The Historical Jesus vs. the historical...?

[Jayhawker Soule]

Definition of Inference:

In logic, the process of deriving logical conclusions from premises known or assumed to be true. Verb: infer.

An inference is said to be valid if it's based upon sound evidence and the conclusion follows logically from the premise.

1) Your premises are not know, the are assumed.

2) You have no sound evidence, your conclusions follow only from logical fallacies, e.g., argument from ignorance. In fact, two consecutive jumps from ignorance are required. Is that additive or multiplicative?

You're embarrassing yourself. See IBE.

 

[Copernicus]

And you are left with an argument from ignorance: "we have a movement: it must have had a founder; now we have a founder: must have been the 'object' of the movement. Thin, thin ice, logically unacceptable.

Movements must have founders, so I don't question that logic. However, most religious movements clearly have human founders (e.g. Joseph Smith or Muhammad), and the assumption here is not that a founder existed, but that Jesus Christ, its object of worship, existed historically and was the founder. There is no chain of logic behind that connection. Some think that Paul was the real founder of Christianity, since he is the one on record who advocated the doctrine of spreading the religion to non-Jews. The orthodox Gospels were part of a group of popular stories surrounding the Jesus figure that seem to have appeared many years after Paul's time. The NT itself seems to have appeared only in the 2nd century, when Irenaeus promoted his "fourfold" Gospels as the only authentic accounts in reaction to the competing Gnostic tradition. There is no independent evidence to corroborate his position, and the textual record clearly contains a great many myths and forgeries interspersed with details that could possibly be believable. Biblical scholars tend to weed out the more fantastic parts as obvious embellishments and pick over the remainder in search of clues as to what sounds most plausible. In the end, it seems to come down to Paul's passing reference to having met James, a "brother" of Jesus. If we assume he was telling the truth and not delusional or just trying to embellish his own credibility, maybe that is some kind of evidence. It certainly feels that way to those who argue against mythicism. Beyond that, there is very little serious evidence other than that Christians existed, not the object of their worship. So we get references from folks like Josephus, Tacitus, and Pliny the Younger, who could only report secondhand accounts and whose writings may have been contaminated by error or interpolation. Lots of folks told stories back then. They still do today. Sometimes fiction sounds very plausible. The question comes down to whether one can truly separate fiction from fact merely by studying textual records.

 

[Nakosis]

For the benefit of a newcomer with now idea what the debate is about,could you enlighten me?What are the denialists denying?What is the point you support?

Sorry, I think it is like picking some random episode of "Lost" to watch. You have to have been there since the beginning to make any sense of what is going on.

I was going to offer up something like the DNA and physical body we have for King Tut as evidence for his historical existence, but I don't know if that really has anything to do with this thread.

 

[Bunyip]

I'm more concerned with your basic familiarity of introductory logic, basic inference, and really any field of academia. After all, you were the one to make claims about Nero's intelligence agencies, to make your misuse of terms from mathematics, and to make the laughable claim that classical physics (named so only because it is wrong) is correct. Your capacity to analyze historical evidence is little better, as you have claimed Tacitus made statements in a work he never wrote and based upon your quote-mining of a source that so utterly demonstrates you inability to understand historical methods you couldn't distinguish the translator from Tacitus.

I feel so sad for you, you have repeated those same silly accusations so many times now.

 

[Bunyip]

Which is also the reason it's almost impossible to have an intelligent discussion about this topic in here.

Too many people with an axe to grind against Christianity/religion in general.

To those people, anyone one who's advocating any sort of authenticity regarding basically anything having to do with Christianity has just identified themselves as the enemy.

It's funny you should say that, given that all of the insults and personal attacks on this thread are from the side of those arguing for the historicity of Jesus, and none from those questioning it. it seems that the only anger, axe grinding and attack is from those who are pro Christian.

 

[Quagmire]

It's funny you should say that, given that all of the insults and personal attacks on this thread are from the side of those arguing for the historicity of Jesus, and none from those questioning it. it seems that the only anger, axe grinding and attack is from those who are pro Christian.

Yeah, that's funny alright. And very imaginative too.

Hey man, since I can't get you to stop replying to my posts, and since we both know this is going to wind up with you reporting me for some imaginary slight at some point, why don't you just go ahead and report this post and save us both a lot of time?

 

[Bunyip]

Yeah, that's funny alright. And very imaginative too.

Hey man, since I can't get you to stop replying to my posts, and since we both know this is going to wind up with you reporting me for some imaginary slight at some point, why don't you just go ahead and report this post and save us both a lot of time?

What I would prefer would be simply that the personal attacks and insults from those on your side of the argument are addressed.

Read the thread, I am correct - the personal attacks and name calling from Prophet and Legion go undetected.
Post 40# Prophet; "As is science you goddamn imbecile".
You will find no such comments from the opposition here.

 

[Bunyip]

If we can return to the OP.

The notion being discussed is that people who question the historicity of Jesus, rely unquestioningly upon the historicity of other ancient figures.
Hence the title of this thread; "The historical Jesus vs the Historical...?

So far all of the objections to the claimed certainty regarding the historicity of Jesus have related to the dearth of reliable evidence as opposed to comparisons with the legitimacy of other claims.

As such the OP does seem to have been established as a strawman.

 

[Sapiens]

Movements must have founders, so I don't question that logic.

Movements sometime do not have founders but inevitably, it seems, someone takes control.

However, most religious movements clearly have human founders (e.g. Joseph Smith or Muhammad), and the assumption here is not that a founder existed, but that Jesus Christ, its object of worship, existed historically and was the founder. There is no chain of logic behind that connection.

No chain of logic and no substantial evidence either.

Some think that Paul was the real founder of Christianity, since he is the one on record who advocated the doctrine of spreading the religion to non-Jews. The orthodox Gospels were part of a group of popular stories surrounding the Jesus figure that seem to have appeared many years after Paul's time. The NT itself seems to have appeared only in the 2nd century, when Irenaeus promoted his "fourfold" Gospels as the only authentic accounts in reaction to the competing Gnostic tradition. There is no independent evidence to corroborate his position, and the textual record clearly contains a great many myths and forgeries interspersed with details that could possibly be believable.

"could possibly be believable," even that strikes me as too supportive given the realities.

Biblical scholars tend to weed out the more fantastic parts as obvious embellishments and pick over the remainder in search of clues as to what sounds most plausible.

Kind of interesting to apply the "scholars" logic to the question of their motivation to, "pick over the remainder in search of clues as to what sounds most plausible." I submit that that is rice bowl protection for some and religious affiliations and/or feelings for others.

In the end, it seems to come down to Paul's passing reference to having met James, a "brother" of Jesus. If we assume he was telling the truth and not delusional or just trying to embellish his own credibility, maybe that is some kind of evidence.

This is the Paul who last we saw rolling in the dust on the road to Damascus in the grips of hallucinations so massive that they blinded him and ruined his appetite for three days?

It certainly feels that way to those who argue against mythicism. Beyond that, there is very little serious evidence other than that Christians existed, not the object of their worship. So we get references from folks like Josephus, Tacitus, and Pliny the Younger, who could only report secondhand accounts and whose writings may have been contaminated by error or interpolation. Lots of folks told stories back then. They still do today. Sometimes fiction sounds very plausible. The question comes down to whether one can truly separate fiction from fact merely by studying textual records.

All that I'm saying is that there is little enough real evidence and those declaring the issue closed need to have their motives closely examined.

 

[LegionOnomaMoi]

However, most religious movements clearly have human founders (e.g. Joseph Smith or Muhammad),

Or Pythagoras or Haile Selassie (see e.g., the attached, Standing, E. (2010). Against mythicism: A case for the plausibility of a historical Jesus. Think, 9(24), 13-27.)

and the assumption here is not that a founder existed, but that Jesus Christ, its object of worship, existed historically and was the founder.

True. That is indeed part of the assumption. However, as "Christ" was so loaded a term that the Greek hardly touches upon it and given the matrix from which the gospels (let alone the letters of Paul) originated, one is hard pressed to dream up some explanation for Christianity without Jesus, providing one is aware of historical methods and the context(s) relevant here.

Some think that Paul was the real founder of Christianity

It is indeed quite possible to suppose he was, without winding up with the rather impossible conclusion that Jesus didn't exist. To do so, one would have to posit a thoroughly Jewish figure in terms of a thoroughly non-Jewish notion of the type Jews had recently killed each other for espousing and that moreover this ever-so-attractive movement (which Paul states he originally persecuted violently) drew "gentiles" to it despite the fact that it was persecuted by the Romans while Paul still lived. The, we must not only accept the author of Mark (despite his lack of literary skill) as having founded the genre of historical fiction well over 1,000 years before it exited, but that somehow this historical fiction was then accepted by formerly Jewish or formerly gentile individuals despite the fact that it would have been simplicity itself to question the "Christ" behind the movement and despite the fact that the adoption of said movement was more likely to result in death than anything else.

The orthodox Gospels were part of a group of popular stories surrounding the Jesus figure that seem to have appeared many years after Paul's time.

Mark is generally dated fairly close to Paul. Josephus, Paul, and Q all refer to Jesus' brother. Tacitus tells us that while Paul lived the Christians were named for their founder Christ and were generally hated (a sentiment echoed in Pliny and Suetonius).

The NT itself seems to have appeared only in the 2nd century

The oldest of the gospels, that of John, is ironically the earliest text for which any manuscript evidence exists, in that the earlier fragment of the NT dates from the first half of the 2nd century and is a portion of John. Given the location of its finding and the fact that it is almost universally agreed to be the latest, for the "NT itself" to "have appeared only in the 2nd century" is not even supported by actual manuscript evidence. The historical evidence, from Marcion to Papias, simply makes such a reading more utterly implausible.

, when Irenaeus promoted his "fourfold" Gospels as the only authentic accounts in reaction to the competing Gnostic tradition.

This is quite simply incorrect, even were it not for the fact that whatever the "gnostic tradition" was it was clearly so diverse as to be connected only because of modern scholarship.

There is no independent evidence to corroborate his position, and the textual record clearly contains a great many myths and forgeries interspersed with details that could possibly be believable.

What do you mean by "textual record"?

Biblical scholars tend to

Upon what are you basing your view of what "biblical scholars" do?

So we get references from folks like Josephus, Tacitus, and Pliny the Younger, who could only report secondhand accounts and whose writings may have been contaminated by error or interpolation.

That is if we for no reason whatsoever discount Christian sources, a method seemingly adopted as necessary by all those who haven't studied or contributed to historical scholarship here, and if we dismiss the Talmud, Mara bar Serapion, Thallus, and non-canonical sources. Having done so, we still are left with a relatively incredible foundation of sources.

Lots of folks told stories back then

Yet there exists no parallel to the gospels excepting their classification as ancient biographies.

 

[oldbadger]

Which is also the reason it's almost impossible to have an intelligent discussion about this topic in here.

Too many people with an axe to grind against Christianity/religion in general.

To those people, anyone one who's advocating any sort of authenticity regarding basically anything having to do with Christianity has just identified themselves as the enemy.

..........you've lost the plot here.....
Nearly every regular contributor accepts that the existence of Jesus was possible, many accept HJ was plausible, and a lot (incl non-believers) accept HJ as probable.

Look what a pro-Jesus debater wrote earlier.....

Prophet:- Rather than attempting to submit any kind of theory which explains the evidence we are left with,

I don't think that you understand the subject matter..... we are not arguing about Christianity, we are debating and discussing the History of Jesus, and the best minds in research can just about agree on J's Baptism, Incident in the Temple and execution........ very little to cling on to.

 

[oldbadger]

No, you are left with inference to best explanation on the one hand versus implicit ad hominem and conspiracy theories on the other.

Let me get this straight...... so you don't believe that any part of the Jesus story was manipulated, altered, adjusted, exaggerated or ..... on the other hand, smothered or hidden away?

Just asking......

 

[oldbadger]

There may be some evidence that Jesus was a member of the Essenes.
There is mention of Jesus in the writings of Josephus, although there is controversy over the authenticity.

The more that I think about the possibility that the Jesus story is the mixed reporting of two or more people, so the more interested I become in the Essene theory.
The Galilean 'Heal-for-Meal' Holy itinerant.
The religious Essene.
The devout disciple of John the Baptist.
The Jewish insurrectionist.
Plus the story of the Brigand, Jesus Son of the Father.

All of this is surrounded by a great deal of controversy of course.

It does not support the current Christian thinking.
In fact it would bring down the whole structure of Christianity if it were proven true.

Christianity does not have to suffer from any truth that might be discovered.

 

[redpolk]

Sorry, I think it is like picking some random episode of "Lost" to watch. You have to have been there since the beginning to make any sense of what is going on.

I was going to offer up something like the DNA and physical body we have for King Tut as evidence for his historical existence, but I don't know if that really has anything to do with this thread.

For King Tut we have a body.If we find Jesus' body,Christianity is in trouble.

 

[Jayhawker Soule]

Let me get this straight...... so you don't believe that any part of the Jesus story was manipulated, altered, adjusted, exaggerated or ..... on the other hand, smothered or hidden away?

Just asking......

I'm a Jew. I consider much of it to be midrashic embellishment. But that is a far cry from believing that the works of Paul (and, later, Luke) were complete fabrications.

 

[oldbadger]

I'm a Jew. I consider much of it to be midrashic embellishment. But that is a far cry from believing that the works of Paul (and, later, Luke) were complete fabrications.

Your post infers (ha ha! ) that the opinion of a majority of HJ Scholars is deeply enmeshed in conspiracy theory, because (as you know well) they only have general consensus of opinion about J's Baptism, Temple dispute and execution.

And, yes, I do believe that Paul's Christianity did little more than use the name of Jesus, because he seems to have held little interest in the man's life. You mention Luke..... why, it was a lovely story he thought out, between copying whole tracts of info from other more genuine sources.

It would seem that you do not like HJ threads, (this one NOT introduced by any atheist, you may notice) possibly because you see them as an attack upon Christianity. But I have learned more about Jesus on these threads over two years, and hold more interest in the man, than from all the rest of my life put together.

 

[Jayhawker Soule]

Your post infers (ha ha! ) that the opinion of a majority of HJ Scholars is deeply enmeshed in conspiracy theory, ...

Then, either it was poorly written or poorly read. My opinion is precisely the opposite: that the typical mythicist position is predicated upon ad hominem and conspiracy theories.

 

[oldbadger]

F

Then, either it was poorly written or poorly read. My opinion is precisely the opposite: that the typical mythicist position is predicated upon ad hominem and conspiracy theories.

Fair enough......

 

[Copernicus]

However, most religious movements clearly have human founders (e.g. Joseph Smith or Muhammad),

Or Pythagoras or Haile Selassie (see e.g., the attached, Standing, E. (2010). Against mythicism: A case for the plausibility of a historical Jesus. Think, 9(24), 13-27.)

and the assumption here is not that a founder existed, but that Jesus Christ, its object of worship, existed historically and was the founder.

True. That is indeed part of the assumption. However, as "Christ" was so loaded a term that the Greek hardly touches upon it and given the matrix from which the gospels (let alone the letters of Paul) originated, one is hard pressed to dream up some explanation for Christianity without Jesus, providing one is aware of historical methods and the context(s) relevant here.

Standing's paper is a straw man argument that Jesus probably existed because we can cite examples of real people who became the basis for a legend. It is easy to counter that with examples of cult leaders who probably never existed but became the object of cults. Just because John Frum is said to have spawned the Cargo Cult religions, that doesn't mean that there was a real person named "John Frum" who spawned them. Maybe there was a real Robin Hood or King Arthur, maybe not.

Was there a real person whose existence led to the Santa Claus legend? Well...sort of. There was Nikolaos of Myra. But do we therefore claim that there was a historical Santa Claus? No, not really. That's not what the historicism/mythicism debate is about. Historicists are not talking about just someone who happened to be crucified and then had all sorts of nonsense made up about his life. They are talking about someone who had a fair number of attributes that we attribute to Jesus--a religious leader who inspired a following.

...Mark is generally dated fairly close to Paul. Josephus, Paul, and Q all refer to Jesus' brother. Tacitus tells us that while Paul lived the Christians were named for their founder Christ and were generally hated (a sentiment echoed in Pliny and Suetonius).

But what can the expression "fairly close" mean? We do not have the autograph, and what we have is basically a reconstruction of what scholars believe was the original text. So there is a lot of debate and speculation about dating. The other two synoptic gospels clearly use it as a reference source, but we have no original sources for any of the four gospels. Jesus was a very popular cult figure in the second century, so there were a lot of stories about his life circulating in the Empire. Most of them were suppressed by the later orthodox movement, because they conflicted with official church doctrine. I don't see the gospels as a credible basis for promoting historicism. Only Paul is thought to have been a contemporary of Jesus, but much of what he wrote was not preserved, and forgery of religious materials was rampant in the Empire. So scholars only treat some of the writings attributed to Paul as having been authored by him. And he did seem to suffer from delusions, given the content of what we do trust him to have written. Did he meet the brother of Jesus? Was he using the word "brother" in a religious sense (as Richard Carrier has claimed)? Was it just in his imagination, as were other things he said? Was he lying? There are many possibilities.

The NT itself seems to have appeared only in the 2nd century

The oldest of the gospels, that of John, is ironically the earliest text for which any manuscript evidence exists, in that the earlier fragment of the NT dates from the first half of the 2nd century and is a portion of John. Given the location of its finding and the fact that it is almost universally agreed to be the latest, for the "NT itself" to "have appeared only in the 2nd century" is not even supported by actual manuscript evidence. The historical evidence, from Marcion to Papias, simply makes such a reading more utterly implausible.

Pay attention to what I wrote. The NT is an anthology. Irenaeus may not have been the first to promote the anthology, but he is our earliest attestation of the existence of the "fourfold gospel". Each piece would obviously have existed independently before Irenaeus, but so did other Jesus stories. Christianity was a much more diverse community in the second century than it was allowed to remain after the fourth, when orthodoxy rose up on its hind legs and smote all its competitors.

, when Irenaeus promoted his "fourfold" Gospels as the only authentic accounts in reaction to the competing Gnostic tradition.

This is quite simply incorrect, even were it not for the fact that whatever the "gnostic tradition" was it was clearly so diverse as to be connected only because of modern scholarship.

No, it's not incorrect according to what I've read. See, for example, the Wikipedia article on Irenaeus, which primarily references Will Durant's book Caesar and Christ (1972):

Irenaeus' best-known book, Adversus Haereses or Against Heresies (c. 180), is a detailed attack on Gnosticism, which was then a serious threat to the Church, and especially on the system of the Gnostic Valentinus. As one of the first great Christian theologians, he emphasized the traditional elements in the Church, especially the episcopate, Scripture, and tradition. Against the Gnostics, who said that they possessed a secret oral tradition from Jesus himself, Irenaeus maintained that the bishops in different cities are known as far back as the Apostles and that the bishops provided the only safe guide to the interpretation of Scripture. His writings, with those of Clement and Ignatius, are taken as among the earliest signs of the developing doctrine of the primacy of the Roman see. Irenaeus is the earliest witness to recognition of the canonical character of all four gospels.

There is no independent evidence to corroborate his position, and the textual record clearly contains a great many myths and forgeries interspersed with details that could possibly be believable.

What do you mean by "textual record"?

Written materials from the period of the Roman Empire. What did you think I meant?

Upon what are you basing your view of what "biblical scholars" do?

Upon what I've read that they do. It is not an unprecedented behavior. Thomas Jefferson is famous for having reconstructed the Bible so as to remove all of the references to miracles. What scholars do with the historical record is not quite as gross, but it is analogous. They do not let all of the contradictions and obvious embellishments get in the way of taking the rest of the text seriously. However, all of that discarded material ought to be a warning to those who would accept the rest as plausible. You can ignore the goofy stuff, but you ought not to ignore the fact that it is there. For those of us of a more skeptical mind, it may not poison the well, but it makes the water smell awful fishy.

So we get references from folks like Josephus, Tacitus, and Pliny the Younger, who could only report secondhand accounts and whose writings may have been contaminated by error or interpolation.

That is if we for no reason whatsoever discount Christian sources, a method seemingly adopted as necessary by all those who haven't studied or contributed to historical scholarship here, and if we dismiss the Talmud, Mara bar Serapion, Thallus, and non-canonical sources. Having done so, we still are left with a relatively incredible foundation of sources.

And an incredibly skewed one, thanks to the meddling, censorship, and outright book-burning by people who were motivated to distort the historical record for the sake of personal profit or personal bias. I have not advocated just dismissing it all out of hand, but I have advocated not accepting it out of hand. What mainly bothers me is all of that non-existent material that one would expect to be there or that we only possess fragments of to sift through. Given the importance of the Jesus figure to its followers, one would expect them to have preserved more than just scraps of text. Instead, they fought with each other over who got to say anything at all about Jesus. Scholarship got pushed aside by doctrine. So don't be so quick to dismiss mythicism out of hand.

Lots of folks told stories back then

Yet there exists no parallel to the gospels excepting their classification as ancient biographies.

I'm really not sure what you are talking about here. The gospels are hagiographies, not real biographies. And there were other works of that genre back then.

 

[Bunyip]

I'm a Jew. I consider much of it to be midrashic embellishment. But that is a far cry from believing that the works of Paul (and, later, Luke) were complete fabrications.

Paul's testimony is drawn from conversations he had with a man who had been executed years earlier. Of course it is a fabrication - dead people do not chat to you.