You cant even write a replacement hypothesis, because once you start, you realize a mythical Jesus doesn't make sense. You cant even fathom how it started in mythology while keeping the evidence we have.
Most mythers only attack blindly, and promote a mythical view without explaining it, and trying to trash the evidence they disagree with.
I think your better then that. Create a replacement hypothesis, or admit your making this way more complicated then it really is.
Because as it stands nothing makes more sense then a martyred man at Passover.
What makes sense to you does not make it historical, besides I don't see anything in Paul that suggests passover. The gospels came later and they turned Paul's Lord's Supper into a Last Supper during a passover, I suppose it makes for a good story.
I have no need to prove Jesus was historical anymore than I have a need to prove Jesus was completely mythical. Least of all I have no interest in making a replacement hypothesis for those that try to prove that their religious founding figure was historical, they can knock themselves out for all I care.
There are reasons historians do not do this. The most convincing was what happened when they did it with Socrates. Back before Fréret, Bruckner, & Garnier, most of the interest in Socrates was (like Jesus at that time) not concerned really with history at all, but with philosophy for the former and Christology for the latter. The above 3 names in particular turned interest in Socrates into a hunt for the quintessential kernel.
This turned the Socratic problem during the 19th century into quagmire: all scholars arguing that X source gave us the kernel, while other sources had some set problems such that they should be ignored.
The end result was that by the early 20th century, many historians had pretty much given up. All we had was stories of some philosophical equivalent of Achilles: the wisdom/philosopher hero. I know you aren't talking about "kernel" in terms of specific sources like Xenophon compared to Plato, but the problems are at the very least quite similar. Historians trying to find the kernel without realizing that the only possible kernel would be Socrates himself. That is, only he would be able to give us the kernel (or as close as is possible), and he didn't write anything. Same for Jesus.
Now we have scholars who simply ignore a century of historical scholarship and treat the sources for Socrates uncritically AND those who say that we can't know anything about Socrates at all.
But we have a 3rd kind: those who recognize that all the sources are problematic, but that they can be checked in various ways.
So, for example, we know that Aristophanes was clearly writing fiction (drama actually), not history. And we know that the Socrates in Plato's Apology contradicts Plato's Socrates elsewhere (simplistically, in the Apology Socrates denies being natural philosopher and of doubting the gods).
However, in Aristophanes play The Clouds, we find a Socrates described consistent with Plato's descriptions outside of his Apology, and consistent with what Plato brings up in his Apology (his Socrates just denies these things in that work).
Thus, we can use contradicting statements in Plato, as
1) In his Apology, his "character" Socrates was denying certain charges, but the point of the work was to defend this Socrates.
2) Plato elsewhere indicates these charges are true (at least to some extent)
3) They are consistent with a totally fictional work which, if we postulate Socrates existed, now explain the contradictions in Plato: a work designed to defend Socrates did so, and is contradicted by Plato's works elsewhere and consistent with a fictional story about Socrates that nonetheless depicts him as doing that which he was charged with.
And for context, we have e.g., external evidence suggesting that at the time Socrates was supposed to have lived, there was a "religious" crisis (which, at that time, meant a social and political crisis) and Socrates was among those accused and/or executed for impiety.
This is what happens when we try to look for the kernel. People don't have one, and modern biographies can't give one. Even one person's answer about themselves might differ over time or perhaps because they're in a bad mood.
The approach is not to start looking for the answer, but a framework. We examine the historical context, the best methods to analyze the sources and evaluate both how important they are and the ways in which they are biased, and a great deal more in order go from the very general to as specific as we wish. However, the more specific, the more contentious/speculative.
But that is how historians work (ideally): what is our evidence and what are the most logical, consistent, and holistic explanations for this evidence?
(Kinda like tracing mythical Santa Claus back to the historical Saint Nicholas.)
Given that the 19th century scholars who were interested in the historical Socrates made comparisons to the historical Jesus, and those interested in the historical Jesus to Socrates, it's a much better comparison. Also, we learned the same lesson from both: when you go straight to "what is the historical nature of this person based on these particular sources", you've already failed.
The reason Schweitzer said that we have better evidence for Jesus than practically anybody and gave Socrates as an example was not blind religious bias. It was because both before and after him (not to mention ancient authors from Aristotle to Diogenes Laertius), determined that the Socratic texts were a type of literary genre, featuring a Socrates as the fictional Hero (not in the Sophoclean sense, but a sort of wisdom Hero).
This had been said of our sources for Jesus a century before Schweitzer. In fact, Schweitzer already addressed the mythicist position there, a century ago.
Karl Joel & Rudolf Bultmann both wrote curiously similar statements in the early 20th century. Bultmann wrote that we couldn't say much about Jesus. Joel wrote that we could only say of Socrates the we know we don't really know anything, much like the quote attributed to Socrates.
Both were wrong.
IMO, the historical source for the hyperbolic JC character must be an historical person of that era who cleansed the Temple, preached against the Herodian collaborators of Rome and was later killed for doing so.
You've already assumed here things about the nature of political and social activity at Rome, the nature of their "collaborators", the ways in which the dynamics of Jewish responses to the Temple, the nature of the Temple itself in relation to both those who ran it, those who denounced it, and both specific groups along with it's much broader significance at this time. That's without even getting to the gospels. And we have hundreds of thousands of pages from historians one part of one of these (who the Sadducees were). Clearly, nobody can claim to have read all that unless that's what they devote themselves to. And indeed that's frequently how historians work. They pick a few very specific historical research areas and focus on that.
That's why nobody gets a degree in "historical Jesus studies". It's both too specific a topic and one that involves too many specialties (this isn't unique; it's the norm). The way it is handled is by specializing. That's why we can find a linguist who has consulted for Boeing.
Scholars with degrees in history, classics, and biblical studies will borrow from anthropology, sociology, linguistics, and more. They'll actually have these specialists submit papers to volumes on NT studies or orality in Jesus' day.
As fun as it is for some, like Doherty and Carrier, to act like biblical scholars are unqualified people isolated from the world, I can give you hundreds of names of people in the fields I mentioned and others who have actively participated in biblical scholarship. Some of them are probably people Copernicus has either met or read.
What makes sense to you does not make it historical, besides I don't see anything in Paul that suggests passover. The gospels came later and they turned Paul's Lord's Supper into a Last Supper during a passover, I suppose it makes for a good story.
I have no need to prove Jesus was historical anymore than I have a need to prove Jesus was completely mythical. Least of all I have no interest in making a replacement hypothesis for those that try to prove that their religious founding figure was historical, they can knock themselves out for all I care.
Instead he founds his whole theology surrounding this martyred man, and never once states that's not how it happened, nor tries to tell another explanation.
That is telling.
The gospels came later and they turned Paul's Lord's Supper into a Last Supper during a passover,
There are some bad arguments for Jesus being completely mythical and there a bad arguments coming from those that try to prove an historical Jesus. What difference does it make? Shooting goldfish in a barrel, it's all the same to me.
There are some bad arguments for Jesus being completely mythical and there a bad arguments coming from those that try to prove an historical Jesus. What difference does it make? Shooting goldfish in a barrel, it's all the same to me.
How could he? Paul's Lord's Super was turned into a Last Supper during Passover by gospel writers after Paul died. So no, he didn't live then, he was dead.
steeltoes besides I don't see anything in Paul that suggests passover. .
How could he? Paul's Lord's Super was turned into a Last Supper during Passover by gospel writers after Paul died. So no, he didn't live then, he was dead.
Argument from ignorance, you don't know why it is a bad argument therefor you think it is a good one. It is fallacious.
It makes for a great story, but did it happen in this particular case? Can the story be corroborated? Those are the questions that can be asked. This story never appeared to get off the ground until the late second century. It sat on a shelf collecting dust until then by the sounds of it. When people finally read the story they believed it, still do.
