did jesus exist?

[outhouse]

the historic volumes were in the posession of the Church

The fact that the Church could write means that the forgeries could have been made. The Church had the opportunity, the means, and the motive to forge historical documents.

 

[outhouse]

OK so im learning biblical jesus and historical jesus are two different things based on scholars that study jesus.

why should I NOT believe in this

The story of Jesus was originally an allegorical story based partly on the Jewish exodus myth and Joshua/Jesus ben Nun, successor of Moses, the Jewish Messiah-myth and the widespread pagan myth of the dying and resurrected godman Dionysos-Osiris. Later uneducated Christians in Rome, people without the insight and understanding of the deeper meaning of the texts, started to take these allegorical stories for their face value, and Literary Christianity as we know it was born.

There is no contemporary historical record of any kind of Jesus!! No written Roman, Greek or Jewish sources from this time (apart from the gospels) know of any historical Jesus or Christ. The name "Christ" is mentioned in some later texts but then merely as the name of the idol of the Christians' worship. We don't even know who the writers of the Gospels were, and don't have the original manuscripts themselves either. We just have later copies of copies of copies of copies … of copies of the assumed lost originals. And with each copy the copyist usually felt free to alter details or rewrite whole parts of the manuscript

[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]All the teachings of Jesus are "borrowed" from older sources, for example from the teachings of Buddha. Many of Jesus teachings are almost word for word identical with some of Buddhas sayings (400 years earlier). The so-called "Golden rule" can be found in several earlier pagan Greek (and Jewish) texts. The famous "Sermon on the Mount" was never held by Jesus , but also because it was actually first produced in the second century AD by Christian priests, assembled from what they assumed were sayings of Jesus in different other texts. [/FONT]

 

[outhouse]

We know there were many different jesus named people that lived at that time.

can you in all your "expert" ways go beyond saying that Robert Price is way off base?

OR do you view it this way? Historical research can reveal a core of historical facts about Jesus, but he is very different from the Jesus of the New Testament

Or this way

There is enough evidence to conclude that Jesus existed, but the reports are so unreliable that very little can be said about him with confidence

 

[dogsgod]

It's no use. Those that believe Jesus is historical are extremely sure of themselves even though the scholarly consensus is all over the map. Just look at the Jesus Seminar to see how a cross section of Jesus scholars vote on the probability of various gospel events and sayings being accurate or not. There appears to be very little agreement among them. However, the quest continues, why is anybody's guess.

 

[Oberon]

so what your really saying is, that the translations are so bad I cant get a grasp on the reality of jesus? without becoming a theologist.

Wow you really don't get it. What I am saying is that with any documents, person, etc, you can't simply read them and understand everything behind them. I can't appreciate the tradition surrounding buddha without understanding hinduism of the time. I can't pick up Huck Finn and understand it without knowing at the very least the backdrop of slavery in which Mark Twain wrote. I can't understand the Maccabean revolt without understanding the jewish beliefs and history behind it.

Likewise, one cannot pick up the NT and understand the historical Jesus without understanding his social, political, religious, etc., context.

Additionally, people who have read all the primary sources and built of other peoples work have been doing this for over 2 centuries. By ignoring all of these arguments you run the risk of reinventing the wheel. For example, while dogsgod decries scholarship and their work, and beliitles the experts, he is absolutely dependent upon their diligent work for his arguments. How does he know that the four gospels are not all independent? Not because they are all alike. After all, four people can all describe the same person and events similarily, and there is plenty of variance in the texts.

No, this hypothesis comes from careful work examining the greek and building arguments based on close parallels of the original language. If you weren't aware of this scholarship, even if you could read the greek you would have to reinvent the wheel.

Im sorry this is about the bible, that is where jesus magicaly manifest itself.

The bible isn't one text. Nor can the stuff about Jesus be ripped from it's historical and literary context. For example, you keep calling the gospels (and Jesus) myth.

Have you read enough of the primary sources to tell the difference between what constituted myth vs. history in the ancient world? How about scholarship which addresses this question?

For example,

Burridge, R. A. (2006). Gospels. In J. W. Rogerson & Judith M. Lieu (Eds) The Oxford Handbook of Biblical Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 433
Stanton, G. N. (1974). Jesus of Nazareth in New Testament Preaching Society of New Testament Studies Monograph Series 27. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Talbert, C. H. (1977). What is a Gospel? The Genre of the Canonical Gospels. Philadelphia: Fortress Press.
Aune, D. E. (1987). The New Testament in Its Literary Environment. Philadelphia: Westminster.
Frickenschmidt, D. (1997). Evangelium als Biographie: Die vier Evanelien im Rahmen antiker Erzählkunst. Tübingen: Francke Verlag.
Wills, L. M. (1997) Quest of the Historical Gospel : Mark, John and the Origins of the Gospel Genre. London: Routledge.

We know there were many different jesus named people that lived at that time.

can you in all your "expert" ways go beyond saying that Robert Price is way off base?

Yes. see the links to the threads I started. I'll post them again

Why do people think Jesus didn’t exist? A theory

Groundwork in Historical Jesus Studies

 

[Oberon]

It's no use. Those that believe Jesus is historical are extremely sure of themselves even though the scholarly consensus is all over the map.

Great logic. Let's extend it to all fields of scholarship, as it must be valid.

The nature vs. nurture debate is all over the map in many fields (e.g. psychology, biology, sociology, etc). As scholars aren't sure how much we are a product of our environments, humans must not exist.

There is no consensus on syntactic alignment in proto-indo-european. Therefore it never existed and latin, greek, sanskrit, etc, are all unrelated.

There is no consensus on how cloud dynamics should be modelled in global warming research. But here I'm not sure how your logic should best be applied. Should we ignore climate change as a potential problem, or can we safely say the climate doesn't exist. These are the questions which keep me up at night.

All in all though, great strategy. If scholars can't agree on the specifics, the general can't exist in any meaningful way.

 

[Requia]

A question for those who deny the historical Jesus:

If Jesus was real, what exactly would you expect to be different in the historical record?

 

[angellous_evangellous]

I do have a love for history

It's only being expressed in contempt.

 

[angellous_evangellous]

Likewise, one cannot pick up the NT and understand the historical Jesus without understanding his social, political, religious, etc., context.

That's the key.

These folks who give no credibility to "historical Jesus" scholarship have no clue that there are many disciplines involved in constructing or reconstructing the historical Jesus.

We can examine the archaeology of where the NT says that Jesus lived, and get an idea about how Jesus lived. And there's a TON of archaeological reports in that area. We can see what compliments what we can know from archaeolgy and dismiss exagerrations in the text as myth or unhistorical that do not fit.

We can do the same thing with social / political / religious life. And we can dismiss the portions of the text that cannot be sustained by textual criticism.

[I'm not forgetting orality ]

 

[dogsgod]

You guys make a mockery of scholarship with your stupid little straw man arguments. You consider the experts to be the ones that support your forgone conclusion about an historical Jesus, that's how you tell an expert from a non expert and that shows how incredibly biased you are. Scholarship isn't even about an historical Jesus, that's a side project, it's about viewing the texts objectively like any other ancient literature in order to learn how and when they came to be, and by whom. The more one reads the more one sees how foolish it is to go on this quest for an historical Jesus.

 

[angellous_evangellous]

You guys make a mockery of scholarship with your stupid little straw man arguments.

:biglaugh:

 

[outhouse]

first of all, your either weekend warrior's or its your field of pay and your a proffessional scholar. I dont care you try to leed the debate with yourt so called "expertise"

EITHER WAY you still cant answer my questions?


Is Robert Price is way off base?

Historical research can reveal a core of historical facts about Jesus, but he is very different from the Jesus of the New Testament?

There is enough evidence to conclude that Jesus existed, but the reports are so unreliable that very little can be said about him with confidence?

One thing is %100 certain, what most people think about who jesus was, IS NOT historical jesus.

Your expertise in copy's of copy's does not make it historical.

 

[outhouse]

It's only being expressed in contempt.

simple minded statement beings you dont know the first thing about me

 

[angellous_evangellous]

simple minded statement beings you dont know the first thing about me

Well, you're writing.

 

[outhouse]

You guys make a mockery of scholarship with your stupid little straw man arguments. You consider the experts to be the ones that support your forgone conclusion about an historical Jesus, that's how you tell an expert from a non expert and that shows how incredibly biased you are. Scholarship isn't even about an historical Jesus, that's a side project, it's about viewing the texts objectively like any other ancient literature in order to learn how and when they came to be, and by whom. The more one reads the more one sees how foolish it is to go on this quest for an historical Jesus.

The quest is great, gaing more knowledge on the subject is interesting. Reading old scripts that have already yielded nothing but a different interpetation is foolish.

The worst scholars are the biased ones, ones trapped to deep in the work to see the whole picture.

They base there historical knowledge on copys OF copy's from unknown authors and were the silly ones

 

[angellous_evangellous]

first of all, your either weekend warrior's or its your field of pay and your a proffessional scholar. I dont care you try to leed the debate with yourt so called "expertise"

EITHER WAY you still cant answer my questions?


Is Robert Price is way off base?

Historical research can reveal a core of historical facts about Jesus, but he is very different from the Jesus of the New Testament?

There is enough evidence to conclude that Jesus existed, but the reports are so unreliable that very little can be said about him with confidence?

One thing is %100 certain, what most people think about who jesus was, IS NOT historical jesus.

Your expertise in copy's of copy's does not make it historical.

Depends on how you measure "off base."

But yes, historical Jesus studies from the beginning have argued that the historical Jesus is different - perhaps far different from how he appears in the Gospels, and especially how Jesus appears in later Christian theologies.

That the NT is copies of copies of copies does not negate the fact that there is some historicity in the text. Every document that we have from the ancient world concerning historical people is a copy - there's nothing original. We have to use text criticism to study everything from Plato to Plutarch to Diogenes Laertius and beyond. But that does not mean that there is nothing historical in these writers. And yes, they have their fair share of myth as well.

On another point, even if the Golden Rule comes from the East, that doesn't mean that the historical Jesus didn't say it.

 

[Oberon]

:biglaugh:

You guys make a mockery of scholarship with your stupid little straw man arguments. You consider the experts to be the ones that support your forgone conclusion about an historical Jesus, that's how you tell an expert from a non expert and that shows how incredibly biased you are.

The way to tell an expert from a non-expert expertise. While theoretically no formal schooling is necessary, the fact that expertise in this area (and others) requires knowledge of multiple languages, ancient and modern, and years and years of reading primary and secondary sources, means that most people who are going to dedicate that kind of time are going to get a PhD in the field.

This is why i do not qualify guys like doherty or even wells as experts. Their interactionand knowledge of both primary and secondary work is too limited, which is understandable given that this isn't their field.

The other problem, of couse, is that being and expertdoesnt mean everything one writes is scholarship. When one is publishing (either online or in print) for the public, one can get away very easily with avoiding the arguments of other scholars, glossing over evidence, making misleading statements, etc, because the audience won't have the background to catch these finer points. However, scholarship is written to, for, and by experts, and the kind of things a guy like price can get away with in his books won't fly in a journal or monograph intended for experts because they are well aware of the flaws. Which is why in the academic literature, while minority and extreme views exist, you aren't going tofind mythicist arguments because the audience know too much to fall for it.

 

[Oberon]

EITHER WAY you still cant answer my questions?

Did you bother to read the threads I provided, which will answer your questions or at least provide the background for you to understand the answers?

 

[angellous_evangellous]

Hey Oberon,

Do you think that the historical Jesus is related in any way to the Sermon on the Mount (in Matthew or Luke)?

 

[outhouse]

These folks who give no credibility to "historical Jesus" scholarship have no clue that there are many disciplines involved in constructing or reconstructing the historical Jesus.

First of all historical jesus reconstruction is on ongoing tedious proccess. The problem is people believing what the want based off a few slivers of works that are not original documents. [gospels atleast] I dont know how you can paint a picture of a majestic mountain with one color.


There is no solid evidence for jesus at all. Hearsay is the best you have.