Your POV on the historical Jesus

[nPeace]

That's my view of history and historians, it's exactly like Pharoah telling Moses' what's the news of previous generations and everyone has their dependence on Pharaoh's government in that regard, and I will leave it at that.

This generation trusts way too blindly.

Hear hear.

 

[Link]

"This generation"?
What makes you think that this generation trusts more blindly than the primitive folks who invented religion?
Tommy

This generation, because we have some scientific knowledge, trusts all form of Academic authority. While in the past, religion for the people of falsehood was just a way to get along and they took leaders as idols among themselves so to love one another based on them and religion was a unifying factor. Almost no one really believed in the conjecture, but just went along and played along.

As for the Messengers that came with bright proofs in form of illuminating books and miracles and wisdom, they proved everything they said, to their generation, and even to those who would not witness their miracles.

This generation on the other hand, is not just playing a long. They really trust Academia to do all the thinking for them. They won't even give God and his chosen Guides and his holy books a chance to guide them.

They are lost in this regard like no other generation.

 

[GoodbyeDave]

• Papias was probably not referring to our present-day gMark, in fact it is still unclear to which document Papias was referring.
• The Pauline epistles aren't real letters but documents of faith written in the form of letters. You cannot use them for historical purposes as with the gospel of Mark.
• There is still some doubt about the authenticity of those references in Josephus.
• Same problem with Tacitus.

• On what basis do you make that statement about Papias? His works have not survived, save in quotation. Eusebius, who quotes the remark about Mark actually had his writings — he'd have been hard-put to quote them otherwise! Are you suggesting that there were two books about Jesus with the name Mark attached, one known to Papias and one to us? Try using Occam's razor.
• The Pauline letters are answers to questions raised in the churches he founded. But they obviously reflect facts that he knew. He arrived in Jerusalem, if I remember correctly, 8 years after the crucifixion. Are you suggesting that the story of Jesus had been invented and accepted in that period — that the people whom Paul met who claimed to be Jesus's disciples and family were all imposters?
• The references in Josephus show signs of interpolation, but so do many ancient texts — learning to spot and amend such this is a basic method of textual criticism, which you can see exhibited in the apparatus criticus attached to any scholarly text. Most scholars accept the references as evidence of the historicity of Jesus.
• Again most classicists accept the reference in Tacitus.

All the "Jesus as myth" writers are militant atheists like Richard Carrier and they are rejected by professional historians as cranks.

 

[Twilight Hue]

Did Jesus Christ exist?
It is universally accepted by biblical scholars, without doubt, that Jesus existed.
They consider it a fact, based on a handful (something like five or so) of writings, by a few historians they consider genuine or authentic.

My question is, what makes one or two letters of a Roman historian, and writings of a Jewish historian, more genuine and authentic, than historians like Matthew and Mark... who wrote earlier, and were closely associated with Jesus, and his early footstep followers?

Even if one were to claim that they did not know Jesus (for which there is no evidence for this claim), or other claims, the fact is, these writers wrote much about Jesus' life and ministry, and the followers that formed the Christian congregation - including Paul.

So, it seem quite evident to me, that the only reason, most scholars, and skeptics, dismiss the Gospel writers, and other books of the Christian Greek scriptures, is basically because they include supernatural stuff.
I don't see that as a valid reason to doubt primary sources. In fact, from my perspective, there is more evidence of the reliability, and authenticity of the Bible writers, than Josephus, and Tacitus.
It is these sources that prove to me Jesus existed.

What was Jesus like?
Jesus was exactly as described by those that knew him, and wrote about him in the Christian Greek scriptures.

What did he do and say?
Jesus did and said exactly as described by those that knew him, and wrote about him in the Christian Greek scriptures.

The thing about all the ancient historians is they were not talking about Jesus at all.

They were directly talking about the early Christians and the object of those beliefs which included the persona of Christ when you view the context of the statements they had made.

Just because it bears the name Christ , does not mean Christ existed.

 

[nPeace]

The thing about all the ancient historians is they were not talking about Jesus at all.

They were directly talking about the early Christians and the object of those beliefs which included the persona of Christ when you view the context of the statements they had made.

Just because it bears the name Christ , does not mean Christ existed.

References please.

 

[Twilight Hue]

References please.

Geez... You should of had them already long ago, considering all the past topics that we've had on this subject.

Just look up Pliny the Elder and Josephus to get the ball rolling for ya. I'm sure you're capable of managing it.

 

[nPeace]

Geez... You should of had them already long ago, considering all the past topics that we've had on this subject.

Just look up Pliny the Elder and Josephus to get the ball rolling for ya. I'm sure you're capable of managing it.

I did, but it seems to me you read only the parts you wanted. So sorry you can't even support your claim. I'm not here to do that for you'
If you are happy just making claims, that's fine. There is no rule on RF which says you must support your claims with evidence/reference, so I find it's common practice here to just make claims, and declare...not in words, "It's a fact because I said so".
Claim acknowledged.

 

[columbus]

I did, but it seems to me you read only the parts you wanted. So sorry you can't even support your claim. I'm not here to do that for you'
If you are happy just making claims, that's fine. There is no rule on RF which says you must support your claims with evidence, so I find it's common practice here to just make claims, and declare...not in words, "It's a fact because I said so".
Claim acknowledged.

Here's the claim I am making.
Nobody but gospel authors ever made a claim that Jesus existed with any credibility.
People did refer to guys with a similar name. People referred to the cult, it was mainly created by Paul who didn't actually even meet Jesus.

But their is no credible evidence that the Legend of Christ is based on accurate history.

Quite the contrary, I would expect a lot of such evidence.
If I were an I inhabitant of 1st century Judea, and was aware of Jesus's preaching, His violent crucifixion on Passover, and then found Him fresh as a daisy the next week,
I'd have been in the streets! I'd have done whatever I thought He wanted me to do. I'd die for whatever Jesus told me to fight for. I'd want to know everything I could find out, especially before the Ascension.
I would at least remember where the Ascension happened.

But nothing like any of that happened. Nobody noticed Jesus's Death and Resurrection for decades afterwards, as far as anybody can tell. Nobody wrote a Gospel. Nobody marked the place Jesus was buried, or Ascended (although there is, curiously, lots of details about the Nativity).

I see this as pretty clear evidence that, while Jesus existed, Christ is a legend invented for the purposes of people who lived long after He died.
Tom

 

[Vouthon]

Paul says plainly at Galatians 1:11 that he never met an historical Jesus and was never instructed about him by other people. Instead he had a vision ─ that is, everything Paul tells you about Jesus comes out of his own head.

Your description of Paul is very flattering, as it makes him look like the exceptional genius who came up with an entire religion. The truth is far more prosaic.

There are no Pauline scholars of note, whom I am aware of, that would endorse your contention that "everything" Paul tells us about Jesus "came out of his own head".

The consensus (here I am with scholarly consensuses again), typified by the likes of Paula Fredriksen, E.P Sanders and the late Larry Hurtado, is that the extent of the novelty of Paul's theology in the early church has been greatly exaggerated in the traditional accounts - not entirely so, since he was (in many respects) an exceptional thinker in the early church and seems to have pursued a more radical doctrine of grace/antinomianism, but in the main he was not innovating.

There wasn't even much of a divide between himself and James, Jesus's brother (referred to twice by Josephus, on both occasions almost universally accepted by scholars as authentically Josephan), the leader of the early church, as has been commonly opposed - or else he wouldn't have urged his followers to pay the voluntary tithe/collection for James:

"From the beginning—before Paul was even involved—the movement had admitted gentiles without requiring them to be circumcised. James, Peter, and John all affirmed that position, back in Jerusalem...And finally, Paul, as we have seen, worked in concert with James about the collection for the Jerusalem community throughout the rest of his missions. No ideological breach yawned between the two men" (Paula Fredriksen (2018), p.188).

​

Paul's Gentile churches were literally financing James's Jerusalem church. As the Fordham historian L.L. Welborn has noted in a Cambridge University Press study from 2013:

https://www.cambridge.org/core/serv...texts_and_consequences_of_a_pauline_ideal.pdf

In Corinthians, Paul stipulates as the criterion and goal of the collection for the poor saints in Jerusalem the ideal of ‘equality’ (ἰσότηϛ): ‘for the purpose [of the collection] is not that there [should be] relief for others and affliction for you, but rather [it should be] out of equality (ἐξ ἰσότητοϛ). In the now time, your abundance should supply their lack, in order that their abundance may supply your lack, so that there may be equality (ὅπωϛ γένηται ἰσότηϛ)....

Paul’s appeal to ‘equality’ as the principle that should govern relations between Greeks and Jews would be especially shocking, if Hans Dieter Betz is correct in his interpretation of Paul’s subsequent statement in Corinthians about the effect of the collection as signifying the obligatory submission of the Achaians to the Jerusalemites
​

We now know with relative certitude, based upon ample textual studies - as you allude to yourself - that in Corinthians, Galatians and Philippians he references pre-Pauline hymns and creedal statements. The famous statement: "There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus" (Galatians 3:28), has for now long been regarded by most scholars as a pre-Pauline baptismal formula. In other words, he didn't actually 'come up' with that profound insight - he simply inherited it from the Jerusalem church and was referencing what, by then in the 50s CE, was a common aphorism among the nascent communities of Jesus-believers used in their rituals.

Paul refers to his conversations with people who knew Jesus directly, including his brother James, the apostles Peter, John and others. He lived with the apostle Peter (Cephas) for fifteen days and we know that they were close enough to have engaged in a very heated argument that Paul boasted about many years after the fact. In both Galatians 1:18-9 and 1 Corinthians 9:5 the “brothers of the Lord” are mentioned. The existence of Jesus’ brother James is further strengthened by the fact he is attested outside of Christian texts – in Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, XX.200-203, where he is described as well-liked notable of Jerusalem whose stoning to death by the chief priests sparked outrage.

In the early Christian movement, "prophecy" and private "revelation" were signifiers of authority. The Didache, the earliest extra-canonical (first century) catechism of Jewish Christianity, states: "Let every prophet who cometh unto you be received as the Lord".

The early church was a movement that literally thought it was living in the messianic times predicted by the Hebrew prophet Joel: "And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy" (Joel 2:28). As such, its not surprising that early Christians all tried to "upstage" one another by claiming that they too had been 'gifted' with mystical revelation or a vision of the Lord, as the Holy Spirit was believed now to be dwelling within all followers of Jesus.

When Paul boasts in Galatians that he received revelations unmediated through human knowledge, it needs to be understood in this context. He wasn't saying anything that was exceptional in the Christian movement - and his hyperbole doesn't actually mean that everything he's telling us about Jesus was derived from visions, a ludicrous conclusion because its flatly contradicted by the numerous occasions in which he cites the oral traditions.

You're taking his self-propaganda far too seriously there.

Paul was not writing a biography of Jesus, nor was he interested in doing so. He was writing letters to churches he had founded in an attempt to ensure that they overcame factionalism, were thriving and growing, by pushing his understanding of the Jesus movement.

What's fascinating, is that in spite of this agenda we find a number of references to various elements of Jesus's life and preaching in his letters (which are 'common knowledge' to the audience in the 50s A.D.), which indicates that Paul knew a lot more than he wrote down.

Firstly, we learn from 2 Corinthians 10:1 that Paul appealed to his readers by the, "meekness and gentleness of Christ". As a number of scholars have noted: "On a number of occasions Paul appealed to the example of Christ and urged others to imitation. For example, he encouraged the Philippians to have the mind of Christ in humility and service (Phil 2:5-11). Elsewhere he instructed the Romans to put on the Lord Jesus Christ and avoid self-gratification (Rom 13:14). In the midst of Jewish-Gentile discord in the Roman church, Paul told them to welcome each other as Christ has welcomed them (Rom 15:7). The apostle even urged the Corinthians to imitate him since he imitated Christ (1 Cor 11:1). Admonitions to imitate Christ depend ultimately on having authentic traditions regarding Christ’s life. The traditions about how Christ lived would have provided a script for imitation. When, for example, Paul taught the Romans to strive to please their neighbors, he appealed to Christ’s example: “for Christ did not seek to please himself” (Rom 15:3)." (Encyclopedia of the Historical Jesus, ed. Craig A. Evans, Routledge (2008)). Other examples:

1 Corinthians 15:1-8. Paul tells us he received the tradition (paredōka = “I delivered”; parelabon = “I received”), of Christ’s death on a Roman execution stake and burial. He reiterates this in 1 Cor. 2:2, Gal. 3:1, 2 Cor. 13:4, and many more occasions. He didn't derive this from a "revelation" but from the same synoptic tradition we find in the gospels.

1 Corinthians 11:23-26 Paul tells us that he received the tradition that Jesus had a last supper with his disciples before dying, quotes his alleged words "this is my body...blood...do this in memory of me") and then notes that he was betrayed by one of his disciples. Again, no personal revelation involved here - just a historical memory distributed in the early movement that formed part of the verbal tradition that was eventually written down in Mark's gospel.

1 Corinthians 15:3-8 Paul tells us that Jesus had a core of inner disciples called "the Twelve". Again, no revelation involved here - just an allusion to another verbal tradition.

Romans 1:3 Paul tells us that in "his earthly life [Jesus] was a descendant of David". That is, he tells us about Jesus's flesh and blood ancestry (this could only have come from a family tradition i.e. "do you know, our family is supposedly descended from King David").

1 Thessalonians. 2:14–15 Paul tells us that Jewish leaders (the High Priests) participated in the killing of Jesus, again that's a reflection of the synoptic tradition of the trial before the Jewish elders.

Then we have quotations of Jesus's teachings in Paul's epistles. In answering the Corinthians' questions about marriage, Paul cites Jesus' ruling on divorce as binding on his followers. "To the married I say, not I but the Lord, that the wife should not separate from her husband but if she does, let her remain single or else be reconciled to her husband and that the husband should not divorce his wife" (1 Corinthians vii. 10 f.).

You can find this exact same teaching against divorce in Matthew and Luke - Paul didn't "come up with it" by himself.

Paul tells the Corinthians that "the Lord [Jesus] commanded that those who proclaim the gospel should get their living by the gospel" (1 Corinthians ix. 14). This "command" appears in our synoptic tradition in the Matthaean commission to the twelve (Matthew x. 10), "the labourer deserves his food", and in the Lukan commission to the seventy (Luke x. 7).

As Bart Ehrman notes, "Paul's first letter (1 Thessalonians) is usually dated to 49 CE; his last (Romans?) to some twelve or thirteen years after that [...] In addition to data about Jesus’s life and death, Paul mentions on several occasions the teachings he delivered. Where did Paul get all this received tradition, from whom, and most important, when? Paul himself gives us some hints. He tells us, he made a trip to Jerusalem, and there he spent fifteen days with Cephas [Peter] and James. Cephas [Peter] was one of Jesus’s twelve disciples, and James was his brother."

Scholars can discern strong 'kernels' of early Palestinian Jesus tradition through multiple attestation, criterion of embarrassment and many other analytical tools - and Paul has been found to exhibit this.

Thus, to say that "everything" he tells us about Jesus is from his own head is extremely far off-the-mark.

 

[blü 2]

Yes, I'm aware, and my statement is still correct.

Are you aware of how "textual criticism" is not "forensic science" and of how you've just made an appeal to authority fallacy and an ad populum (most scholars believe X)?

Ahm, textual criticism is an exacting form of reasoned enquiry, and addresses questions both of the authenticity of the document, and the nature and quality of its contents. You have no basis for dismissing an argument simply because it's derived from competent scholarship regarding the text. Instead you need to state your disagreements with the scholarship, and make your own case from the evidence.

At the same time, you're right to point out that to argue from authority is fallacious. For example, like any other ancient documents, the books of the bible have no more authority than the processes of textual and historical examination can affirm for them.

 

[loverofhumanity]

I didn't suggest that Jesus was non existent. I'm confident that He did.

Whether what was later ascribed to Him accurately reflected His Ministry is a very different question.
Tom

To me Jesus real and greatest miracle was that His teachings changed hearts and transformed people’s character. Things like raising people from the dead I believe meant He raised the spiritually dead to spiritual life. A lot of what was ascribed to Him I believe was spiritual acts not physical because if one interprets everything literally it does appear extraordinary and also against science and reason and becomes more superstitious than real.

 

[Marcion]

Your description of Paul is very flattering, as it makes him look like the exceptional genius who came up with an entire religion. The truth is far more prosaic.

There are no Pauline scholars of note, whom I am aware of, that would endorse your contention that "everything" Paul tells us about Jesus "came out of his own head".

The consensus (here I am with scholarly consensuses again), typified by the likes of Paula Fredriksen, E.P Sanders and the late Larry Hurtado, is that the extent of the novelty of Paul's theology in the early church has been greatly exaggerated in the traditional accounts - not entirely so, since he was (in many respects) an exceptional thinker in the early church and seems to have pursued a more radical doctrine of grace/antinomianism, but in the main he was not innovating.

If the scholarly concensus about the origins of the letters however is wrong, your arguments fall to pieces. I believe they are wrong, very wrong indeed. Much that is found in the letters was written by different authors and the final editors were members of the Church Orthodoxy (the original letters were Heterodox) who did not like much of the original theology of the "letters", adding their own interpolations and other redactions (even whole new "letters") to bring sort of more harmony with the doctrines of Orthodoxy.

Of course the Marcionite Church would have objected to what the Orthodoxy did to the original corpus of so-called letters but they were branded as heretics. Scholars can now be much more objective about who really cheated with the Scriptures despite the destruction of all of the original books that Marcion and his school produced.

 

[Vouthon]

Paul, as the earliest extant witness to the Christian tradition (writing a mere decade and a half after Jesus died, and at a time when people who had known him personally were still alive, some of them referred to by Paul in his letters), is actually very insightful in what he "doesn't say" just as much for what he says.

For example, Paul advents nowhere to the doctrine of the Virgin Birth of Jesus.

He appears to assume, actually, that Jesus was born normally and was literally (in the flesh) a descendant of David, whereas the later gospels of Matthew and Luke strive to portray him as being only adopted by Joseph.

This has been useful to scholars, in highlighting (along with other evidence in the Nativity accounts themselves, which point to them being largely ahistorical unlike the baptism by John, incident in the Temple, Last Supper and crucifixion, which are all credible) areas of apparent accretion to the tradition that doesn't go back to the historical Jesus.

By contrast, Paul does advent to the 'divinity' of Jesus - that is, his pre-existent status as a supramundane being that was incarnated in the flesh as a human person - and crucially 'in passing' (i.e. its already an assumed belief, not something contested by his listeners, which suggests that the belief that Jesus was an incarnate being from some other realm that took human form).

1 Corinthians 8:6

6 yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist.

​

The above statement is not thought by scholars to have been composed by Paul, rather they believe he was referencing an already well-known creed of the primitive church, which tells us that the earliest Christians had already come to regard Jesus as a pre-existent divine agent of creation co-eternal with God, here incorporating him into the shema.

There is a consensus in New Testament scholarship now that "high christology" emerged early, before the writing of the Pauline epistles (which are our first Christian documents). See the relevant chapters in Bart Ehrman's 2014 book, "How Jesus became God" for an accessible overview of this scholarly consensus.

For instance, Hurtado contends on pages 119 - 124 of his now standard treatment of the topic in the book, Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity:

"…The overwhelming majority of scholars in the field agree that there are at least a few passages in Paul’s undisputed letters that reflect and presuppose the idea of Jesus’ preexistence…

Most scholars take these verses to reflect a belief in the personal preexistence and incarnation of Christ…

Paul’s formulaic statement in 1 Corinthians 8:6 indicates that already at that early point in the Christian movement believers were attributing to Christ not only preexistence or foreordination, but also an active role as divine agent in creation.…This is a suitable point at which to underscore certain key results of this discussion of Jesus’ preexistence…It appeared astonishingly early in the Christian movement. Second, the condensed nature of the references indicates that Paul was not introducing the idea but presumed acquaintance with it already among his converts…Third, these references include reflections of the idea that Christ was actively involved as divine agent in creation…

One final point: in these Pauline statements it is the historic figure Jesus who is referred to as preexistent…These passages directly attribute to Jesus personally a preexistence and a central role in creation…"​

Thus, while the Virgin Birth is regard by scholars as fictional - the belief in Jesus pre-existence as some kind of divine entity co-eternal with Yahweh is regarded as an actual fundamental tenet of even the earliest Christians, including Jesus's brother James, Peter and the rest.

Its thought to be one of the main reasons why Christians were deemed especially heretical by other Jews of the time.

Quite why a crucified Jewish criminal of the Roman state, who had preached a subversive doctrine of social change and reversal, had come to be so regarded even by his earliest band of followers is the perplexing question. It's not unknown in history, though, as we can see from the Mahayana doctrine of Bodhisattva or the Hindu belief in Avatars.

But to believe that a guy who had just been executed for sedition by a Roman prefect, within living memory, was such an incarnate being - that was the most shocking thing for contemporaries and for pious Second Temple Jews to believe such was regarded as notably perverse by the Jewish authorities (understandably).

For Buddhism, we have evidence that the early Mahāsāṃghika school (which split from the Sthaviras - from whom the Therevadins trace their lineage - at the Second Buddhist Council) believed the historical Buddha possessed a transcendental, supramundane nature, although even the Sthavira vinaya attributed miracles to him. Additionally, the Mahāsāṃghika vinaya is thought to have been the older redaction.

So a belief in Gautama Buddha's supramundane nature also seems to have emerged early among his followers.

 

[columbus]

To me Jesus real and greatest miracle was that His teachings changed hearts and transformed people’s character. Things like raising people from the dead I believe meant He raised the spiritually dead to spiritual life.

I believe that things if like this happened there would be evidence. But there isn't.

There's evidence for the Legend of Christ, dating from a few decades after the Crucifixion. But that's not the same at all.
Tom

 

[loverofhumanity]

I believe that things if like this happened there would be evidence. But there isn't.

There's evidence for the Legend of Christ, dating from a few decades after the Crucifixion. But that's not the same at all.
Tom

Yes I agree. But we have seen over the centuries how His teachings have transformed people to perform acts of charity and kindness. This to me was His real and lasting legacy that His teachings changed hearts.

 

[columbus]

Yes I agree. But we have seen over the centuries how His teachings have transformed people to perform acts of charity and kindness. This to me was His real and lasting legacy that His teachings changed hearts.

I see a lot of the opposite as well.
More really.
Tom

 

[Dan From Smithville]

I did, but it seems to me you read only the parts you wanted. So sorry you can't even support your claim. I'm not here to do that for you'
If you are happy just making claims, that's fine. There is no rule on RF which says you must support your claims with evidence/reference, so I find it's common practice here to just make claims, and declare...not in words, "It's a fact because I said so".
Claim acknowledged.

This is interesting.

 

[Dan From Smithville]

I have a whole thread on the evidence that proves the Bible to be authentic, so your post apparently is "fake news", and busted.

That is interesting.

 

[Vouthon]

Compared to ethics and morals of His time and place His teachings were excellent. Far more secular and objective than the norm.

I agree.

The reason I think this is sometimes lost on moderns is the intellectual distance between our own age and that of the Sadducaic-Graeco-Roman milieu in which Jesus was born. Most contemporary lay men and women are not avid readers of classical literature or ancient Semitic texts, so the quite alien values of their world - with the exception of a few bright sparks, like Epicurus - are not generally recognised, and there is a parallel (and to an extent naive / misguided) nostalgia for the mythos / grandeur of the Greeks and Romans, which distorts our objectivity in appraising what was 'radical' about the early Christian movement.

Its why a secular historian such as Tom Holland - who admits that he abandoned Christianity as a teen and doesn't believe in nor see any need for a god - has seen fit to write a mammoth tome on this very issue, Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind, published last year:


Dominion by Tom Holland review – the legacy of Christianity

Holland might also have pointed out that the ancient Romans reserved crucifixion mostly for political rebels. Jesus may not have been a Lenin, but it might have suited the Jewish leaders to persuade Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor, that he was. He would certainly have knocked around with Zealots, the anticolonial revolutionaries of the day.

Christianity started life as an eastern, not western phenomenon, but rapidly left its birthplace behind. What held it together was faith, not territory. One was no longer to grovel before the idols of state, tribe, nation and household. And as for household, almost every reference to the family in the New Testament is deeply hostile. Kinship and blood ties no longer matter, and Jesus’s treatment of his mother is by no means always that of a good Jewish boy.

You can, however, make a fetish or idol out of anything, as Freud instructs us. Such false gods fill every chapter of this illuminating study. Yet Holland is surely right to argue that when we condemn the moral obscenities committed in the name of Christ, it is hard to do so without implicitly invoking his own teaching.​

People also mistake this for some kind of uncritical argument for Christian exceptionalism - when no one is denying that there were a lot of unsavoury elements to early Christianity as well (from our contemporary vantage point), but in context it was less unsavoury than the norm in that milieu and its savoury elements were very radical in their day-and-age. We are speaking in relative terms here.

An agnostic-atheist scholar, however (differentiated from those outside the actual study of ancient literature), like Bart Ehrman (or Tom Holland) is able to look at the evidence impartially and reach the following conclusion.

Bart Ehrman writes in Misquoting Jesus?:

"Most scholars remain convinced that Jesus proclaimed the coming Kingdom of God, in which there would be no more injustice, suffering, or evil, in which all people, rich and poor, slave and free, men and women, would be on equal footing. This obviously proved particularly attractive as a message of hope to those who in the present age were underprivileged—the poor, the sick, the outcast...

One of Jesus’s characteristic teachings is that there will be a massive reversal of fortunes. Those who are rich and powerful now will be humbled then; those who are lowly and oppressed now will then be exalted. The apocalyptic logic of this view is clear: it is only by siding with the forces of evil that people in power have succeeded in this life; and by siding with God other people have been persecuted and rendered powerless...

In his view, present-day society and all its conventions were soon to come to a screeching halt...Only when God's Kingdom arrived would an entirely new order appear, in which peace, equality, and justice would reign supreme...What mattered was the new thing that was coming, the future kingdom. It was impossible to promote this teaching while trying to retain the present social structure." (p. 181)​

(continued....)

 

[Vouthon]

Another scholar: "Jesus' message was controversial and threatening to the established institutions of religious and political power in his society: the message carried with it a fundamental transvaluation of values, an exalting of the humble and a critique of the mighty" ( Professor Richard Hays (Moral Vision of the New Testament, p. 164).

The best exemplar of this is in Jesus's practice of 'open-commensality' or inclusive table-fellowship.

Sharing meals - meant to create bonds of friendship - with “outsiders” and inviting, as well including them, was for Jesus key to breaking down barriers:

"Go out quickly into the streets and alleys of the town and bring in the poor, the crippled, the blind and the lame." (Luke 14:21)

Jesus said also to the one who had invited him, “When you give a luncheon or a dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors, in case they may invite you in return, and you would be repaid. But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. And you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you" (Luke 14:12-14)​

Walter Burkert defines a quite-different kind of meal - the Greco-Roman Symposium - with deep roots in the history of Hellenistic culture, one that was explicitly exclusionary:

The [Greco-Roman] symposium is an organization of all-male groups, aristocratic and egalitarian at the same time, which affirm their identity through ceremonialized drinking...it guarantees the social control of the polis [city] by the aristocrats. It is a dominating social form in Greek civilization from Homer onwards and well beyond the Hellenistic period

(Walter Burkert, “Oriental Symposia: Contrasts and Parallels,” in Dining in a Classical Context (ed. William J. Slater; Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991))
​

From a different scholarly perspective, Marcus Borg:


Marcus Borg: Jesus the Man of the Spirit

The historical Jesus challenged the purity boundaries in touching lepers as well as hemorrhaging women, in driving the money changers out of the temple, and in table fellowship even with outcasts. Jesus replaced an emphasis on purity with an emphasis on compassion.

People who were not “whole” – the maimed, the chronically ill, lepers, eunuchs, and so forth – were on the impure side of the spectrum. The purity contrast also was associated with economic class...

For Jesus, compassion had a radical sociopolitical meaning. In his teaching and table fellowship, and in the shape of his movement, the purity system was subverted and an alternative social vision affirmed. The politics of purity was replaced by a politics of compassion.​

While the written Torah had restricted cruel acts towards blind and deaf people (i.e. "You shall not curse the deaf nor place a stumbling block before the blind; you shall fear your God - I am your Lord." (Leviticus 19:14)) as part of its wider concern for social justice, it becomes readily apparent when one reads the Qumran literature that by the first century CE, the exclusionary mindset typified by the ritual purity laws in Leviticus 21 had been significantly extended by Essenes & Sadducees to make these people subject to onerous social stigmas, ostracization and discrimination.

Saul M. Olyan, Professor of Judaic Studies at Brown University, explain in his study, The Exegetical Dimensions of Restrictions on the Blind and Lame in Texts from Qumran:

"Several Qumran texts exclude the blind and the lame from the vicinity of the deity or that of his angelic servants. In 11QT 45:12-14, the blind may not enter the holy city...and are excluded from the temple city forever, and their power to pollute Jerusalem is given as the reason for their exclusion...

According to 1QSa 2:3-9, the blind and the lame, among others with bodily imperfections or impurities, may not present themselves in the congregation...Each of these proscriptions has its basis in particular biblical texts, yet each reflects exegetical reworking of those texts."​

Characteristic examples are the Qumran Community Rule, which forbade the disabled from the congregation and placed them alongside "fools, madmen" and "imbeciles":

Fools, madmen, simpletons and imbeciles, the blind, the maimed, the lame, the deaf and minors, none of these may enter the midst of the community (CD 15.15-17)​

Jesus deliberately 'broke' this taboo when he overturned the tables of the moneychangers in the Temple:

Matthew 21:12-15 reads,

14 Then the blind and the lame came to Him in the temple...But when the chief priests and scribes saw the wonderful things that He did...they were indignant.​

The Graeco-Roman practices were far worse, even, than the Sadducee-Essene ones (which look positively enlightened by comparison). The Twelve Tables, the constitution of Rome which underpinned its legal system, included a law that said disabled or deformed children should be put to death by their own fathers, usually by stoning:

Law III.

A father shall immediately put to death a son recently born, who is a monster [or 'deformed'], or has a form different from that of members of the human race.

​

Even Seneca - great Stoic philosopher though he was - defended the morality of the Roman constitution's command to kill disabled children, referring to it as a practice of reason intended to sift the sound from the worthless:

"We put down mad dogs; we kill the wild, untamed ox; we use the knife on sick sheep to stop their infecting the flock; we destroy abnormal offspring at birth; children, too, if they are born weak or deformed, we drown. Yet this is not the work of anger, but of reason - to separate the sound from the worthless"

- (Seneca, Lucius Annaeus (1995). Seneca: Moral and Political Essays. Cambridge University Press. p. 32. ISBN 0-5213-4818-8. Retrieved November 2, 2013.)​