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Why didn't Jesus write anything down?

Frank Merton said:
Historians have a number of ways in which they assess the value of their sources, and first on this list is that the source does not narrate supernatural stuff.

The only exception made to this rule is the Bible. Here the traditional historians bend over backward to allow this source in, in spite of all the miracles and so on.

If we are to take Matthew has history, why shouldn't we similarly take Homer?
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To be entirely fair, as David Fitzgerald points out, while you're usually told that no, see, historians are sure Jesus existed... it actually turns out that most historians won't touch it with a ten foot pole. It's mostly the theologians and bible studies guys who pretend to speak for all historians, and frankly most of those have just some minimal training as historians, if at all.

E.g., while everyone will tell you to listen to Dr Ehrman and not to Dr Carrier, because, see, Ehrman is the real historian... funny thing is, it's kinda the other way around. Carrier actually has a Ph.D. in ancient history. Ehrman has one in bible studies, from a theology seminary, where he studied under a theologian and bible scholar. And while I enormously appreciate and respect his expertise in what various bible manuscripts say, as a historian he's largely just about a self-taught wannabe. If he hadn't become the 'look, we even have an agnostic who says Jesus existed!!!' poster child, well, he'd still be a distinguished and respected scholar of bible studies, but nobody would cite him as a historian.

I mean, seriously, if studying the bible at a seminary makes one a historian, then we have several people on the board who never knew they were really historians :p

Basically, as an analogy, imagine that you have a complete Star Wars fanboy... err... scholar of Star Wars studies. Even a distinguished one. Let's say he saw all movies and cartons, read all books, and not only knows each change in each edition, but even studied all preliminary scripts and the making of each movie and so on. Real scholar and all that.

Would you think it's fair to say that the physicists say lightsabers are possible, because the obsessive fanboy says so?

Well, that's about how much historians usually have to do with Jesus :p
 
Craig B said:
Homer relates myths, and at one time scholars believed that Troy was fictional. But its ruins were discovered in the nineteenth century, along with those of the mythical palace of Minos on Crete. So Matthew, like Homer, isn't history, but it may be myth inspired by real events.
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Schliemann did himself well claiming he had found Troy. Nonsense. None of what he found fit.
 
I'm reminded of the line from Double Star by R.A.H. "...The Odyssey wasn't written by Homer, but by another Greek with the same name."

To me the question isn't whether the stories are based on an actual person, but rather how close to reality are they?
 
Gawdzilla said:
I'm reminded of the line from Double Star by R.A.H. "...The Odyssey wasn't written by Homer, but by another Greek with the same name."

To me the question isn't whether the stories are based on an actual person, but rather how close to reality are they?
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They aren't. Homer is great stuff, but not history.
 
Frank Merton said:
Schliemann did himself well claiming he had found Troy. Nonsense. None of what he found fit.
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Schliemann was definitely off, as he identified Troy II with the Homeric Troy. However, the later identification of Troy VIIa (which originated, IIRC, with Dörpfeld, Schliemanns assistant and successor in excavating Troy) does fit. Homer's description of the surroundings of Troy even fit with the geological reconstruction of the Troas plain ca. 1190BC. The Greek cities that Homer mentions have also been attested by archaeology as being powerful cities in those times. Some of them, like Pylos, haven't even been rebuilt after the Bronze Age Collapse. Personal names from the Iliad have been attested from Linear B tablets or Hittite correspondence (Alaksandu) as existing names in Mycenaean times. The warfare Homer depicts is generally Bronze Age (though with Iron Age anachronisms mixed in).

Strip away the supernatural from the Iliad, and we still have a vivid account of a Bronze Age war with many details that can be corroborated, composed some 450 years, and written down some 700 years after the alleged events.

By contrast, the synoptic gospels have Jesus preach in the synagogue in his hometown - Nazareth. However, archaeology shows that Nazareth cannot have been more than a small village in Herod's to Pilate's times, too small to support a synagogue. That's one of the two most important places in the life of Our Lord the Saviour.

Strip away the supernatural, and Matthew gives us the account of a wandering preacher with a band of no-names. Jerusalem, Pilate and Caiaphas is about the historical backdrop that can be verified.

Do I exaggerate? Maybe. But I'm more impressed with the first than the second, and my money is on Troy VIIa = Homer's Troy more than on Jesus existed.
 
HansMustermann said:
Literacy in Palestine IIRC was something like 2-3%, and even those were mostly in the cities. In the larger rural area, virtually everyone would be illiterate.

Still exceptions would exist, and you'd think the incarnation of an omniscient God would know the letters too :p
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Luke 4:14-29 tells that Jesus went to the synagogue in Nazareth and read from the scroll of Isaiah. So that settles the question whether Jesus was illiterate, I guess. :)
 
Luke also says that the (couple of other families of) people in his home town took Jesus to the edge of the nearest cliff and wanted to chuck him off (Luke 4:29), although geographically the nearest such cliff is miles away. You can pretty much picture the band of people huffing and panting as they leg it uphill with Jesus in tow, looking for a place to chuck him from. Which, I guess would explain why in the end they don't even prevent him from walking away (Luke 4:30), much less do any chucking: they were too tired ;)

Actually, joke aside, in Luke the town is built upon a suitable hill with a sharp drop for his made-up story, but Nazareth is actually in a valley. As I was saying, it's a long way off to the nearest cliff edge. All they could do in that small village was maybe to roll him gently down the slope, or make him jump 1-2m (3-7 ft) down from one of those agricultural terraces to the next one ;)

Plus, Luke's scroll is clearly a device to let Jesus say point-blank that he's fulfilling it. The original story in Mark is just about Jesus not being accepted at home. Luke does, well, what Luke does best, and inserts spurious elements into the story to puff it up.

So, yeah, I wouldn't take Luke as a historical source about that incident :p
 
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Still, I can see how your point fits what was discussed at that point. Any Sunday School who actually tells pupils that Jesus was illiterate, contradicts a gospel. I'd like to see them explain that.
 
HansMustermann said:
Actually, joke aside, in Luke the town is built upon a suitable hill with a sharp drop for his made-up story, but Nazareth is actually in a valley.
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You know, the "Nazareth" in the valley was founded in the fourth century by Constantine's mother. She was a strong woman, and when a relic or a shrine or something she wanted wasn't there, she "found" it.

In this case, no "Nazareth." So she finds a place and declares it Nazareth and builds a church.

Check it out -- there was no such place in the first century, and, even if the traditional place is it, as you point out, the geography is wrong.
 
ddt said:
Schliemann was definitely off, as he identified Troy II with the Homeric Troy. However, the later identification of Troy VIIa (which originated, IIRC, with Dörpfeld, Schliemanns assistant and successor in excavating Troy) does fit. Homer's description of the surroundings of Troy even fit with the geological reconstruction of the Troas plain ca. 1190BC.
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It fits to the extent you want it to, it doesn't fit to the extent you want it to. Obviously Homer knew the area, so the geography would be the geography.

We are talking about the Greek "dark ages," and stories about what they thought came before them.

This and other similar figures (Robin Hood, King Arthur, Agamemnon, Cincinnatus, and so on), are all romantic figures people would like to think had some sort of historical reality. They need to get real. The same processes were at work in Hebrew history and later with Jesus.
 
Well, I did argue just that before, that it didn't exist at that point, but I don't think it started with Constantine's mom either. Actually apparently some priestly Jewish families may have moved there after the revolt and destruction of Jerusalem. So by the time of Matthew, he could hear about such a place and figure out that it would work just nicely to explain Jesus's Nazoraios title (i.e., nazirite) without his actually fitting the conditions to be a nazirite. Constantine's mom may well have started from this village.

Or maybe not. I wouldn't put it past a zealot to start it from scratch either.
 
HansMustermann said:
Well, I did argue just that before, that it didn't exist at that point, but I don't think it started with Constantine's mom either. Actually apparently some priestly Jewish families may have moved there after the revolt and destruction of Jerusalem. So by the time of Matthew, he could hear about such a place and figure out that it would work just nicely to explain Jesus's Nazoraios title (i.e., nazirite) without his actually fitting the conditions to be a nazirite. Constantine's mom may well have started from this village.

Or maybe not. I wouldn't put it past a zealot to start it from scratch either.
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Someone once pointed out to me a text that implies what you say, but it was second century (referring to the first but not first hand). It was also subject to other interpretations. I'm going to have to see if I still have anything on that.

As to "Jesus of Nazareth," I don't think the early Christians ever has any problem confusing that with Nazirite. However, Isaiah has a passage that in the Hebrew talks about the Messiah coming from the branch of Jesse (branch = "nazer"). The LXX mistranslates that into a place name and "of Nazareth." So our early Christians may have picked up their Messiah's name and origin from that, assuming they were Greeks and not Palestinians.

Of course this created the entire problem that Jesus should have been, according to the actual prophesies and not the mistranslation, one "Jesus of Bethlehem."
 
Epiphanius of Salamis in his Panarion, part 29, "Against the Nazoreans" says point blank that Jesus was a nazirite, at 4:2.

ETA: but yeah, there are various interpretations as to what the heck did Nazarene mean for Jesus, or for other guys. E.g., in Acts we see Paul being accused of being the ring-leader of the Nazarenes. Clearly that couldn't have come from a village name, because, you know, even if I'm to assume that the village existed, how many people out of the maybe a dozen families there could be in one place (outside of the village itself) and cause enough trouble to warrant that?
 
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HansMustermann said:
Epiphanius of Salamis in his Panarion, part 29, "Against the Nazoreans" says point blank that Jesus was a nazirite, at 4:2.
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This, after all, is fourth century.

ETA: but yeah, there are various interpretations as to what the heck did Nazarene mean for Jesus, or for other guys. E.g., in Acts we see Paul being accused of being the ring-leader of the Nazarenes. Clearly that couldn't have come from a village name, because, you know, even if I'm to assume that the village existed, how many people out of the maybe a dozen families there could be in one place (outside of the village itself) and cause enough trouble to warrant that?
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Acts always presents something of a problem for my understanding of what happened, as the author knows the Quelle Jesus biography, and he also knows of Paul. He builds Paul into his story, but none of it fits well with the Paul we hear in the epistles, so I don't know. I guess Luke invented these stories, or they have some kernel in the real Paul, but cannot be relied on.

Since the author of Acts (we say Luke for convenience) knows Quelle, he has the formula "Jesus of Nazareth." To me it seems reasonable that early Christians may have been sometimes called "Nazarites" after that formula rather than as Nazirites. Still, whose to say? That confusion would arise, given the similarity of the names, is reasonable too.
 
Of course we must not forget that according to Jesus the world was about to end at any moment. Why waste time writing? If we assume that he was not the Messiah, or God incarnate and all that stuff, we're left with the possibility that a bunch of disciples pinned their hopes on the wrong guy and a bunch of later followers adorned the original story to make it look better. It happens all the time, doesn't it? Of course we can't know for sure, but it would not be difficult to imagine that somewhere under all that stuff is a talented rabble rouser with a knack for rhetoric and reformation, who just happens not to have been any more divine than anyone else.
 
Frank Merton said:
I have to ask why an atheist would think this, other than force of habit.

You are speaking of probabilities. No one can prove anything, so is it probable he actually existed when no historically valid record of him exists?
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Yeah, force of habit…..that would explain all the ancient world scholars as well….:rolleyes:
 
Frank Merton said:
Historians have a number of ways in which they assess the value of their sources, and first on this list is that the source does not narrate supernatural stuff.

The only exception made to this rule is the Bible. Here the traditional historians bend over backward to allow this source in, in spite of all the miracles and so on.

If we are to take Matthew has history, why shouldn't we similarly take Homer?
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False.

Ancient writings are filled with supernatural embellishments**. That doesn't lead us to throw all of it out a priori. And this fact shouldn't surprise skeptics at all, given what we now know about cognitive science.

No, what historians do is sift through different sources, obviously discounting the supernatural, but keeping what is plausible based on the different criteria of the historical method. Ultimately, as what I said earlier, it comes down to probability.






*And interestingly enough, there actually have been ancient scholars who have argued (based on some actual, albeit very limited evidence) that the Odyssey had some basis in actual history.




**For an example of this, see Richard Carrier's discussion about supernatural events related by the noted historian Herodotus in The Christian Delusion
pp 291-293.
http://www.amazon.com/Christian-Delusion-Why-Faith-Fails/dp/1616141689
 
HansMustermann said:
To be entirely fair, as David Fitzgerald points out, while you're usually told that no, see, historians are sure Jesus existed... it actually turns out that most historians won't touch it with a ten foot pole. It's mostly the theologians and bible studies guys who pretend to speak for all historians, and frankly most of those have just some minimal training as historians, if at all.
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I'll the same question I put to creationists: what peer reviewed journals has Fitzgerald published in and what degrees does he hold?
 
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