"Historical Jesus"?

[sayak83]

If you say so.

All known earliest documents support this. That is all.

Didache - Wikipedia

 

[Jayhawker Soule]

All known earliest documents support this. That is all.

And you know that the Didache

• existed at the time gMk was authored,
• was known by the author,
• expressed a view shared by the author, and
• expressed a theology that would have rendered the presumed baptism of Jesus an embarrassment

despite the fact that

• it called Jesus the servant of God, and
• it was excluded from canon.

If only I were as bright and as certain as you. Perhaps someday ...

 

[Jayhawker Soule]

I think Richard Carrier has shown this theory to be false but the idea of Jesus as a myth created by Jews has been shown to be the most probable.

No. What he has done has been to persistently argue the mythicist position, and you choose to accept his arguments, not because they have been demonstrated to be "most probable," but because they align with your preferred narrative. Carrier is (IMO) an outlier, worthy of respect but an outlier all the same. Unless and until you feel qualified to dismiss the historicists, with their many decades of peer-reviewed scholarship, you might consider a more intellectually responsible evaluation of the matter.

 

[Mythos40]

I'm leaning towards the first four categories, but which category would Jesus the (mostly) Hillelite Pharisee fit into?

Also, what if the historical Jesus made the same mistake that the late Lubavitcher Rebbe made about an individual Messiah? That is, neither of them claimed to be the individual Messiah, yet both of them believed that they themselves would live to witness the coming of the individual Messiah himself?

 

[roger1440]

My question still stands. It is not credible a Roman procurator delivered a death sentence on a sort of harmless Rabbi (not that different than Hillel the Elder), unless he had conspired against the Roman Empire. We are speaking of a vassal state where the Roman authorities had a very limited jurisdiction.

What justifies such a specific penalty?

"You do not realize that it is better for you that one man die for the people than that the whole nation perish."" (John 11:50)

Why do you think he said that?

 

[Jayhawker Soule]

"You do not realize that it is better for you that one man die for the people than that the whole nation perish."" (John 11:50)

Why do you think he said that?

I don't "think he said that."

Rather, I think that it's a bit of created dialogue, penned by an anonymous author many decades after the purported crucifixion, and quoted here because you apparently have nothing of value to add on the question of historicity.

 

[roger1440]

I don't "think he said that."

Rather, I think that it's a bit of created dialogue, penned by an anonymous author many decades after the purported crucifixion, and quoted here because you apparently have nothing of value to add on the question of historicity.

For the sake of agreement let’s say Jesus did exist. Two questions then come up. Why was he executed and how did he go from being an executed Jew to being the son of God or God? The answer to both questions is answered in that one quote, regardless if that quote was invented or not. Without the execution of Jesus there would not have been any Gospels written. Therefore, his execution must be the starting point for examining his historicity.

 

[joelr]

Even the predominate scholar of demythologizing the Gospels, Bultmann, does not deny the historicity of Jesus.
Bultmann has it that the historical man named 'Jesus' was an eschatological Jewish prophet whose original disciples(A.D. 30's) knew him only as such, and whom the post-apostolic (i.e. non-apostolic) Hellenistic church (late first century A.D.) deified as the Son of God: "Jesus proclaimed the Kingdom of God...,...the kerygma of the Hellenistic church proclaimed Jesus as the crucified and risen Christ". Bultmann recognized the two predominating cultural influences which shaped each New Testament document: [a] the historical Jesus dressed in the mythical garb of the Gnostic "heavenly redeemer". And from a Jewish NT scholar, Pinchas Lapide, who finds the Resurrection to be an historical event, though does not believe Jesus the awaited Messiah.

He isn't the predominate scholar. An actual PHd historicity study has not been done since 1926 which has been demonstrated to rest on several incorrect assumptions. You could only get away with so much "heresay" back then.
Even in the 1970 when Thomas Thompson put out a paper showing Moses and the patriarchs to be mythological his career was destroyed. Then 20 years later his work was peer-reviewed and accepted.
Carrier has applied his PHd to a 6 year study and he has successfully debated several scholars and shown the mythicist theory to be the most probable.

He explains how many of the assumptions about Jesus have been allowed to continue in the field but are now recognized as faulty.

None of the scholars he has debated have shown any faults in his thesis. The mythicist theory will eventually gain acceptance. The older version was literally crank and the author made stuff up. Carrier exposes the ideas as false.

Carrier also has a good blog that exposes a lot of the falsehoods Bart Ehrman uses in his books on Jesus.

 

[joelr]

For the sake of agreement let’s say Jesus did exist. Two questions then come up. Why w
ras he executed and how did he go from being an executed Jew to being the son of God or God? The answer to both questions is answered in that one quote, regardless if that quote was invented or not. Without the execution of Jesus there would not have been any Gospels written. Therefore, his execution must be the starting point for examining his historicity.

In this video at 20:00 Carrier touches on the other mystery religions that we know for sure were happening right before Christianity.
It's more likely that some syncretism was happening and some Jews wanted to incorporate the dying-rising, forgive your sins through baptism personal savior demigod model into their religion. It is more exciting to have this personal deity who was killed and defeated death and so on.

So some Jews looked into the OT or into Jewish angelology and found an angel named Jesus who was the first born son of God (Carrier explains where that occurs) and took it from there. The actual letters of Paul (not Acts, that is fiction later created by the church) don't show any earthly Jesus at all and Paul knows of Jesus only from scripture and revelation.

Then each gospel followed Mark but added more supernatural tales and parables. Interestingly the first established canon, the Marcionites considered the physical Jesus to have been an illusion.

 

[sayak83]

In this video at 20:00 Carrier touches on the other mystery religions that we know for sure were happening right before Christianity.
It's more likely that some syncretism was happening and some Jews wanted to incorporate the dying-rising, forgive your sins through baptism personal savior demigod model into their religion. It is more exciting to have this personal deity who was killed and defeated death and so on.

So some Jews looked into the OT or into Jewish angelology and found an angel named Jesus who was the first born son of God (Carrier explains where that occurs) and took it from there. The actual letters of Paul (not Acts, that is fiction later created by the church) don't show any earthly Jesus at all and Paul knows of Jesus only from scripture and revelation.

Then each gospel followed Mark but added more supernatural tales and parables. Interestingly the first established canon, the Marcionites considered the physical Jesus to have been an illusion.

The argument is totally and completely unconvincing. The idea that Paul believed that Jesus was born in a lower spirit plane located between heaven and earth and was crucified by the evil spirit ruler of that plane is the silliest idea I have heard in my life. That is what he argues along with his eccentric use of Bayesian statistics regarding historical facts.

 

[roger1440]

My question still stands. It is not credible a Roman procurator delivered a death sentence on a sort of harmless Rabbi (not that different than Hillel the Elder), unless he had conspired against the Roman Empire. We are speaking of a vassal state where the Roman authorities had a very limited jurisdiction.

What justifies such a specific penalty?

More then likely Jesus was executed to avoid a riot or uprising.