How certain are we that Jesus was historical?

[Jayhawker Soule]

An historical Jesus thread? How novel!

 

[Desert Snake]

An historical Jesus thread? How novel!

Yes i'm surprised I responded. Oh well. could be worse topics.

 

[Stovepipe_Hat]

If a person really went around turning water into wine, feeding 5,000 from a few fish and loaves of bread, raising a rotting corpse to life (!), changing his body to able to shine like the Sun during a visit from apparitions, rose from the dead after rotting in a tomb for 3 days (!) and ascended bodily into the sky (!), this person would not only be the biggest sensation in the ancient world but the biggest sensation in all of human history!....

Actually, if someone did all those things today the rest of the world would immediately dismiss this person as a fraud, probably not even bothering with an investigation. If the person managed to attract some "true believers" via charisma and got a cult off the ground, all of them would be spoken of in polite terms like "batty" at best, or crushed by force and prosecuted at worst in the modern USA. They were going to go after Jim Jones in 1978, after all, but Jones & Co. had cyanide ready for just that possibility.

Almost all such persons are undoubtedly frauds or lunatics, yet their historicity isn't usually questioned. On issues like this, point-by-point investigation is difficult and expensive, so it's rarely done. It's done in the Jesus case only because his religion has 2 billion adherents and his skeptics number on the same order of magnitude. And the inquest comes rather late, having had to wait until political constitution divorced from church.

But what's curious is that the ancients were somewhat less credulous than we think. They believed in their established gods, but were skeptical about new religions. If a Jesus were walking around a land filled with highly conservative Jews, he would be thought charlatan just as much as as he would be in modern times. He had to be pretty good in the charisma department to get even 12 disciples to follow. And his immediate successors had to be pretty clever to keep the new religion from going defunct once Jesus was off the scene.

None of which answers to historicity. Unfortunately, this won't ever be known for sure, but inventing a person completely from scratch as in the William Tell myth isn't too easy, so I think there was an original teacher, Jesus. Note that William Tell was first attested quite a ways after the fact. He was supposed to have lived around 1300, but is first attested only in 1475, in Weisses Buch von Sarnen. Jesus is attested in the Gospel of John, a papyrus fragment of which dating to 125 AD is known, and mentions of Jerusalem being sacked suggest gospel material was out in the 70s AD, when the Roman siege was fresh in memory. Which makes me think he was real. Whether he was divine, or supernatural, is a matter of faith.

 

[Saint Frankenstein]

I'm not sure that Romans were religion-tolerant of all.....
You mention 'Pre-Christian Romans....' which could win your point. But Romans didn't half show aggression to the Druids..... possibly later..... but.... ?

I don't know much about what happened with the Druids under Rome but it seems they put their foot down on Druidry because the Druids had such a hold on the populace and also because they allegedly practiced human sacrifice, which the Romans found abhorrent. But no one really knows for sure because all we know about them was what the Romans wrote and obviously the Romans weren't going to be telling both sides of the story. I think the Druids were slandered by Rome so I wouldn't trust a word they say about them. Pre-Christian Germanic and Celtic Europeans were known to be generally more democratic and communitarian in their societies so I don't buy Roman claims that the Druids were controlling the populace through fear.

 

[`mud]

To read the story of Jesus one must accept satan.
The scriptures mention satan many times, he(?) was the vile of life.
Most people who are not theists don't believe in him(?).
Picture him(?) with a tail and carrying a staff, remember, he was an angel at first.
How he(?) got the tail eludes me! But, Jesus talked to him(?) but shooed him away.
If one doesn't believe in Jesus, one can't believe in satan.
Someone is telling tales.
Now.....from where did the angels come, thousands of them, bunched up on that needle point, with their harps and swords.
I really love mythology.............
~
'mud

 

[Stovepipe_Hat]

Druids...allegedly practiced human sacrifice, which the Romans found abhorrent. But no one really knows for sure because all we know about them was what the Romans wrote...

Fortunately we have a little more than Roman reports. There's archaeology. Ness of Brodgar in the Orkney Islands is a spectacular preservation of a temple compound occupied during the Neolithic. The people there were farmers. There is no evidence of human sacrifice at this site; apparently cattle were slaughtered there. I doubt they are Druids - this isn't near Roman territory and was much earlier, about 5000 years ago. National Geographic (Aug. 2014) has an article by Roff Smith on it.

My general impression is that routine human sacrifice is associated with chiefdoms or states, and not even that many states engaged in it. This doesn't tell me who was democratic, or that democratically-inclined tribes don't inflict terror on outsiders and enemies. I've never heard that any of them put humans on their altars, though.

This was off-topic. Historical or ahistorical, Jesus didn't call for it, and neither did Hebrew religion. There's a thing I've heard about Ba'al, a Canaanite god who I'm told demanded human victims. Judaism was in part a reaction against Ba'al and other gods of this sort; cf the Book of Daniel. Doubting Jesus' historicity strikes me as odd, however. We have only 7 copies of Thuycidides' Peloponnesian Wars, yet no one says this Athenian general was a pseudonym, much less a cardboard cutout invented by the author. Texts related to Jesus are numerous and start occurring shortly after his lifetime, which convinces me he really lived - even if the story of Jesus is embellished enough not to resemble what happened. But a ministry along the gospel's basic narrative is plausible.

 

[Kilgore Trout]

George Washington actually existed. Of course, he never threw a silver dollar across the Potomac and his teeth weren't made out of wood.

 

[outhouse]

There's a thing I've heard about Ba'al, a Canaanite god who I'm told demanded human victims. Judaism was in part a reaction against Ba'al and other gods of this sort;

.

Welcome to the forums, but you are wrong here.


Baal was a Israelite deity for quite some time.


Judaism was and still is part of Baal and El and Asherah all mixed up in multiple redactions that took place after king Josiah's reforms after 622 BC when the bible was redacted to monotheism and loyalty to yahweh alone.

Which the people were not really all following, and many passages from this period attest to that.

 

[Stovepipe_Hat]

Judaism was and still is part of Baal and El and Asherah all mixed up in multiple redactions that took place after king Josiah's reforms after 622 BC when the bible was redacted to monotheism and loyalty to Yahweh alone.

I stand corrected at least in part. The "image of gold" in the Book of Daniel is not identified as Ba'al, so I was wrong there. Ba'al does not appear by name in Daniel at all. Some mentions of this fella are at

• Gen. 36:38 uses Ba'al as part of a man's personal name.
• Ex. 14:2 uses Ba'al as part of a place name.
• Num. 25:3, 5 "So Israel yoked themselves to the Baal of Peor. And the Lord’s anger burned against them...So Moses said to Israel’s judges, 'Each of you must put to death those of your people who have yoked themselves to the Baal of Peor.'"

The last of these indicates the reaction against Ba'al. You allude to redaction of the Pentateuch and Deuteronomistic history taking place between the 7th and 5th centuries (discussion, Oxford Annotated Bible 3rd ed. augmented), especially in connection with the reign of Josiah in Judah, a century after the northern kingdom had fallen to Assyria. I apologize for my lack of clarity. I am aware the Hebrew text underwent longtime editing before reaching its canonical form, and was thinking about Judaism's mature phase. I admit I don't know much of the history, although the Oxford annotators indicated that scholarship was in a state of flux regarding the text traditions.

I'm curious how Ba'al and Asherah survived in the text. Presumably this must mean that description of their activities, their words, or of devotional aimed toward them was carried forward with deity names removed. An instance of possible replacement of name by epithet is "...make cakes to the Queen of Heaven" (Jer. 7:18).

I should stop here since I'm off-topic again. :bow:

 

[`mud]

I sense an interesting mix coming.
Just thinking out loud.
~
'mud

 

[outhouse]

I'm curious how Ba'al and Asherah survived in the text.

400 years of previous scripture that evolved the whole time. There are traces they could not redact out.

All of Israelites mythology was plagiarized from Canaanite mythology, but the Israelites stayed with a family of gods.

El the father, Yahweh and Baal the sons of El. Asherah first Els wife then later attribute to Yahweh.

I should stop here since I'm off-topic again.

Its OK

There is no value in OP's thread.

he must be part of 4 or 5 of these on the same exact topic. and he has no problem trashing others threads against modern scholarships and what is known.

 

[fantome profane]

But what's curious is that the ancients were somewhat less credulous than we think. They believed in their established gods, but were skeptical about new religions. If a Jesus were walking around a land filled with highly conservative Jews, he would be thought charlatan just as much as as he would be in modern times. He had to be pretty good in the charisma department to get even 12 disciples to follow. And his immediate successors had to be pretty clever to keep the new religion from going defunct once Jesus was off the scene.

I am going disagree with the idea that people in that period of history were "skeptical" in the modern sense. Jesus was accused of being a magician (not in the Penn and Teller sense of the word, in the Harry Potter sense). He was accused of being in league with demons. But no one from that time ever accused him of being a fake or fraud.

And that was pretty typical of the attitude they had to "wonder workers" or "healers" of all kinds. And there were lots of these kind of people in 1st century Palestine. Their supporters said they performed miracles, their critics said they performed magic. But we have few if any reports denying they did these things.

This is not a constant thing throughout all of history. People were surprisingly skeptical during the middle ages for example. But not in 1st century Palestine.

 

[outhouse]

He had to be pretty good in the charisma department to get even 12 disciples to follow


.

The 12 is probably mythical in nature to match the mythical 12 tribes.


The NT really only talks about his inner circle with any sort of vague details

If a Jesus were walking around a land filled with highly conservative Jews, he would be thought charlatan just as much as as he would be in modern times.

Nope.

This show a pretty deep lack of knowledge on what Judaism was in the first century.


It was wide and diverse, and there was no orthodoxy of any kind.

People were considered Jewish to simply swear off pagan deities on one side of the scale, and on the other you had Pharisees and pious Zealots and Essenes, and Sadducees, Hellenistic Judaism and Judaism of the typical oppressed peasant, and Aramaic Jews like Jesus that fell under Zealots.

Conservative Jews describes nothing at all that can be used here.


And last, Jesus was a typical Galilean Aramaic Jewish healer and teacher. he did nothing out of the ordinary while alive, that was any different from any aspect of first century Judaism.

He found fame only after death due to his martyrdom, and only in circles of Hellenism in the diaspora. His movement failed in Galilean Aramaic Judaism with his death.

All we really know is the Hellenistic retelling of oral traditions that floated around Passover for decades after his death that generated his Hellenistic following.

 

[Stovepipe_Hat]

I am going disagree with the idea that people in that period of history were "skeptical" in the modern sense...People were surprisingly skeptical during the middle ages for example.

Not in the modern sense, and no precursor to William of Occam. In the sense of beginning criticism of their own tradition, a relatively new development enabled by having a codified tradition to work from. Egypt had long written traditions, but never attempted to organize them as a system. And at least according to gospel sources, Jesus was questioned on the basis of his actual opinions about Jewish law, for heterodoxy (Matthew 15: 1-2 as instance), not so much on allegations of magic, and the final charge was that he claimed to be the Jewish messiah, a blasphemy, suggesting political conservatism instead of fear of witchcraft. I understand of course that gospel sources are biased, so I don't make a great deal of them, yet I see no reason for them to dissimulate on this issue. They indicate legalism was favored over oracle by then. Law is inherently more skeptical in attitude than magic. Nor does it matter that belief in magic persisted; if it wasn't being used as basis of prosecution.

400 years of previous scripture that evolved the whole time. There are traces they could not redact out.

True, and I agreed earlier that previous traditions were carried forward with deity names removed.

All of Israelites' mythology was plagiarized from Canaanite mythology.

Plagiarism is a serious charge. Especially if it's all their work, as opposed to borrowing. But I thought Israelites were essentially Canaanites to begin with rather than invaders. Anthropological opinion supports this, though I can't get citations on short notice. They also innovated quite a bit in formulating their new religious edifice.

It was wide and diverse, and there was no orthodoxy of any kind..

Then why did the Essenes have to hole up by the Dead Sea, if not harassed by the orthodox in power? I will grant that there was some diversity, with minor alternative groups around, and factionalism within the main bloc.

He found fame only...in circles of Hellenism in the diaspora... All we really know is the Hellenistic retelling of oral traditions.

And in Egypt as Coptic Christianity after the Johannine tradition. :sad4: Alas, the last point is almost true, except it was written down promptly by the standards of that day. And eventually codified. Earlier Hellenism had never been in the habit of worshipping by the book, so influence went the other way also.

Moving the discussion is a good idea if it's a change of topic. The thread title is how you find topics. Are we on the proposition "Judaic scripture reduces to Canaanite religion," or is that one exhausted? I'm actually near limits on ability to debate on Hebrew tradition, a subject I'm not good at. I've only encountered it in connection with learning Egypt.

 

[outhouse]

Plagiarism is a serious charge. Especially if it's all their work, as opposed to borrowing. But I thought Israelites were essentially Canaanites to begin with rather than invaders. Anthropological opinion supports this, though I can't get citations on short notice. They also innovated quite a bit in formulating their new religious edifice.


.

Plagiarized does not mean 100% plagiarized


Sounds like you have the right take on it. They were Canaanites, so using their mythology and plagiarizing it was normal. All religions do it as far as I know.

Israel Finkelstein or William Dever are credible sources for the ethnogenesis of Isarelites

Then why did the Essenes have to hole up by the Dead Sea, if not harassed by the orthodox in power?

They lived there by choice. I have no knowledge if they were harassed or not. Very little is known about the sect in general

"Judaic scripture reduces to Canaanite religion,"

I will run with influence.

Israelites were mowed over so many times and so multi cultural, they did not even know their own Canaanite heritage. The culture rebuilt itself so many times, and the religion evolved so much, by the time we got to monotheism we were dealing with pseudo history

 

[outhouse]

Thanks for a rational debate

 

[Ingledsva]

Fortunately we have a little more than Roman reports. There's archaeology. Ness of Brodgar in the Orkney Islands is a spectacular preservation of a temple compound occupied during the Neolithic. The people there were farmers. There is no evidence of human sacrifice at this site; apparently cattle were slaughtered there. I doubt they are Druids - this isn't near Roman territory and was much earlier, about 5000 years ago. National Geographic (Aug. 2014) has an article by Roff Smith on it.

My general impression is that routine human sacrifice is associated with chiefdoms or states, and not even that many states engaged in it. This doesn't tell me who was democratic, or that democratically-inclined tribes don't inflict terror on outsiders and enemies. I've never heard that any of them put humans on their altars, though.

This was off-topic. Historical or ahistorical, Jesus didn't call for it, and neither did Hebrew religion. There's a thing I've heard about Ba'al, a Canaanite god who I'm told demanded human victims. Judaism was in part a reaction against Ba'al and other gods of this sort; cf the Book of Daniel. Doubting Jesus' historicity strikes me as odd, however. We have only 7 copies of Thuycidides' Peloponnesian Wars, yet no one says this Athenian general was a pseudonym, much less a cardboard cutout invented by the author. Texts related to Jesus are numerous and start occurring shortly after his lifetime, which convinces me he really lived - even if the story of Jesus is embellished enough not to resemble what happened. But a ministry along the gospel's basic narrative is plausible.

Actually most of the religions in that area practiced sacrifice, generally of crops and animals, but also the ultimate sacrifice to God, - a human. Which I might add - is what Christianity came up with in the Sacrificed Jesus story.

The first born that opened the womb, - were Sacrificed to Ba'al. The Hebrew originally followed these Gods and Goddesses, and they too Sacrificed the First Born Son.

We know they followed Goddess, as there is a verse saying they were better off when they follow her.


*

 

[Desert Snake]

Actually most of the religions in that area practiced sacrifice, generally of crops and animals, but also the ultimate sacrifice to God, - a human. Which I might add - is what Christianity came up with in the Sacrificed Jesus story.

The first born that opened the womb, - were Sacrificed to Ba'al. The Hebrew originally followed these Gods and Goddesses, and they too Sacrificed the First Born Son.

We know they followed Goddess, as there is a verse saying they were better off when they follow her.


*

This is like a hodge-podge of sketchy deduction. And the 'goddess' reference is saying how they should not be worshipping other deities, you're getting it backward.

 

[oldbadger]

Idk, this seems in the speculation department. It seems to me that if we actually read the narrative, the non-Christians (or Jesus followers), seem a tad hysterical to me, Jesus seems quite rational, I guess it's just ones viewpoint.

Yes..... proposals without firm evidence..... I would agree that this point, and nearly all HJ 'positions' are speculative, because there is no certainty, which is the thread's question. Jesus's followers (disciples) were Galileans and they appear to have been very very superstitious. I have not discovered any dissertations or academic work by any psychiatrists or psychologists which covers the subject of male hysteria in Eastern Mediterranean races other than the briefest mention in a mid 20th century Blacks....... but such conditions linger in races and scrutiny of televised demonstrations, riots, etc in these areas do seem to show interesting levels of hysteria...... the medical condition, that is.

However, it is Josephus who said that Jesus had gathered gentile followers, that's my reference there.

Christianity gathered gentile converts..... Jesus was not much interested in outsiders because his mission was for his own lower classes of his own people.

p.s. Yes I know, some think Josephus is full of interpolations. That being said, even the earliest descriptions have Gentile converts, I don't think it makes that much of a difference whether they were the ones being healed or just Christ followers in general.

Josephus's mentions of Jesus, or the places where he chose to make these mentions, do count as indirect, secondary (tertiary?) evidence for Jesus's life, but I think that any mention of foreigner converts applied to movements after J's death...?

 

[oldbadger]

An historical Jesus thread? How novel!

Why not?
For some of us this is an interesting subject.
Do you comment about the repetitions of other debates?