were trying to rationalize something. In fact, it's just something neutral, so to speak. People can add miraculous details to a story about something real, just as well as to a purely fictive story.

 

[Craig B]

... And that paragraph still doesn't actually say "as to his earthly life" in Greek. There is no word that means "earthly" in that Greek text. You're using an artefact of the English translation to judge what Paul might have meant in Greek.

I know all that, which is why when discussing the passage I immediately wrote

OK, the original is "in the flesh"

which you may confirm by perusing my post #1702, to which you are alluding.

 

[davefoc]

Why "Jesus Myth" won't work, and why it's a bad idea to look at things through a soda straw

As I've mentioned before, the central fatal flaw with mythicism is that it doesn't cohere into an actual alternative explanation.

I think this is a valid argument against some of the articles promoting some form of argument that an historical Jesus didn't exist. They make the case that almost everything in the New Testament is problematic as a reliable source of history and then they move to a conclusion that an historical Jesus didn't exist without suggesting a plausible mechanism for the rise of Christianity that doesn't involve an HJ.

However, I think there is a very plausible scenario for the rise of Christianity that does not require an historical Jesus. The God-fearer group had become obsessed with the notion that a messiah was coming and at some point this obsession morphed into a belief that a messiah had come. The most common secular view about this is the seed that initiated this change in the God-fearer group was the existence of the historical Jesus. However, the documentation from this period is fraught with contradictions, historical and geographical inaccuracies and implausibilities. So clearly most of what the originators of Christianity wrote during this period was fiction. It strikes me as plausible that what they wrote wasn't just mostly fictional, it was all fictional.

So what we are left with is teasing a guess about whether an historical Jesus existed or not out of the few facts that have come down to us about this issue.

You make, what I think is a reasonable case that the writings of Paul ring true on certain issues. In particular, it seems likely that he really had communications with the various congregations that his letters allude to. But an idea that seems very plausible to me is that Paul made up the details of his interactions with the former associates of the HJ. Schuler, of Crystal Cathedral fame, made up a story about a trip to China so it doesn't seem like a stretch to imagine that some other holy roller made up a story to puff up his own position in the newly developing Christian religion by creating a false back story of his involvement with associates of an HJ.

...

For example, consider the issue of Paul's credentials.

...


First of all, nobody would invent accusations against oneself that are hard to defend against, to the point where you have to say "I swear I'm not lying". Second, because the apostles were constantly traveling and visiting each other's congregations, such a ruse simply would have been impossible.

So we're confident that the power center in Jerusalem really were these guys who said they were among the brothers of the Lord and the Twelve. (We know from later writers that the Twelve were Jesus's disciples -- not because the stories they told about them were true, but from the fact that they bothered to tell stories about them in the first place.)

Next question, then… why did they say that they were the brothers and disciples of this guy Jesus?

Of course, the mostly likely answer, historically speaking, is that they were the brothers and disciples of Jesus.

But wait… couldn't they be lying or mistaken.

I'll dismiss that last bit as absurd. It's impossible that a whole group of people were somehow mistaken about who their brother or teacher was.

OK, so are they lying?

Well, we have two options here, according to the mythicists.

What if Jesus were a folk figure and they told everyone he was real?

That doesn't pan out, because… well, first of all, there is no such figure that we know of… but more importantly, that would only work if the folk figure were known because claiming to be the followers of someone nobody knows gets you nowhere.

But look at the stories in Daniel. The author tells it the way you have to… in the past.

These guys COULDN'T have gone around saying they knew a known folk hero, for the same reason I couldn't tell you I knew Johnny Appleseed and expect you to believe me.

After all, as another poster noted above, Paul says clearly that Jesus was crucified within the lifetimes of people who are still living.

OK, so that leaves the other option -- they were lying to gain power as movement leaders. They made up a messiah leader so they could pose as his posse.

But that can't be true either.

Why? Simple. Nobody in their right mind would try to gain power and prestige in first century Jewish culture by claiming that they were followers of a messiah who was from Nazareth, was baptized by John, and was crucified by Pilate, and failed to bring the Kingdom of God or anything else.

That obviously wouldn't work, and it didn't work.

These were fringe people, meeting in houses (that's what Paul's "churches" were, groups meeting in each other's homes), eventually getting hounded out of the synagogues.

In short, Paul's own account of his feud with other apostles over his status only makes sense if there really were guys in Jerusalem who really did get their authority within the group from personally knowing Jesus.

But as long as anybody cares to keep looking at the issue through a soda straw, asking for some tiny scrap of evidence that proves it all and ignoring the big picture, this is not going to become apparent.

And of course that's not all. For example, the early Christians have to explain why Jesus was not known for performing miracles in his hometown in Galilee, only in other places. What an odd thing to bother with if nobody from anywhere actually met the fellow and he didn't even have a hometown.

And how odd that among all the criticism which the early Christians defend themselves from, they never have to grapple with locals who say "We're from Nazareth and never heard of him!" even though they do deal with objections by folks who say they knew him and he didn't seem like a Messiah to them.

Viewed in widescreen, mythicism simply isn't coherent, much less plausible.

Your entire post above appears to me an argument for plausibility (and I agree with some of those arguments) with conclusions of certainty mixed in. I am completely with IanS on this. Nothing that has been presented by anyone here seems to support the kind of certainty that you attach to your conclusions.

I specifically took note of this paragraph:

First of all, nobody would invent accusations against oneself that are hard to defend against, to the point where you have to say "I swear I'm not lying". Second, because the apostles were constantly traveling and visiting each other's congregations, such a ruse simply would have been impossible.

I am in the apartment business. It was a bit of a strange transition for me to go from being an engineer where almost everybody I interacted with mostly told the truth to a world that contained people who routinely lied. I think the faith that you have in being able to detect a truth teller is not supported by my real world experience. Experienced liars understand the kind of clues that provide credibility and they attempt to work those kinds of clues into their narrative.

The second sentence in the above paragraph is even more problematic for me. How do we know these apostles existed? When I was actively pursuing evidence for the HJ I looked high and low for some kind of reliable connection between NT characters and the early Christian community. There is no doubt that some connection was claimed by or for the early church fathers. And there is no question that various churches claim a history that goes back to one apostle or another. But if there was reliable evidence for any of this, this discussion would be pointless. It would be obvious that the historical Jesus existed.

So what is the evidence that the apostles of Jesus existed? Paul refers to them. Mark refers to them. And beyond that? I don't see any. FWIW, that is enough evidence to sustain my guess that an HJ existed but it is way below the strength of evidence required to conclude that an HJ existed in my opinion. For one thing, there is the ring of implausibility that attaches to a lot of this. Somehow, members of what surely was a small time Jewish sect, if it existed, without any apparent significant resources or education fan out and become successful proselytizers for Christianity in the first century Mediterranean area. It seems unlikely to me.

 

[HansMustermann]

TBH, I think that whether Peter and James actually existed is a good question, but it's not the really important one. And it's even more annoying that it's invariably used to claim more stuff than is actually supported. Namely while it's argued that they EXISTED, then out of the blue comes the pretense that therefore we also know what they said, that they knew a pre-crucifixion Jesus, etc.

And that's a whole different question, that has to be supported in its own right: who WERE these guys? How well did they know Jesus? What were their actual opinions or teachings about it? On what was their authority based? Etc.

Once you look at just what Paul actually says, he doesn't actually give them all that much authority in the first place. E.g., Paul actually doesn't say anything other than pre-existing authority. He doesn't say it's because they learned more directly from Jesus or anything.

And one can't just take the gospel version, retrofit it into Paul, and pretend it's what Paul meant. It's an intensional context, not an extensional one.

 

[Slowvehicle]

<snip>
Now before I get into this, I'll just say that if anyone wants to argue against the solid historical consensus that Paul's known letters aren't fake, you'll need to take it up with the folks at Princeton and Yale, in Israel and Germany, etc. I don't have time for that.
<snip>

I really, really, appreciate your sharing your opinion, especially the appeal to authority and all. Seriously.

ETA:

In fact, he says it was years after his conversion before he even met the guys in Jerusalem, so they couldn't have converted him, and he adds "I swear I'm not lying".

Because, of course, anytime someone swears that they aren't lying, you have to believe whatever they say.

 

[Piggy]

I'm not proposing anything. I'm asking you a question:

How do we even know that, except from Paul himself ?

OK, I'll take the hit because I'm not doing a very good job of explaining.

But I do have to ask your indulgence, because seriously, the nature of this stuff simply requires that evidence -- the real nuts and bolts evidence -- for any particular point is incredibly complicated.

And I'll say up front that I get tired of demands for proof that exclude the most direct proof we have.

The thing is, there's no reason to even ask for evidence aside from Paul when it comes to this point.

Paul never makes a claim that missionaries are traveling to each other's churches. It's simply inherent in the letters themselves, in which he makes introductions, talks about his travels, discusses controversies that involve the travels of various people, tells folks that so-and-so will be showing up, and so on.

In other words, it's not that we take Paul's word for a claim, it's that Paul's letters reveal to us a world in which this network of missionaries is simply assumed.

But let me say, if folks are going to be part of a discussion on these points, I don't think it's asking too much to request that they actually bother to read the stuff we're talking about.

Nobody who actually read Paul's letters would ever ask, for example, whether or not Paul referred to Jesus as a human being.

And anyone who was familar with the literature and with even the basic scholarship would bother asking half the questions that get asked here.

And yet, no one seems to bat an eye when folks come on here and start citing the mythicists, who -- let's be clear -- are fringe outsiders.

I do get weary of addressing questions which even a basic understanding of the field would render unnecessary.

But I get your point.

 

[tsig]

Or you could just present actual evidence already.

Like many other trolls hiding behind "I don't have time for that", actually I see you have plenty of time to write dozens of messages spewing more unsupported nonsense, arguing fallacies, slinging insults, and arguing why you don't have to abide by the perfectly normal rules of logic.

But it would have taken exactly one message to provide actual evidence for just about anything that was asked. E.g., it wouldn't take more than one message to provide at least one instance of "son of man" being used as a title in either Hebrew or Aramaic.

But nah, apparently you totally don't have time for that one message, when you could instead be pumping out dozens of ego-wank messages about who's crank if they don't agree with you.

Heh.

qfp

 

[Slowvehicle]

It's not my opinion, but you won't know that unless you look up their bios and actually read some scholarship to see if anybody takes this stuff seriously or not.

I can't do that for you. Sorry.

No, seriously--I do appreciate you presenting your opinion. It almost makes it sound as if it is reasonable of you to label anyone who disagrees with you a crank. I really appreciate your pointing out that the concepts of nuance and continuum are not welcome in your boolean formulation.