Did Jesus exist? [Archive]

This Guy

17th October 2006, 06:40 AM

I was having a discussion with a friend at the weekend and he asserted that there was conclusive proof of Jesus' existence.

I was of the understanding that there was nothing conclusive and much of the extra-biblical evidence was disputed.

I don't know one way or the other and spent some time yesterday when I should have been working looking at various bits and pieces, but many of the articles I read were out-of-date or were just conttradictoruy of each other with no strong sense of which one was right.

So, my question is; is there a consensus among scholars on the existence of Jesus, or is the evidence still inconclusive?

From what I've read, inconclusive. Those that argue the strongest for either position (he did/did not exist) use many evidences that are disputable IMHO.

There is (IMHO) strong evidence that there were Christians around the first century, but not so strong evidence that there was someone called Jesus.

Josephus' writings are the biggest argument I've had given for the existence of Jesus, outside the bible. But there are problems with his writings. It's generally agreed that what we have now is not what he wrote. The biggest arguments are over the extent of the changes made to his writings. It seems to me that if he had written what we have today, Josephus would either be an idiot or a liar, since even though he would appear (at face value) to have written -

Antiquities 18.3.3. "Now there was about this time Jesus, a wise man, if it be lawful to call him a man, for he was a doer of wonderful works, a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure. He drew over to him both many of the Jews, and many of the Gentiles. He was the Christ; and when Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal men amongst us, had condemned him to the cross, those that loved him at the first did not forsake him, for he appeared to them alive again the third day, as the divine prophets had foretold these and ten thousand other wonderful things concerning him; and the tribe of Christians, so named from him, are not extinct to this day."

- he still wasn't convinced enough to convert from Judaism to Christianity.

For a good discussion of the controversy look here -

http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/testimonium.html

From the link - "Opinion on the authenticity of this passage is varied. Louis H. Feldman surveyed the relevant literature from 1937 to 1980 in Josephus and Modern Scholarship. Feldman noted that 4 scholars regarded the Testimonium Flavianum as entirely genuine, 6 as mostly genuine, 20 accept it with some interpolations, 9 with several interpolations, and 13 regard it as being totally an interpolation."

Personally, I find the fact that there is no evidence that Josephus wrote about all the things that the Gospels talk about happening at the death of Jesus (earthquakes/dead rising.....) even though his father was a Jewish priest in the area at the time, and Josephus was born roughly around the time of Jesus' death hard to accept. It's just hard for me to believe that he wouldn't have heard about these things from someone (like his father!). He talks about other "miracles" performed by other folks (though off the top of my head I have no links to provide to back that up, but I'll try to add some later).

EDIT to complete the thought (added "hard to accept")

triadboy

17th October 2006, 07:13 AM

So, my question is; is there a consensus among scholars on the existence of Jesus, or is the evidence still inconclusive?

There is no direct evidence. Some scholars believe Jesus existed because of the words of Jesus found in a wide range of early xian writings.

If Jesus lived, he CERTAINLY is not the Jesus you think about now. He would have been a relatively unknown sage with a small loyal following. His followers wrote down his words. Eventually miraculous deeds were created and wrapped around the words.

geni

17th October 2006, 07:24 AM

Josephus' writings are the biggest argument I've had given for the existence of Jesus, outside the bible. But there are problems with his writings. It's generally agreed that what we have now is not what he wrote. The biggest arguments are over the extent of the changes made to his writings.

There is a second mention.

17th October 2006, 07:27 AM

There is a second mention.

Do tell...?

Deus Ex Machina

17th October 2006, 07:29 AM

There is no direct evidence. Some scholars believe Jesus existed because of the words of Jesus found in a wide range of early xian writings.

If Jesus lived, he CERTAINLY is not the Jesus you think about now. He would have been a relatively unknown sage with a small loyal following. His followers wrote down his words. Eventually miraculous deeds were created and wrapped around the words.

I agree with you but I don't think it matters a great deal. Whats being looked for, I think, is a direct connection from the myths back to the man the myths are about. If it were possible to sort that out it could be a fascinating discussion - because it would point up the differences between what he taught and what others wished he had taught.

From what i have read of the bible and the new testament (and I would not call them a riveting read) it looks to me that the "Christians" of the Roman times would more accurately be described as "Paulians", not "Christians".

17th October 2006, 07:31 AM

I think the preferred term is 'Paulines...'

:D

This Guy

17th October 2006, 07:36 AM

Do tell...?

Josephus also mentions "James, the brother of Jesus" (may not be an exact quote). I've tried finding a reference, but having problems ATM (the link I wanted appears dead/down).

As I recall (may not be accurate!) it offers far less support for a 1st century Jesus than the Testimonium Flavianum, and I believe there is some question of the accuracy between what we have today, and what Josephus wrote.

marcais

17th October 2006, 07:43 AM

I had read that the paragraph in question from Josephus had been pretty much discredited as being added to his writings long after his death.

But wasn't there another mention of Jesus in Josephus' writings? Something about referring to someone as the brother of Jesus or something like that.

I've also heard of other writers from Josephus' time and slightly later referring to Christians, but not mentioning the name Jesus.

I'm not so much interested in whether the Jesus as presented these days was real, but more in whether there was a preacher (for want of a better word) called Jesus mooching around Galilee during the period in question.

Edit to add: Thanks for all the info so far.

17th October 2006, 07:45 AM

AFAIK, Josephus' writings re: Jesus have been discredited - except to apologists, fundamental Christians, and others with a strong pro-Jesus bias.

geni

17th October 2006, 07:48 AM

Do tell...?

http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/world/readfile?fk_files=2359&pageno=648

pgwenthold

17th October 2006, 07:49 AM

If Jesus lived, he CERTAINLY is not the Jesus you think about now. He would have been a relatively unknown sage with a small loyal following. His followers wrote down his words. Eventually miraculous deeds were created and wrapped around the words.

Bingo.

"The Jesus that is described in the bible" did not exist.

Was there some uppity Rabbi who caused a lot of problems for the Romans and generated a lot of followers? Probably. But it makes as much sense to say that was "Jesus of the bible" as it does to say that L. Frank Baum's niece named Dorothy who lived in Kansas and had an Aunt "M" (Maude Gage) was Dorothy of the Wizard of Oz.

This Guy

17th October 2006, 07:54 AM

I'm not fond of the link this comes from, it's one that takes the "did not exist" stance, and IMHO, while it offers some good insight, some of the views are questionable. But it's the best I can come up with at the moment.

"Here, then, is the Antiquities 20.9.1 passage containing the reference to Jesus (in bold), as it stands (essentially) in all extant copies, including in Eusebius’ quote of it:

“But the emperor, when he learned of the death of Festus, sent Albinus to be procurator of Judea . . . But the younger Ananus who, as we have already said, had obtained the high priesthood, was of an exceedingly bold and reckless disposition. . . . Ananus, therefore, being of this character, and supposing that he had a favorable opportunity on account of the fact that Festus was dead and Albinus was still on the way, called together the Sanhedrin and brought before them the brother of Jesus, the one called (the) Christ [ton adelphon Iesou tou legomenou Christou], James by name, together with some others and accused them of violating the law, and condemned them to be stoned. But those in the city who seemed most moderate and skilled in the law were very angry at this, and sent secretly to the king, requesting him to order Ananus to cease such proceedings . . . And the king, Agrippa, in consequence, deprived him of the high priesthood, which he had held three months, and appointed Jesus, the son of Damnaeus.”

From - http://pages.ca.inter.net/~oblio/supp10.htm

The link offers some good arguments against the validity of the passage. But I urge anyone reading it to also look for a more balanced view, and not take everything on the link at face value.

Cleon

17th October 2006, 08:04 AM

Foster Zygote

17th October 2006, 09:02 AM

I think the preferred term is 'Paulines...'

:D

Yeah, they're kinda sensitive about that. Like Trekkers/Trekkie's.

Steven

Foster Zygote

17th October 2006, 09:09 AM

Deus Ex Machina

17th October 2006, 09:42 AM

Another interesting question is: Was the Biblical Jesus based on just one man or were two or more person's teachings mixed together? There were scores of magician/holy men in the area at that time. The place was practically crawling with them.

Steven

somehow I envision an ad coming along:

Announcer: Is your neighborhood crawling with magicians and Holy Men?

Announcer: dont waste a second! Rush out and buy your own bottle of "Kook-be-gone"! Spray around wherever you see one of these creatures. They trail the mixture back to the nest and soon your area will be infestation free.

Announcer: Kook-be-gone! Use it to protect your family!

kurious_kathy

17th October 2006, 09:46 AM

There's no clear consensus on this, the way moden archaeologists have consensus that the biblical Exodus almost certainly did not take place.

The historical references are few and far between, and questionable at best. However, it's fairly well-known that at the time Palestine was crawling with various "Messiahs." It's certainly possible that the cult around one particular "Messiah" grew into what became Christianity.

I would say, though, that if there was a historical figure that Jesus is based on, in all likelihood he bore little resemblance to the Jesus that Christians worship. It's important to remember that the "gospels," accounts of Jesus and the people around him, were essentially oral histories that were combined into the bible long after Jesus (supposedly) died. A number of gospels were even rejected. This is why the idea of a bibilical literalism is so ludicrous on its face.

Cleon have you taken my recommendation about a year ago to read "The Case For Christ"? I think anyone who is looking for more details in confirming Jesus's life owes it to themselves to investigate it further.

And back to the OP of course Jesus came to earth and lived among us to show us the way to God. The thing you guys keep forgetting that even though they crucified and killed him, He rose again. He is the Messiah and still is very much alive today! Jesus is still very much alive today even though we can't physically see Him. He is alive in His people.

17th October 2006, 10:02 AM

Cleon have you taken my recommendation about a year ago to read "The Case For Christ"? I think anyone who is looking for more details in confirming Jesus's life owes it to themselves to investigate it further.

And back to the OP of course Jesus came to earth and lived among us to show us the way to God. The thing you guys keep forgetting that even though they crucified and killed him, He rose again. He is the Messiah and still is very much alive today! Jesus is still very much alive today even though we can't physically see Him. He is alive in His people.

There goes the bridge - the troll has arrived.

Cleon

17th October 2006, 10:02 AM

Cleon have you taken my recommendation about a year ago to read "The Case For Christ"?

No. Given your other recommendations, which consist of little more than some preacher spouting bibilical passages, I really don't rank your suggestions high on my reading list.

Just googling around on it, I see that the book endorses the Josephus writings as positive evidence for Jesus--with no mention that the passages in question are likely later edits by the Church and considered questionable by most historians. That alone calls the book into question. The fact that the book is based almost entirely on his conversations with evangelical apologists (as opposed to actual historians or direct examination of the evidence) suggests that the book is little more than a case of an evangelical Christian re-assuring himself that what he believes is right--not a substantial examination of the evidence and drawing a conclusion based on said evidence.

And back to the OP of course Jesus came to earth and lived among us to show us the way to God.

Of course he did. It's amazing that there's so little actual independent evidence of such an occurrence, though.

The thing you guys keep forgetting that even though they crucified and killed him, He rose again.

No, we don't forget this. Most of us have at least a passing knowledge of the story in question. What you forget is that the evidence that this actually occurred is completely nonexistent.

Now kindly take your substance-free preaching elsewhere, and stop derailing what was otherwise a substantial thread on the evidence of a historical Jesus.

Deus Ex Machina

17th October 2006, 10:10 AM

mind you, we should admire the clarity and intellect behind god's plan.

he tried a coula stone tablets fro the mountain and tried speaking from a burning bush - all to no avail.

I can imagine the management meeting in heaven "Hey, god! Here's a blockbuster of an idea - let's get this carpenter and have the Roman's nail 'im to a tree. That should get everyone believing in you."

Ranks up there with the New Coke campaign.

Cleon

17th October 2006, 10:16 AM

Ranks up there with the New Coke campaign.

More like Crystal Pepsi.

17th October 2006, 10:21 AM

More like Crystal Pepsi.
Egads, that was a horrible drink!

And the only time I ever tried Zema, I thought it tasted like fermented Crystal Pepsi.

kurious_kathy

17th October 2006, 10:29 AM

zizzybaluba

17th October 2006, 10:32 AM

Trantor

17th October 2006, 10:45 AM

No. Given your other recommendations, which consist of little more than some preacher spouting bibilical passages, I really don't rank your suggestions high on my reading list.

Just googling around on it, I see that the book endorses the Josephus writings as positive evidence for Jesus--with no mention that the passages in question are likely later edits by the Church and considered questionable by most historians. That alone calls the book into question. The fact that the book is based almost entirely on his conversations with evangelical apologists (as opposed to actual historians or direct examination of the evidence) suggests that the book is little more than a case of an evangelical Christian re-assuring himself that what he believes is right--not a substantial examination of the evidence and drawing a conclusion based on said evidence.

Nice response Cleon. Somehow I doubt that it will stir a change in Kathy's thinking.

FarSideOfTheMoon

17th October 2006, 10:49 AM

Cleon

17th October 2006, 11:07 AM

Marc L

17th October 2006, 11:18 AM

Another interesting question is: Was the Biblical Jesus based on just one man or were two or more person's teachings mixed together? There were scores of magician/holy men in the area at that time. The place was practically crawling with them.

Steven

I read an interesting article online once that brought this up. He mentioned that it was likely that there were several "Jesus" groups in existance, as well as Paul's "Christ" group, and that Paul merged his philosophy with theirs.

He quoted a scripture (I don't have time to look it up, right now, but will try to later), where Paul mentions other people "preaching a different Christ".

If I can find the article, I'll post the link.

Marc

jjramsey

17th October 2006, 05:00 PM

FWIW, there is a SkepticWiki article on this issue ('cos I wrote it :)):

http://www.skepticwiki.org/wiki/index.php/Existence_Of_Jesus

I think I can safely say that neither Jesus-mythers nor kurious_kathy will like it.

Dave1001

17th October 2006, 05:37 PM

If jesus didn't exist, would that make the gospels a sort of conspiracy? Are any of the apostles considered to have conclusively exist? Who is the earliest historical christian considered to have conclusively existed?

This Guy

17th October 2006, 05:44 PM

Okay then what about taking a look at this article from CRI called
"The Evidence For Christ's Resurrection"
http://www.equip.org/free/CP0106.htm

How about you read it and tell me why you do or don't agree with it?

From your link - "As Paul noted in 1 Corinthians 15:14, if Christ did not rise from the dead then our preaching and our faith are useless. We must therefore be prepared to demonstrate that Christ’s resurrection was an event that occurred in space and time — that it was in fact historical, and not mythological (cf. 2 Pet. 1:16). The importance of this event cannot be minimized as Jesus Himself proclaimed that His resurrection would prove His power over death, and thus His deity (John 2:18-22)."

And yet the Gospels give 4 very conflicting accounts of the event.

Please answer these questions -

When did Mary buy the spices to take to the tomb?

Was the stone in front of the tomb when Mary arrived?

How many angels were present when Mary arrived?

Did Mary recognize Jesus when she saw him?

Can those questions be answered with non-conflicting quotes from your Bible? If so, please do so, and identify the version of the bible your quoting from.

I'll try first!

Matt 28 KJV -

No mention of the spices. No problem.

1 In the end of the sabbath, as it began to dawn toward the first day of the week, came Mary Magdalene and the other Mary to see the sepulchre.

2 And, behold, there was a great earthquake: for the angel of the Lord descended from heaven, and came and rolled back the stone from the door, and sat upon it.

OK, stone in place, but then moved by an earthquake (which no one else seems to have noticed, as there's no recording/mentioning of this "Great earthquake" in history that I know of.)

No mention of any angels other then the one outside the tomb. Note it says "for THE ANGEL of the Lord" "The" as in one, and angel, not angels.

9 And as they went to tell his disciples, behold, Jesus met them, saying, All hail. And they came and held him by the feet, and worshipped him.

Jesus met them on their way to tell the disciples, and they recognized him.

Let's check Mark 16 KJV

1 And when the sabbath was past, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome, had bought sweet spices, that they might come and anoint him.

Spices were bought when the sabbath was past.

3 And they said among themselves, Who shall roll us away the stone from the door of the sepulchre?

4 And when they looked, they saw that the stone was rolled away: for it was very great.

OK, stone already moved. No earthquake this time (or at least no one noticed the "great earthquake"). No mention of an angel outside, sitting on the stone, even though one talked to them outside the tomb in Matt.

5 And entering into the sepulchre, they saw a young man sitting on the right side, clothed in a long white garment; and they were affrighted.

Ahh! There's the angel! He's inside (well a young man dressed in white is, I assume he's an angel).

7 But go your way, tell his disciples and Peter that he goeth before you into Galilee: there shall ye see him, as he said unto you.

8 And they went out quickly, and fled from the sepulchre; for they trembled and were amazed: neither said they any thing to any man; for they were afraid.

9 Now when Jesus was risen early the first day of the week, he appeared first to Mary Magdalene, out of whom he had cast seven devils.

OK, a little confusing here. Not enough details to really compare to Matt. as far as where Mary saw Jesus, and whether or not she recognized him. No problem.

Let's check Luke 23 and 24 KJV

23.56 And they returned, and prepared spices and ointments; and rested the sabbath day according to the commandment.

So, they had the spices before the sabbath, and prepared them, then rested on the sabbath.

Luke 24 -

2 And they found the stone rolled away from the sepulchre.

3 And they entered in, and found not the body of the Lord Jesus.

4 And it came to pass, as they were much perplexed thereabout, behold, two men stood by them in shining garments:

Stone was moved, and TWO men (again, I assume angels) were in the tomb.

No mention of Mary seeing Jesus at all. In fact he seems to appear first to two disciples -

13 And, behold, two of them went that same day to a village called Emmaus, which was from Jerusalem about threescore furlongs.

14 And they talked together of all these things which had happened.

15 And it came to pass, that, while they communed together and reasoned, Jesus himself drew near, and went with them.

Most of Luke's details have little in common with the other gospels, so it's hard to get answers to the other questions. So, let's move to John 20 -

1 The first day of the week cometh Mary Magdalene early, when it was yet dark, unto the sepulchre, and seeth the stone taken away from the sepulchre.

No mention of the spices. No problem.

OK, stone gone when Mary arrived.

10 Then the disciples went away again unto their own home.

11 But Mary stood without at the sepulchre weeping: and as she wept, she stooped down, and looked into the sepulchre,

12 And seeth two angels in white sitting, the one at the head, and the other at the feet, where the body of Jesus had lain.

OK, this is a bit strange, but it seems that Mary went to the tomb, saw the stone removed, then went to the disciples and told them. Only after they came, and left, did Mary look inside and see two angels.

14 And when she had thus said, she turned herself back, and saw Jesus standing, and knew not that it was Jesus.

So, here she sees Jesus at the tomb, not on the way to the disciples. But she doesn't hold him by the feet and worship him as she did in Matt. She doesn't recognize him.

Most of the rest of the gospel accounts concerning the day of and days following the "resurrection" are so conflicting that I have neither the time nor desire to go into them. But feel free to consider when/where Jesus met the disciples, and what else took place after the opening of the tomb.

IMHO it seems that the most important event in the ministry of Jesus (his resurrection), which is listed as the very proof of the Christian religion's validity (if it didn't happen, their teaching is in vain), wasn't important enough to have been given a decent, non-conflicting account in the holy ghost inspired bible.

What's up with that?

Edit for minor typos. Left the other errors to test you! Yea, that's it! ;)

pipelineaudio

17th October 2006, 11:31 PM

SezMe

18th October 2006, 12:33 AM

<snip>His followers wrote down his words. <snip>
This is not correct. Assuming there was a Jesus, there was a period of arguable length that consisted of only oral history. Then the various gospels began to be written down.

The authors of Mark, Matthew, Luke and John were not Mark, Matthew, Luke and John and, more specifically, were not the deciples Mark, Matthew, Luke and John.

SezMe

18th October 2006, 12:40 AM

Cleon have you taken my recommendation about a year ago to read "The Case For Christ"?
I have read it completely through. It is presented as a hard-nosed investigation by a hard-nosed investigative jounalist. It is not and the author is not.

I'll give you a concrete example. At one point, the issue of the opinion of the "Jesus Seminar" arises and he then sets out to investigate their views and what those views are based on. So you would think he would begin his investigation by talking with one (or, for a hard-nosed investigator) or more individuals actually involved in that project.

But noooo, that might actually reveal some concrete evidence. So he finds a severe critic of the Seminar and bases his entire chapter which speaks to the Seminar on this one interview.

The book is excellent...crap. It is only good for a read if you want exposure to how biased and narrow-minded someone can be when setting out to discover what he already knows as a certainty -- namely, that Jesus existed.

SezMe

18th October 2006, 12:51 AM

<snip>And yet the Gospels give 4 very conflicting accounts of the event.

Please answer these questions -

When did Mary buy the spices to take to the tomb?

Was the stone in front of the tomb when Mary arrived?

How many angels were present when Mary arrived?

Did Mary recognize Jesus when she saw him?

<Big Snip>
The problem with this, This Guy, is that you have fallen into the same hole with all those biblical literalists. The bible, and specifically the gospels, are NOT historical accounts. More importantly, they were never intended to be so and should not be read literally. To read every assertion as fact and then find all the contradictions is certainly easy to do.

But it misses the bigger picture.

The gospels are political documents, crafted to very different audiences at very different times. They were written to convince various groups that this new sect was the best thing since crunchy peanut butter and that you (the listener) should join us. They are like a speech a politician or an evangilist might give today. They are NOT giving a history lesson, they are trying to drive home a point. That their story is not factually consistent with others' stories is of no importance to them in their time.

I once was into biblical contradictions at one point. Now I see it as a waste and, more importantly, as a diversion from a more productive way of looking at the bible....or at least the new testament.

SimonJ1966

18th October 2006, 01:37 AM

If this man did exist, just for arguments sake, what would have been the most likely racial group he would have belonged too?

I have always assumed such a man ought to have been of Arabic descent, but that’s just my guess and I have made many a bad guess in my time.

I ask this because in a slightly rhetorical way, I have often thought to myself "why is he so often depicted as an Anglo Saxon" in paintings and statues etc ... If he is from the Middle East, then its more likely he would have the characteristic features of peoples from that part of the world.
IMHO it seems a bit disingenuous to depict him as something else, as one often see's in Western Christian paraphernalia. The only catch to knowing his blood line, and hence getting it right, is the Immaculate Conception clause. It’s the “get out of jail” free card I guess.

Kevin_Lowe

18th October 2006, 04:26 AM

This Guy

18th October 2006, 05:22 AM

The problem with this, This Guy, is that you have fallen into the same hole with all those biblical literalists.

[SNIPPED a lot]

They are NOT giving a history lesson, they are trying to drive home a point. That their story is not factually consistent with others' stories is of no importance to them in their time.

I once was into biblical contradictions at one point. Now I see it as a waste and, more importantly, as a diversion from a more productive way of looking at the bible....or at least the new testament.

I mostly agree with you (except the part where you say I have fallen into the same hole :)

I was answering a Fundy's argument, which used the bible as it's evidence. The only way to deal with Fundy's (IMHO) is to turn their sacred holy ghost inspired, infallible bible against them.

One thing (among many) that I've learned on these forums is that not all religions rely on such an interpretation. The Catholic church in particular takes a very liberal view of the bible. I'm sure there are Protestant churches that do also (Methodist I believe would fall in that category, not sure off hand which others might).

Kathy is a Fundy. Read any of her many other post to confirm that. She believes evolution isn't valid. There was a literal 6 day creation and all that lives today was created during that period, roughly 6000 years ago. Please correct me if I'm wrong Kathy!

For those other than Fundy's, I would likely simply lurk on the thread. I generally consider religious types that don't take a literal view of the bible as a whole different group that have other emotional/personnel/whatever reasons for believing what they believe, and I don't choose to argue with them. At least with Fundy's, you know what their evidence is, and it's readily available to read for information to counter their arguments.

So, again, I agree and disagree :)

Marc L

18th October 2006, 06:06 AM

The problem with this, This Guy, is that you have fallen into the same hole with all those biblical literalists. The bible, and specifically the gospels, are NOT historical accounts. More importantly, they were never intended to be so and should not be read literally. To read every assertion as fact and then find all the contradictions is certainly easy to do.

But it misses the bigger picture.

The gospels are political documents, crafted to very different audiences at very different times. They were written to convince various groups that this new sect was the best thing since crunchy peanut butter and that you (the listener) should join us. They are like a speech a politician or an evangilist might give today. They are NOT giving a history lesson, they are trying to drive home a point. That their story is not factually consistent with others' stories is of no importance to them in their time.

Personally, I (and I'll bet This Guy) agree with you. The problem is, that it's the literalists that are the most vocal, and insist on 100% biblical accuracy. This forces those of us to debate them to focus on that accuracy (which they themselves focus on). Hence, the list of contradictions.

As an aside, back in my fundy days, I read a book called "The Gospels in Harmony" (I think that was the exact title). It was supposedly a weaving together of all four gospels without taking out any of the words that did quite well in getting rid of the contradictions. It's out of print now, unfortunately, because I'd love to re-read it as a skeptic, and do some research on it.

P.S. There is nothing better than crunchy peanut butter, you heathen!

Marc

Paulhoff

18th October 2006, 06:35 AM

18th October 2006, 06:36 AM

Why don't they make Goober Grape with crunchy PB?

pgwenthold

18th October 2006, 06:57 AM

Whether there was a man named Jesus or not is not really as important as the question, “Was there anyone that was the son of a god walking on the earth 2000 years ago or any other time”, and the envelope please, “NO”. :jaw-dropp

Nicely stated, and consistent with what I said above.

If he wasn't doing things like healing the sick, raising others from the dead, turning water into wine, and rising himself from the dead, on what basis do you call him "Jesus", the guy in the bible?

Jesus, as described in the Bible, was NOT just some wise rabbi with a lot of followers.

triadboy

18th October 2006, 07:47 AM

This is not correct. Assuming there was a Jesus, there was a period of arguable length that consisted of only oral history. Then the various gospels began to be written down.

The authors of Mark, Matthew, Luke and John were not Mark, Matthew, Luke and John and, more specifically, were not the deciples Mark, Matthew, Luke and John.

The words written by his followers was the "Book of Q" - which was used by the Gospel writers (years later) to fabricate their stories.

Trantor

18th October 2006, 08:37 AM

Jesus, as described in the Bible, was NOT just some wise rabbi with a lot of followers.

In my opinion, the lack of Non-Biblical evidence for Jesus points to very few followers in his group. Most likely, he was a traveling religious healer, who developed a small following; Probably similar to John the Baptist.

SezMe

18th October 2006, 12:20 PM

I was answering a Fundy's argument, which used the bible as it's evidence. The only way to deal with Fundy's (IMHO) is to turn their sacred holy ghost inspired, infallible bible against them.
<snip>
So, again, I agree and disagree :)
You (and Marc L) make a good point. But I wonder if going after a literalist fact-by-fact is the best approach. Probably sometimes yes, other times no.

All in all, we're singing out of the same songbook.

SezMe

18th October 2006, 12:22 PM

The words written by his followers was the "Book of Q" - which was used by the Gospel writers (years later) to fabricate their stories.
That is not my understanding but I claim no particular expertise here. Since we don't even have "Q" but only infer its existence, how do we know its authors? Do you have a link or book that supports your statement?

triadboy

18th October 2006, 03:26 PM

That is not my understanding but I claim no particular expertise here. Since we don't even have "Q" but only infer its existence, how do we know its authors? Do you have a link or book that supports your statement?

Matthew and Luke used Mark to write their Gospels. But there are Jesus-words in Matthew/Luke which aren't in Mark. Thus the theory arose that they used Mark and another document - Q - the saying of Jesus. (Like the Gospel of Thomas - a laundry list of sayings)

We don't know the authors of Q. But they would have been devout followers of an unknown sage wandering around the country.

http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/q-exist.html

jjramsey

18th October 2006, 05:11 PM

Isnt this link a dud for the same reason as Kathy's? It uses the bible to prove the bible

Ah, yes, I remember this strawman from a few months ago. Folks, to see the level of reasoning that pipelineaudio employs, I quote a post of his from an old thread (http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?postid=1575298#post1575298):

LOL!!!!

If Smaug didnt exist, why is Bilbo writing as if he did?
Tolkien didn't.

You now have the problem that seveal people sat down and worte out rather an elaborate fraud and aranged for it's disribution which would be a rather resouce heavy activity.

Occams razor favor a highly exaggerated account rather an a highly complex deliberate fraud.

Ahhh, duh why didnt I see it before? I get it now

The bible says it so its true

:rolleyes:

Paulhoff

18th October 2006, 05:18 PM

Red is red because it is red because it is red because it is red because it is red is etc etc etc in a Yul Brenner voice. ;)

Paul

:) :) :)

Kevin_Lowe

18th October 2006, 05:53 PM

Ah, yes, I remember this strawman from a few months ago. Folks, to see the level of reasoning that pipelineaudio employs, I quote a post of his from an old thread (http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?postid=1575298#post1575298):

You did dodge that question, and I think there's a degree of validity to it.

You use reasoning like "The Bible says Jesus failed to do any impressive miracles in his home town. If I was making this stuff up I would make Jesus do miracles all the time. Therefore nobody made this stuff up".

There are all sorts of other explanations available. Possibly it's made up and the author was smart enough to include downs as well as ups to make the tale seem more authentic, just as Uri Geller's "powers" fail sometimes. Possibly it's something that happened to a holy man of the time and it got adopted into a Jesus myth. Possibly it was a superstition of the time that holy men couldn't do miracles in their home town and so the episode was supposed to lend verisimilitude. Possibly, the text being what it is, it is made up even if you can't think of an immediately compelling reason why someone would make that up given that they did it nearly two milennia ago.

It's simply an intellectual misstep to place any weight in the claims of a book which is clearly largely fiction.

jjramsey

18th October 2006, 07:40 PM

You did dodge that question, and I think there's a degree of validity to it.

You use reasoning like "The Bible says Jesus failed to do any impressive miracles in his home town. If I was making this stuff up I would make Jesus do miracles all the time. Therefore nobody made this stuff up".

This is a subtle strawman, but a strawman nonetheless. It isn't that if I were making this stuff up I would make Jesus do miracles all the time. It is that if I were making this stuff up, it would be an awfully strange coincidence if what I wrote looked just like what I would write if I were trying to rationalize away my hero doing the kind of failure that an ordinary man would have if he really only could "heal" by the power of suggestion.

There are all sorts of other explanations available. Possibly it's made up and the author was smart enough to include downs as well as ups to make the tale seem more authentic, just as Uri Geller's "powers" fail sometimes.

If Mark is deliberately trying to present Jesus as failing, it is odd that he tacks on "he laid his hands on a few sick people and cured them," rather than let the tale stand as is. Also, neither the authors of the gospels of Matthew and Luke seemed to think it was a smart move. They both altered Mark's version to blunt its implications.

Possibly it's something that happened to a holy man of the time and it got adopted into a Jesus myth. Possibly it was a superstition of the time that holy men couldn't do miracles in their home town and so the episode was supposed to lend verisimilitude.

These are ad hoc hypotheses with little to commend them except that they are not physically impossible. Against this, we have a more obvious interpretation of Jesus' failure that concords with similar failures that we have seen over time, such as those of Uri Geller. Why go for a more exotic explanation of Jesus' failure when a mundane one will do?

One can certainly come up with ad hoc hypotheses to explain how a mythical Jesus is consistent with the healing failures, or having his hometown be Nazareth rather than Bethlehem from the get-go, or explain the references that indicate that Jesus was a flesh-and-blood brother of James, and so on. By the time one is done, though, one is left with a very clunky and convoluted account of why the New Testament text is what it is. Pointing this out is not using the Bible to prove the Bible, but simply using Occam's Razor.

SezMe

18th October 2006, 08:56 PM

We don't know the authors of Q. But they would have been devout followers of an unknown sage wandering around the country.

http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/q-exist.html
I read the intro in the link and skimmed the rest, which seems to deal with how the gospel authors used Q as well as other texts. But nowhere did I see support for the assertion that the authors of Q "would have been devout followers" of anybody.

I do not question at all that Q played an important role in the writing of the subsequent canonical gospels. What I am questioning is the assertion that the authors of Q had direct contact with the putative Jesus. Or, for that matter, any other "unknown sage".

So, again, can you provide evidence for this claim or point out where I missed it in your link? Thanks.

SezMe

18th October 2006, 09:06 PM

jj, in your response to Kevin your are, I think, assuming that there is reason to think that the authors of the gospels would be concerned with consistency between their various accounts.

But what if this is an invalid assumption? What if they didn't give a damn about the historical accuracy of their writings nor about their consistency with previous stories? If this is the case, there is nothing to explain away!

Marc L

18th October 2006, 09:07 PM

Kevin_Lowe

18th October 2006, 10:23 PM

This is a subtle strawman, but a strawman nonetheless. It isn't that if I were making this stuff up I would make Jesus do miracles all the time. It is that if I were making this stuff up, it would be an awfully strange coincidence if what I wrote looked just like what I would write if I were trying to rationalize away my hero doing the kind of failure that an ordinary man would have if he really only could "heal" by the power of suggestion.

As I said in my earlier post, there are many ways such a text could arise other than the tale being an accurate recounting of an incident in the life of a unitary historical Jesus.

If Mark is deliberately trying to present Jesus as failing, it is odd that he tacks on "he laid his hands on a few sick people and cured them," rather than let the tale stand as is. Also, neither the authors of the gospels of Matthew and Luke seemed to think it was a smart move. They both altered Mark's version to blunt its implications.

Again, there are many ways such a story could have ended up in the Bible without a historical Jesus actually failing to heal people in his actual home town.

These are ad hoc hypotheses with little to commend them except that they are not physically impossible. Against this, we have a more obvious interpretation of Jesus' failure that concords with similar failures that we have seen over time, such as those of Uri Geller. Why go for a more exotic explanation of Jesus' failure when a mundane one will do?

One can certainly come up with ad hoc hypotheses to explain how a mythical Jesus is consistent with the healing failures, or having his hometown be Nazareth rather than Bethlehem from the get-go, or explain the references that indicate that Jesus was a flesh-and-blood brother of James, and so on. By the time one is done, though, one is left with a very clunky and convoluted account of why the New Testament text is what it is. Pointing this out is not using the Bible to prove the Bible, but simply using Occam's Razor.

This strikes me as similar to the thinking of 9/11 conspiracy theorists, in that you jump from a collection of dubious "anomalies" to a convenient conclusion.

The history of how the books have come down to us is clunky and convoluted. It should not surprise us if there are oddities in the various texts we have that can be explained by the clunky and convoluted theory that folk tales are made up and constantly modified in all sorts of ways over time.

One interpretation of the story is that you should treat your local cult leader with awe even if you knew them when they wore shorts, because otherwise you won't get miracles. A less charitable view is that the story is a convenient excuse for when people who did know you as a child are not impressed. "Even Jesus didn't impress the people who knew him". Other ways we could get to this text without the need for a historical Jesus have already been suggested.

There's simply no basis for jumping from the fact that the story strikes you as odd to the conclusion that it is evidence for a unitary historical Jesus.

SezMe

19th October 2006, 01:05 AM

It should not surprise us if there are oddities in the various texts we have that can be explained by the clunky and convoluted theory that folk tales are made up and constantly modified in all sorts of ways over time.
I would have written this as:
It should not surprise us if there are oddities in the various texts we have that can be explained by the theory that clunky and convoluted folk tales are made up and constantly modified in all sorts of ways over time.
but then maybe I do not understand your point.

pipelineaudio

19th October 2006, 03:06 AM

I dont see the strawman

We never did get any real answer. jj's article uses the bible to prove Jesus existed

Lots of Hawai'ian gods had failings listed in the legends, does this mean that they existed?

Kevin_Lowe

19th October 2006, 03:32 AM

I would have written this as:

but then maybe I do not understand your point.

Sorry if I was unclear.

What I was trying to say was that I found the argument that it was "clunky and convoluted" to explain each of JJramsey's oddities individually, as opposed to it being nice and simple to just posit a unitary historical Jesus, unconvincing.

The texts have come down to us through a clunky and convoluted process, after all.

Paulhoff

19th October 2006, 05:48 AM

What if they didn't give a damn about the historical accuracy of their writings nor about their consistency with previous stories? If this is the case, there is nothing to explain away!

That may be true, but today many people quote the bible as if it is historically accurate, and to be taken literally and there lies a big problem.

Paul

:) :) :)

triadboy

19th October 2006, 07:21 AM

I read the intro in the link and skimmed the rest, which seems to deal with how the gospel authors used Q as well as other texts. But nowhere did I see support for the assertion that the authors of Q "would have been devout followers" of anybody.

I can't imagine "passers by" recording his words. It must have been followers dedicated to his mission.

Deus Ex Machina

19th October 2006, 07:44 AM

Okay then what about taking a look at this article from CRI called
"The Evidence For Christ's Resurrection"
http://www.equip.org/free/CP0106.htm

How about you read it and tell me why you do or don't agree with it?

how about citing a source outside of the bible? It would appear that the Roman administration failed to note that someone they had put to death was up and around and stirring up the faithful. It would also appear that the Jewish administration and religious hierarchy did not get too excited about the arising of the undead in their midst. This gives rise to two possibilities - either the dead were popping up on a regular basis all over the place or it is a total fantasy.

The "standard" your quoted article uses could as well be used to 'prove' the Aragorn really did exist - as long as you only use the text of "Lord of The Rings" as your reference point.

Have you considered the possibility that you are suffering from cranio-rectal insertion syndrome?

Thinktoomuch

19th October 2006, 08:17 AM

On the Australian Broadcasting Commission site abc.net.au (http://abc.net.au)there is a comprehensive forum debate Jesus: hystory or mith? with all the points raised here and more, thoroughly referenced. Enjoy!

jjramsey

19th October 2006, 04:14 PM

jj, in your response to Kevin your are, I think, assuming that there is reason to think that the authors of the gospels would be concerned with consistency between their various accounts.

Hardly! The author of the Gospel of Matthew's adjustments to Mark's account and Luke's near-total rewrite of it made their accounts less consistent with Mark. My point was that their modifications of the story were indications that they themselves understood that it was damaging.

If your audience expects heroes to have limitations (such as, for example, King David, Samson, (I want to add Heracles to the list, but I haven't read that myth in a long time to be sure), Moses, then it makes sense that you're going to create a hero with limitations-such as the inability to heal where belief isn't strong, losing your temper with your followers from time to time, etc.

Except that it is rather strange to posit that Mark wanted to show Jesus as failing when he tries to backtrack from his implication by tacking on "he laid his hands on a few sick people and cured them."

This strikes me as similar to the thinking of 9/11 conspiracy theorists, in that you jump from a collection of dubious "anomalies" to a convenient conclusion.

Yet if you actually look at what conspiracy theorists theorists come up with, it comes out as, well, clunky and convoluted and ad hoc.

The history of how the books have come down to us is clunky and convoluted. It should not surprise us if there are oddities in the various texts we have that can be explained by the clunky and convoluted theory that folk tales are made up and constantly modified in all sorts of ways over time.

Of course, folk tales are made up and modified over time, and there is nothing convoluted about taking note of that. There are even parts of the Gospels that are easily explained by such phenomena. (The similarities between the account of the Syro-Phonecian woman whose daughter was healed at a distance by Jesus and the account of the centurion whose slave was healed by Jesus comes to mind.) However, that accounts for similarities between accounts or certain kinds of inconsistencies. It is not a catch-all explanation for all red flags.

One interpretation of the story is that you should treat your local cult leader with awe even if you knew them when they wore shorts, because otherwise you won't get miracles.

An interpretation that would make a lot more sense if Jesus was portrayed as refusing to do miracles, rather than lacking ability.

A less charitable view is that the story is a convenient excuse for when people who did know you as a child are not impressed.

Actually, that is pretty much what I think the story is about. He couldn't "heal" because his audience wasn't impressed with him and thus wasn't as suggestable.

Paulhoff

19th October 2006, 04:41 PM

If your audience expects heroes to have limitations (such as, for example, King David, Samson, (I want to add Heracles to the list, but I haven't read that myth in a long time to be sure), Moses, then it makes sense that you're going to create a hero with limitations-such as the inability to heal where belief isn't strong, losing your temper with your followers from time to time, etc.

Jesus was the son of a so-called god, why would you give him limitations since he was supposed to be so-called god himself.

Paul

:) :) :)

You know the all-powerful all-knowing etc god.

SezMe

19th October 2006, 05:19 PM

My point was that their modifications of the story were indications that they themselves understood that it was damaging.
I disagree. I don't think they cared about inconsistencies and thus did not see them as damaging.

My basis for this is that the times and locations of the audiences for the various gospels were totally different and the content was designed to appeal (read, proselytize) to these disparate audiences. They (the audience members) were not going to play detective by looking at various versions, looking for differences. The implication is that there was no damage to be concerned about.

ceo_esq

19th October 2006, 05:35 PM

I disagree. I don't think they cared about inconsistencies and thus did not see them as damaging.

My basis for this is that the times and locations of the audiences for the various gospels were totally different and the content was designed to appeal (read, proselytize) to these disparate audiences. They (the audience members) were not going to play detective by looking at various versions, looking for differences. The implication is that there was no damage to be concerned about.

That's an interesting hypothesis. On the other hand, within a remarkably (to me, anyway) short period of time after the probable composition of the last Gospel, we find Christian writers in widely differing geographic areas who are not only familiar with all four gospels but, indeed, refer to them in terms suggesting that they had already become the definitive gospel canon for the universal Church. Did the Gospel authors simply not foresee this happening so rapidly? Or, on the contrary, would they have expected that much of their audience would be exposed to more than one narrative Gospel tradition?

jjramsey

19th October 2006, 06:02 PM

Paulhoff

19th October 2006, 06:09 PM

Isn’t it fun arguing about a book of fiction? :rolleyes:

Paul

:) :) :)

Can Peter Pan really fly or is that just a metaphor?

SezMe

19th October 2006, 06:46 PM

It is so very nice of you to condescend to explain things to me clearly in your post #71, jj. To bad you can't be honest about the dialog.

Take a look at your embedded dialog at the top of post #71. Now go back to my post #69 and notice that I was responding to the damaging part (which I quoted to make that clear) and NOT to the "inconsistencies" part which you included in your post #71.

Or do I need to spell that out more clearly for you?

SezMe

19th October 2006, 06:59 PM

That's an interesting hypothesis. On the other hand, within a remarkably (to me, anyway) short period of time after the probable composition of the last Gospel, we find Christian writers in widely differing geographic areas who are not only familiar with all four gospels but, indeed, refer to them in terms suggesting that they had already become the definitive gospel canon for the universal Church. Did the Gospel authors simply not foresee this happening so rapidly? Or, on the contrary, would they have expected that much of their audience would be exposed to more than one narrative Gospel tradition?
Well, I should first reiterate that I am no expert here so the real answer is "I don't know." But I suppose that shouldn't stop me from speculating.

When was the last of the "canonical" gospels written, between, say, 110 and 150? But wasn't the "definitive gospel canon for the universal Church" not defined until the Council of Nicea in 325. So the period we are talking about is around 200 years. I don't know whether that is a remarkably short period of time or not but it does seem sufficient for the gospels to become widely circulated.

Imagine Jerry Falwell writing a proselytizing article that gets put into wide circulation and then he goes around giving barn-buring speeches based on that article. He knows he is right and plows ahead. Is he going to be concerned that someone else 50 years from now might write an article that has a different view of the "facts" of the matter? Moreover, is he going to be concerned that 200 years from now someone is going to compare the two documents and notice some horrendous inconsistencies?

My answer to both questions is "no" which is kinda the thrust behind my guesses for what happened 2000 years ago. Sure, it's a long stretch, but what else have we to go on?

SezMe

19th October 2006, 07:01 PM

Can Peter Pan really fly or is that just a metaphor?
Of course he can...didn't you see it at your local Bijou??? :)

ceo_esq

19th October 2006, 07:35 PM

When was the last of the "canonical" gospels written, between, say, 110 and 150?

It was probably the Gospel of John, estimated (http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/john.html) to have been composed between 90 and 120. Unless one takes a very late date for Luke's Gospel, say around 130.

But wasn't the "definitive gospel canon for the universal Church" not defined until the Council of Nicea in 325. So the period we are talking about is around 200 years. I don't know whether that is a remarkably short period of time or not but it does seem sufficient for the gospels to become widely circulated.

The Council of Nicaea did not decide that (here's the SkepticWiki (http://www.skepticwiki.org/wiki/index.php/First_Council_of_Nicaea) entry on the question). Much earlier Christian writings suggest that the orthodox tradition of the four (and only four) official Gospels developed before (maybe well before) the end of the 2nd century. For example, Irenaeus, Tertullian and Clement of Alexandria - all of whom died between 200 and 230 - speak of the four Gospels as though the canon (as regards Gospels, at least) were already well established by the time they wrote. So this canonical Gospel tradition must have coalesced and spread throughout Christendom less than 100 years, and possibly less than 50 years, after the date of composition of the last of the four Gospels. I think that's very rapid, all things considered.

Paulhoff

19th October 2006, 07:43 PM

The problem is that so many will quote the bible as fact and are so reluctant to point out and or will not recognize it many flaws.

Paul

:) :) :)

Peter Pan, god, same same.

jjramsey

19th October 2006, 07:47 PM

To bad you can't be honest about the dialog.

Take a look at your embedded dialog at the top of post #71. Now go back to my post #69 and notice that I was responding to the damaging part (which I quoted to make that clear) and NOT to the "inconsistencies" part which you included in your post #71.

You wrote, "I don't think they cared about inconsistencies and thus did not see them as damaging," as if I thought the inconsistencies were what the authors of the gospels of Matthew and Luke thought were damaging, rather than the implications of the Markan account. Back in post #69, you wrote:

They (the audience members) were not going to play detective by looking at various versions, looking for differences. The implication is that there was no damage to be concerned about.

This entirely misses the point. The damage would have come not from the differences, but from the authors of the gospels of Matthew and Luke reporting the Markan account as is. Instead, both authors controlled the damage by reporting "fixed" versions of the accounts to their audiences, who would presumably read their "fixed" versions, not the original flawed one in the gospel of Mark.

Imagine Jerry Falwell writing a proselytizing article that gets put into wide circulation and then he goes around giving barn-buring speeches based on that article. He knows he is right and plows ahead. Is he going to be concerned that someone else 50 years from now might write an article that has a different view of the "facts" of the matter?

This is a poor analogy. A somewhat better analogy would be if 500 years from now, someone found an article in a Christian newsletter about Falwell that had what looked like embarrassing content, and then found a similar article in another later Christian newsletter that looks almost like it was plagiarized from the earlier article, but some of it was, ahem, revised such that it didn't reflect so badly on Falwell. That would indicate that the content was not only embarassing in the view of readers 500 years from now, but also to the writer and probably the original readers of that latter article. That's an indication of how contemporaries received the original article, and a rough analogy for the relationship between the Markan and Matthean accounts. (Luke's account, as I said before, is a near-total rewrite, unlike the one in Matthew.)

pipelineaudio

19th October 2006, 09:51 PM

Pele was pretty vengeful and swooned over mortal guys all the time

I guess this means she must have existed.

Kevin_Lowe

19th October 2006, 10:37 PM

This is a poor analogy. A somewhat better analogy would be if 500 years from now, someone found an article in a Christian newsletter about Falwell that had what looked like embarrassing content, and then found a similar article in another later Christian newsletter that looks almost like it was plagiarized from the earlier article, but some of it was, ahem, revised such that it didn't reflect so badly on Falwell.

By this logic if we found an old copy of a fairy tale, which was more gruesome than the version found in a Little Golden Book at a supermarket checkout, it would follow that the original version was an accurate recounting of real events.

Marc L

20th October 2006, 06:34 AM

Jesus was the son of a so-called god, why would you give him limitations since he was supposed to be so-called god himself.

Paul

:) :) :)

You know the all-powerful all-knowing etc god.

Because he was also fully human. My guess is that it was to show that humans were fallible, even if they are the son of a so-called god, and that it wasn't until after his resurrection (when he would have shed his human part, obviously) that he became fully god.

Marc

Paulhoff

20th October 2006, 06:53 AM

So you want to set the limits on a so-called man-god that doesn’t and or didn’t exist, it is fun making up any rule you what that can’t be tested. So he is fully human, so than no miracles, no walking on water, no water into wine etc etc in a Yul Brynner voice.

Paul

:) :) :)

ChristineR

20th October 2006, 10:59 AM

The Council of Nicaea did not decide that (here's the SkepticWiki (http://www.skepticwiki.org/wiki/index.php/First_Council_of_Nicaea) entry on the question). Much earlier Christian writings suggest that the orthodox tradition of the four (and only four) official Gospels developed before (maybe well before) the end of the 2nd century. For example, Irenaeus, Tertullian and Clement of Alexandria - all of whom died between 200 and 230 - speak of the four Gospels as though the canon (as regards Gospels, at least) were already well established by the time they wrote. So this canonical Gospel tradition must have coalesced and spread throughout Christendom less than 100 years, and possibly less than 50 years, after the date of composition of the last of the four Gospels. I think that's very rapid, all things considered.

The writings that took the other Gospels seriously were mostly destroyed along with their heretical Gospels. I've heard a lot of people just dismiss the heretics as "not real Christians" (and some of them were pretty far out there) but there's good reason to suspect that some of these people were in closer agreement with the teachings of the carpenter from Nazareth than the "real Christians." And in any case there wasn't perfect agreement.

Cool Table (http://www.ntcanon.org/table.shtml)

joemailman

20th October 2006, 04:36 PM

The book that can answer your question is called The Jesus the Jews Never Knew, by Frank Zindler. It is the most researched work that I've been able to find and is as detailed as one would need to conclude an answer to your question.

skeptic griggsy

20th October 2006, 05:03 PM

Who cares about the joker anyway. I find Hawking and Madonna better role models!His advice is bonkers:she who turns the other cheek lands in the hospital and she who doubles the robber's gain is a fool. Maybe he was other than portrayed which is not edifying anyway .

jjramsey

20th October 2006, 05:11 PM

By this logic if we found an old copy of a fairy tale, which was more gruesome than the version found in a Little Golden Book at a supermarket checkout, it would follow that the original version was an accurate recounting of real events.

Bad analogy, although to be fair, the analogy I gave of Falwell was incomplete because it only addressed how one would tell that content was embarassing to contemporaries and not the truth of it.

Here's a somewhat better analogy. Imagine a biography of Uri Geller that told of his supposed fantastic feats, but had parts trying to explain that he was really born not in Austria, but in Tibet as some New Age-prophecy book foretold, that the fraud lawsuits against him were unjustified, and that some anti-Chi acted as kryptonite to his powers when he tried to exercises them in front of some skeptics. Someone reading that book 1000 years from now could easily conclude that this Uri Geller really existed, because the biographer is clearly trying to spin away failures that, judging from the laudatory content of the rest of the book, he/she would have hardly wanted to make up, and that furthermore, this Geller was probably a charlatan and the biography was propaganda.

pipelineaudio

20th October 2006, 05:40 PM

20th October 2006, 08:16 PM

Bad analogy, although to be fair, the analogy I gave of Falwell was incomplete because it only addressed how one would tell that content was embarassing to contemporaries and not the truth of it.

Here's a somewhat better analogy. Imagine a biography of Uri Geller that told of his supposed fantastic feats, but had parts trying to explain that he was really born not in Austria, but in Tibet as some New Age-prophecy book foretold, that the fraud lawsuits against him were unjustified, and that some anti-Chi acted as kryptonite to his powers when he tried to exercises them in front of some skeptics. Someone reading that book 1000 years from now could easily conclude that this Uri Geller really existed, because the biographer is clearly trying to spin away failures that, judging from the laudatory content of the rest of the book, he/she would have hardly wanted to make up, and that furthermore, this Geller was probably a charlatan and the biography was propaganda.

Problem is, fiction has been written like this for a VERY long time.

Even some of our oldest epic myths include the very human failings of their heroes. Legends are more accessible when the hero has flaws. So as arguments go, JJ, it's very, very weak.

jjramsey

20th October 2006, 08:26 PM

Thats still pretty weak

This seems like argument from personal incredulity (I think I got that right) where you dont think someone would behave a certain way, so you dont believe they could have acted a certain way

Not really. Here we are looking at what someone has already done, which in this case is write Mark 6:1-6, and working backwards to see what are the likely reasons why someone did it. Also it's only personal incredulity when there are no reasons offered as to why someone would not behave a certain way. If one is claiming that someone would not behave a certain way because it would be inconsistent with behavior already displayed, that is not an argument from personal incredulity.

jjramsey

20th October 2006, 08:47 PM

Problem is, fiction has been written like this for a VERY long time.

Even some of our oldest epic myths include the very human failings of their heroes.

And how many legends are written in such a fashion that the writer describes a hero's failure, tries to deflect blame for the failure onto others, and then tries to backpedal from admitting that the hero really failed? When Moses lost his temper, the author of Exodus didn't apologize for it. The author of the book of Samuel didn't imply that David committed murder by proxy and adultery only to tack on something to imply that he really didn't. The problem with your line of argument is that it doesn't account for the way it is presented in the Gospel of Mark, which shies away from the implications of the passage.

SezMe

20th October 2006, 10:36 PM

And how many legends are written in such a fashion that the writer describes a hero's failure, tries to deflect blame for the failure onto others, and then tries to backpedal from admitting that the hero really failed?
Doesn't matter. That there might be other legendary tales that contain such a story is totally irrelevant to the veracity of this tale.

20th October 2006, 10:40 PM

Not really. I don't see any difference in any of the narratives of the Bible. Not one of them is really any different from any other period fiction, really.

As for your initial question, lots of legends were so written. It all depends on who was doing the writing, and what the point of the writing was.

But let's do this right - please post the relevant passages from Mark, with an explanation of how no author would ever post such a passage in a work of fiction. Thanks.

21st October 2006, 01:32 AM

Doesn't matter. That there might be other legendary tales that contain such a story is totally irrelevant to the veracity of this tale.

Actually, I think what he's trying to say is that there are no such other imaginary tales, thereby proving the veracity of this one.

Which is silly.

jjramsey

21st October 2006, 06:40 AM

Actually, I think what he's trying to say is that there are no such other imaginary tales, thereby proving the veracity of this one.

I wouldn't go so far as to say that it was proof of the story's veracity. Rather, this story is trivially explained by a Jesus who existed as an ordinary mortal, and since there are plenty of other pieces of the New Testament--especially errors and offhand remarks--that are also trivially explained by a Jesus who existed as an ordinary mortal (which have only been briefly mentioned but not discussed on this thread), that together points to a Jesus who existed as an ordinary mortal. If Mark 6:1-6 stood out alone as a story trivially explained by a Jesus who existed as an ordinary mortal, that would not be as convincing.

The problem with your line of argument is that you are trying to compare a story that rationalizes an apparant failure to stories that portray heroic failure without apology.

21st October 2006, 06:51 AM

It doesn't point to anything except authors who were fairly imaginative and sensitive to their listener's interests. Period.

jjramsey

21st October 2006, 07:43 AM

It doesn't point to anything except authors who were fairly imaginative and sensitive to their listener's interests.

Right. It is in the listeners' interests to see a Jesus whose power is contingent on others' faith, but only sometimes and not consistently. It is in the listeners' interests to have Jesus' hometown be a podunk place that isn't even prophesied in the Old Testament. It is in the listeners' interests to have Jesus have brothers that are mentioned offhandedly in letters that they may or may not have read. It is in the listeners' interests to have Jesus cast woes on ordinary towns that have no religious significance and that they probably hadn't heard of outside the Gospels.

ChristineR

21st October 2006, 08:37 AM

Right. It is in the listeners' interests to see a Jesus whose power is contingent on others' faith, but only sometimes and not consistently.

This plot device (if I may call it that) is also found in the narrative of Uri Geller (if I may call it that), not to mention the narrative of Syliva Browne, Sri Baba, The Fox sisters, the Cottingly Fairies, ad nauseam.

It is in the listeners' interests to have Jesus' hometown be a podunk place that isn't even prophesied in the Old Testament.

This is actually a fundamental of early Christian theology. At the time Jewish ritual had become so constrained and elaborate that it was physically impossible to be an observent Jew and live in Nazareth, let alone work as a carpenter.

I've never found the people that argue that there is no historical component in the Jesus narratives to be convincing. The best they can do is point to a generic unknown historical figure whose works were pasted onto Paul's theology. If that is what happened though, why not postulate that the generic historical figure was the friend of Peter and brother of James that spawned a small cult?

jjramsey

21st October 2006, 09:04 AM

This plot device (if I may call it that) is also found in the narrative of Uri Geller (if I may call it that), not to mention the narrative of Syliva Browne, Sri Baba, The Fox sisters, the Cottingly Fairies, ad nauseam.

And that I find telling in itself. The plot device is an excuse for the failures of real people who only pretend to have powers.

This is actually a fundamental of early Christian theology. At the time Jewish ritual had become so constrained and elaborate that it was physically impossible to be an observent Jew and live in Nazareth, let alone work as a carpenter.

Except that the Gospels never point this out. Nazareth happens to be portrayed as his hometown, but isn't imbued with any significance. Describing it as a fundamental of early Christian theology is a stretch. Also, while Christians certainly portrayed Jewish ritual in a bad light, FWIW, I haven't read that in general, it was physically impossible to be a working peasant and a Jew. I'm not sure where you read that.

I've never found the people that argue that there is no historical component in the Jesus narratives to be convincing. The best they can do is point to a generic unknown historical figure whose works were pasted onto Paul's theology. If that is what happened though, why not postulate that the generic historical figure was the friend of Peter and brother of James that spawned a small cult?

I agree with you here. Let's here it for parsimony. Can I get a RAmen? :p

triadboy

21st October 2006, 09:05 AM

21st October 2006, 09:56 AM

Right. It is in the listeners' interests to see a Jesus whose power is contingent on others' faith,

Sure - otherwise, how do you convince people to have faith? If Jesus didn't need people to have faith, why bother with priesthoods and followers anyway? Simple political device.

... but only sometimes and not consistently.

After all, faith often doesn't come through. Gives the priests an out if a miracle fails to occur.

It is in the listeners' interests to have Jesus' hometown be a podunk place that isn't even prophesied in the Old Testament.

Harder to verify - or falsify - his birth. Pretty obvious.

It is in the listeners' interests to have Jesus have brothers that are mentioned offhandedly in letters that they may or may not have read.

I lean toward the 'Brotherhood of Christ' theory for that one.

It is in the listeners' interests to have Jesus cast woes on ordinary towns that have no religious significance and that they probably hadn't heard of outside the Gospels.

Just like Zeus would curse villages and harrass innocent people for no particular reason. Makes for an interesting story, but keeps from being verifiable.

The listeners would want to hear of a deity who shares human failings - just as Zeus couldn't find his own bed and was at odds with his kids regularly. They want to hear of a deity who isn't in firm, sole control - that way, natural disasters and unresolved hardships wouldn't disprove the deity's existence or power.

And the authors weren't stupid, obviously. If the authors had made claims like Jesus was born in Rome, for example, and worked miracles among the nobility or something, someone could easily check up on that story and falsify it. By placing events in podunk towns and making many insignificant references, the authors give Jesus an air of reality, but also protect themselves from those who would discover the lie. After all, if any of this had happened in significant towns, more people would hav heard of it on their own. Instead, they were only hearing it from a handful of priests, and had to take their word for it.

BTW, JJ, what experience do you have with literary analysis? Just curious.

ChristineR

21st October 2006, 09:57 AM

Except that the Gospels never point this out. Nazareth happens to be portrayed as his hometown, but isn't imbued with any significance. Describing it as a fundamental of early Christian theology is a stretch. Also, while Christians certainly portrayed Jewish ritual in a bad light, FWIW, I haven't read that in general, it was physically impossible to be a working peasant and a Jew. I'm not sure where you read that.

I don't believe this is ever stated explicitely in the historical record, and I'm pretty sure that you can find scholars who don't buy it. But consider this:

Jews were required to make regular sacrifices at the temple in Jerusalem, which was quite a burden for a working man from Nazareth.

Jews were not supposed to do any manual labor on the Sabbath, which is a lot easier if you have non-Jewish servants or live in a devout Jewish community (or live in the 21st century).

Judiasm at the time was controlled by a parasitical puppet government of the Romans. The Jewish rulers didn't have much to do except criticize other Jews for not being Jewish enough.

Romans made life pretty miserable for the average poor Jew, and the nominal Jewish leadership supported this by enforcing religious laws along with the Roman laws.

A considerable industry had grown up around the sacrifices, and Jesus is portrayed as being disgusted by this.

It is probable that the Romans used Jesus' criticism of Jewish religious orthodoxy as an excuse to crucify him, partially shifting the blame for executing a popular figure to their puppet government.

Jesus was consistently critical of people who follow the letter of the law but violate the spirit, and of course this got him into serious trouble.

So while the word impossible is disputed it certainly was an enormous burden and it is certain that Jesus grew up a devout Jew who was forced to break ritual laws out of necessity. Once you realize this and start to read the gospels you see indications of it everywhere.

RAMEN! it is. ;)

Gord_in_Toronto

21st October 2006, 10:28 AM

. . . .
a working man from Nazareth.
. . . .

Nazareth did not exist at the time of Jesus. Archaeological digging has shown there was nothing at this location but a shepard's hut and a graveyard. Nazareth is not recorded in any historical document from the time.

Jesus was "born" at Nazareth to satisfy the "prophecy" that he be a Nazarene. This was one of the smaller tribes of Isreal not a place. An easy mistake to make if you are not too smart and making the story up.

21st October 2006, 10:36 AM

I'd heard that there was a village at the site of later Nazareth, but obviously under a different name. Is the current consensus that it was nothing but a farmer's home?

jjramsey

21st October 2006, 11:55 AM

Sure - otherwise, how do you convince people to have faith?

You can have stories where Jesus withholds his power from those who lack faith, or have others fail to have power for lack of faith rather than Jesus. Both of these are in the Gospels, and in those cases, there is no backpedaling.

It is in the listeners' interests to have Jesus' hometown be a podunk place that isn't even prophesied in the Old Testament. Harder to verify - or falsify - his birth. Pretty obvious.

It would be just as hard to verify or falsify the claim that Jesus grew up in Bethlehem. That also assumes that the Gospel authors were assuming that their readers would check.

I lean toward the 'Brotherhood of Christ' theory for that one.

As Gerd Thiessen pointed out:

The argument that 'brothers of the Lord' in the passages mentioned means brothers who are especially zealous in the service of the Lord is intrinsically contradictory: in the Gospels [cf. Matthew 28:9ff and John 20:17], as is clear from the context, the brothers are the eleven apostles or the disciples, and Peter is always with included with them. In I Cor. 9.5, however, the 'brothers of the Lord' are distinguished from the 'other apostles and Peter'; in Gal. 1:19 James, and not Peter, is called 'brother of the Lord'. (The Historical Jesus--A Comprehensive Guide, p. 581)

If I replace "brothers who are especially zealous in the service of the Lord" with "brothers in Christ", the argument remains about the same. Note, too that the contexts in the Gospels where James is referred to as a brother are yet different again from the contexts where the meaning "brother in Christ" would be appropriate.

It is in the listeners' interests to have Jesus cast woes on ordinary towns that have no religious significance and that they probably hadn't heard of outside the Gospels.Just like Zeus would curse villages and harrass innocent people for no particular reason. Makes for an interesting story, but keeps from being verifiable.

Except that in the stories that you are talking about, Zeus is actually doing something nasty to the villages, not just denouncing them. The violence or other mischief makes up for the obscurity of the towns.

More to the point, what Jesus does is what any old nutcase could do. He goes to towns within walking distance of where he'd been living in Capernaum, namely Bethsaida and Chorazin, and rails that they are worse than Tyre and Sidon for not being impressed by his deeds of power. Gee, given what we read in Mark 6:1-6, I wonder why they might not be too impressed. If what was described in Matthew 11:20-24 had happened, it would be easy to explain why the names Capernaum, Bethsaida, and Chorazin were mentioned, and why the story could easily be described as the activities of a apocalyptic loony. Those names are not likely to be well-known to a non-Jew making up such a story--which isn't even much of a story--and a Jew might have picked towns that were a starker contrast to Tyre and Sidon. Not that it is impossible for someone making up the story to come up with those names, but they probably wouldn't be first choices.

And the authors weren't stupid, obviously. If the authors had made claims like Jesus was born in Rome, for example, and worked miracles among the nobility or something, someone could easily check up on that story and falsify it.

Except that the Gospels already screwed the pooch by naming real places that could be checked. For example, Gerasa was a town nowhere near water, yet Jesus is described as letting swine drown there. Does this look like the product of people careful enough to avoid making falsifiable claims?

Interestingly enough, unlike Capernaum, Bethsaida, and Chorazin, Gerasa was an actual city, one of the Decapolis, and thus a place that a mythmaker could more easily hear about.

BTW, JJ, what experience do you have with literary analysis? Just curious.

I'm no Bart Ehrman :(, but like him, I learned about exegesis, textual criticism, etc., from an evangelical college. I at least heard of things like redaction criticism from there, but really learned more about such "heretical" stuff on my own. Reginald H. Fuller's book The Formation of the Resurrection Narratives is a good place to see redaction criticism in action. I also had kept an eye on the moderate (http://www.ntgateway.com/weblog/) and secular (http://earliestchristianhistory.blogspot.com/)-oriented biblioblogs (http://lorenrosson.blogspot.com/) and on the Crosstalk discussion list (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/crosstalk2/).

jjramsey

21st October 2006, 12:17 PM

Nazareth did not exist at the time of Jesus. Archaeological digging has shown there was nothing at this location but a shepard's hut and a graveyard.

Funny, I had read it was a "single family farm (http://www.jesusneverexisted.com/nazareth.html)" and a graveyard. :p Never mind the problems (http://forums.randi.org/showpost.php?p=1601083&postcount=50) of supporting an isolated single family farm. As for the shepherd's hut, I'm not too sure whether there is a place to pasture where the hill country of Nazareth is. :con2:

That said, if you look at, say, Richard Horsley's Archaeology, History & Society in Galilee, you get a totally different picture, in which Nazareth is a small village. The idea that Nazareth didn't exist is mainly bandied around by Internet skeptics.

Nazareth is not recorded in any historical document from the time.

That much is true.

Jesus was "born" at Nazareth to satisfy the "prophecy" that he be a Nazarene.

This is false because there is no such prophecy, not even a mention of Nazarenes in the Old Testament.

This was one of the smaller tribes of Isreal not a place.

Wrong. The tribes of Israel were Reuben, Simeon, Levi, Judah, Zebulun, Issachar, Dan, Asher, Naphtali, Ephraim, and Manasseh. No Nazarene in that list.

Gord_in_Toronto

21st October 2006, 01:03 PM

I'd heard that there was a village at the site of later Nazareth, but obviously under a different name. Is the current consensus that it was nothing but a farmer's home?

No, it's not a consenus apparently.
http://www.skepticwiki.org/wiki/index.php/Existence_Of_Jesus#Existence_of_Nazareth
has more about this than probably either of us want to know!

21st October 2006, 01:08 PM

Ah - evangelical redaction. No wonder.

Good day, JJ. There is no point discussing this further with you.

As for the readers, please note that there were possibly dozens in the Brotherhood (the Apostles) mentioned in different texts. And all of them held titles such as 'brother' or 'sister' of Christ.

If what JJ says is true for the Gospels, it also must be true for the Iliad, Beowulf, and A Midsummer's Night's Dream, and any other work of fiction, for that matter.

That his account of things made it to the SkepticWiki is a sad but telling point about the failures of internet encyclopedias.

ceo_esq

21st October 2006, 02:33 PM

The writings that took the other Gospels seriously were mostly destroyed along with their heretical Gospels.

That's an interesting hypothesis, but we do have a number of those gospels or evidence or their existence, without any evidence that they ever attained anything like the status, recognition or authority enjoyed by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John even as early as the 2nd century.

I've heard a lot of people just dismiss the heretics as "not real Christians" (and some of them were pretty far out there) but there's good reason to suspect that some of these people were in closer agreement with the teachings of the carpenter from Nazareth than the "real Christians."

I'm not aware of any especially good reason to suspect such a thing. Particularly since one of the characteristics frequently (though not necessarily) found with apocryphal gospels is a late date of composition. Which heretical groups did you have in mind?

Another thing to remember is that these writings weren't necessarily considered heretical as such. We know that some were read and enjoyed in mainstream Christian communities (and some continue to be). Mainstream Christians have copied and published them throughout the centuries, just without according them the same reverence or authoritative status as the Big Four.

And in any case there wasn't perfect agreement.

I think everyone understands that there's never perfect consensus. But the degree of agreement on the primacy of the four canonical Gospels that arose in Christianity within a relatively short time after the composition of those texts is substantial, to say the least.

Cool Table (http://www.ntcanon.org/table.shtml)

That is cool. It's pretty consistent with what I've been talking about.

ChristineR

21st October 2006, 04:24 PM

That's an interesting hypothesis, but we do have a number of those gospels or evidence or their existence, without any evidence that they ever attained anything like the status, recognition or authority enjoyed by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John even as early as the 2nd century.

We have only a handful of texts, and most of those only through historical accident. Even then some of them may be earlier than Mark, and possibly more historically true to the original teachings. There are also a number of hypothezied books, such Q (mentioned above) an eariler version of the Gospel of John and an earlier version of Mark.

What we do know is that a number of people took these books seriously. Mostly we know this from disapproving quotes from orthodox writers. If a different branch of the church had won out we might all be quoting Valentinius' opinion of the fragmentary Gospel of John and debating the historical merits of The Gospel of Truth. Valentinius' writings were destroyed, but we know from quotes that he had plenty to say.

As it was, the majority party won out and suppressed the opposition. The majority party was the followers of Paul. We know from Paul's letters and the Book of Acts that Paul had some pretty serious theological disagreements with Peter and James...unless you take the approach that the book of Acts was completely fictionalized along with the life of Jesus.

So all this really says is that the popular sect liked four books more than the others, and that the popular sect won out and destroyed everything they could find that disagreed with them. It gives an illusion of consensus that simply wasn't there.

I'm not aware of any especially good reason to suspect such a thing. Particularly since one of the characteristics frequently (though not necessarily) found with apocryphal gospels is a late date of composition. Which heretical groups did you have in mind?

It's entirely within reason that the original Jesus cult held to a theology quite different from Paul's and that Paul's church became popular and won out. In fact, it is fairly certain that this is what happened. We know that the original cult kept kosher, made a point of circumsion, and considered themselves Jews. (Again, this is true unless you take the approach that the whole thing was just invented out of whole cloth long after the theology developed.)

Also, there are echos of gnosticism even in the canonical gospels. Perhaps the evangelists started with a historically accurate document and edited out the obvious gnostic heresies. Perhaps the original documents were destroyed. Perhaps not.

Another thing to remember is that these writings weren't necessarily considered heretical as such. We know that some were read and enjoyed in mainstream Christian communities (and some continue to be). Mainstream Christians have copied and published them throughout the centuries, just without according them the same reverence or authoritative status as the Big Four.

Well that's not really my experience as a former mainstream Christian, but certainly scholars have and continue to love all this stuff.

I think everyone understands that there's never perfect consensus. But the degree of agreement on the primacy of the four canonical Gospels that arose in Christianity within a relatively short time after the composition of those texts is substantial, to say the least.

Again, it's deceptive because what really happened is that one sect became the most popular and reached a consensus on their books.

That is cool. It's pretty consistent with what I've been talking about.

Agreed, but it's also consistent with the possibility that the writers who like different texts just aren't known to us.

jjramsey

21st October 2006, 04:44 PM

Ah - evangelical redaction. No wonder.

Good day, JJ. There is no point discussing this further with you.

That's right. Ignore the references to Jesus being a mortal man and even being a nutcase. I must be an evangelical because I learned exegesis at an evangelical college. Ignore the references that indicated that I moved on from that.

As for the readers, please note that there were possibly dozens in the Brotherhood (the Apostles) mentioned in different texts. And all of them held titles such as 'brother' or 'sister' of Christ.

Actually, as a Crosstalk poster noted (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/crosstalk2/message/12204):

The grammar in "the Brother of the Lord" is completely different from that in every instance with which Doherty compares the use of the phrase, yet Doherty treats them all as identical. It would be interesting to see Doherty try to defend his reading in a forum populated with people who have some linguistic and philological expertise.

--snip--

It's interesting to note that Crossan in BOC mentions precisely the same point, but having done his homework Crossan reaches the diametrically opposed conclusion: That the term "sarx" and its derivatives denote a "fleshly" and physical existence. Crossan's discussion is, of course, in a different context.

Note the remark praising Crossan. This is obviously not from your typical inerrantist evangelical. Not even close.

Anyway, you seem to be trying to get "brother" to mean the same thing across the New Testament, which, as the quote from Gerd Thiessen above shows, doesn't work.

If what JJ says is true for the Gospels, it also must be true for the Iliad, Beowulf, and A Midsummer's Night's Dream, and any other work of fiction, for that matter.

No. The Gospels are in the biographical genre, which means that there is a reasonable chance that they are mixing truth and fiction (hardly uncommon in ancient works!). Furthermore, they have a consistent bias in favor of making Jesus look good, which makes it easier to apply the criterion of embarassment. It also helps that they are written a few decades after the events they purport to describe, though not as helpful as the apologists would like. A Midsummer's Night's Dream is a play written for entertainment several centuries after the events it purports to describe. Comparing it to the Gospels is like comparing apples and oranges. The Iliad and Beowulf are epic poetry and so not in the genre of the Gospels. The Iliad, we know, is dimly based on real events, so the comparison with the Gospels isn't totally off, but unlike the Gospels, there is no clear bias in favor of a particular individual, so the criterion of embarassment is much more difficult to apply. The Iliad is also written several centuries after the events it purports to describe making it even harder to sift fact from fiction. Your comparison is a strawman.

DangerousBeliefs

21st October 2006, 05:26 PM

I've always wondered....

If Adam and Eve was a story...

If Moses and the Egyptian king was a story...

If the temple of Bable was a story...

Soddom and Gomora was a story...

Noah and the great flood was a story...

Jonah and the big fish/whale was a story...

The tell of Sampson was a story...

The tell of David was a story....

What does it matter if Jesus was a real person or not? His story stands on a house made of smoke.

skeptic griggsy

21st October 2006, 05:43 PM

How true! Yahweh and Yehshua were queer birds. Yes, there is not much real history in those stories. The Israelites didn't commit all that genocide,but that shows the mind-set of those men of yore! What is the commandment to love when other matters limit that love -slavery,etc.Yeshua 's ethics were so impractical . If there were an Amazing Randi back then, the fool would have been exposed as a charlatan . Randi is a better role model!

jjramsey

21st October 2006, 05:58 PM

What does it matter if Jesus was a real person or not? His story stands on a house made of smoke.

In and of itself, it doesn't matter too much. However, buying into Jesus-mythicism currently means buying into junk scholarship, and buying into junk is a bad mental practice. Look, for example, at zaayrdragon's attempts to explain away the references to Jesus having brothers as being references to "brothers in Christ," despite the inconsistencies and failure to fit the contexts of the various passages where "brother" is used. Look at how would-be skeptics embrace pseudo-archaeology about Nazareth. Look at the facile apples-and-oranges comparisions made between the propaganda pieces that we call the Gospels and a Shakespeare play written for light entertainment.

This is your brain. This is your brain on Jesus-mythers' junk scholarship. Any questions?

21st October 2006, 06:10 PM

As the apologist-in-skeptic-clothing flings ad-hom attacks...

:D

I will concede on the 'brothers' point. Frankly, whether or not he had brothers is completely irrelevant to whether or not he existed at all. In fact, most of your talking points are irrelevant to whether or not he existed at all. Why? Because every single point you've tried to make, exists in pure fantasy works as well.

Now, if you could come up with NON-BIBLICAL evidence for the existence of a real Jesus, you might have something. But this pathetic literary analysis shows nothing at all.

I wonder in a hundred years if people will wonder if Bilbo Baggins was real, too...

skeptic griggsy

21st October 2006, 06:16 PM

Apologists j ust love to make such far-fetched arguments ! See "I don't have enough Faith to be an Atheist for distorted histiography and other faults .Has any skeptic here anything to say about the book?

Paulhoff

21st October 2006, 06:21 PM

skeptic griggsy

21st October 2006, 06:33 PM

Paul, so true! You post also @ Skeptic Society forum as I remember . How was his morals so much better than those of the pagans ?

SezMe

21st October 2006, 06:35 PM

However, buying into Jesus-mythicism currently means buying into junk scholarship, and buying into junk is a bad mental practice.

Any questions?
Yes, I have one.

As far as I can tell, reasonable people can put reasonable arguments on the table regarding Jesus as a real, single person, as an amalgam of real people, and as a myth.

But, you? No, you have the final answer and everyone else is just doing "junk scholarship".

So my question is this: Given that many, many people over many many decades have studied this question with no definitive, widely accepted resolution at hand, why are you the final authority?

Gord_in_Toronto

21st October 2006, 06:47 PM

Funny, I had read it was a "single family farm (http://www.jesusneverexisted.com/nazareth.html)" and a graveyard. :p Never mind the problems (http://forums.randi.org/showpost.php?p=1601083&postcount=50) of supporting an isolated single family farm. As for the shepherd's hut, I'm not too sure whether there is a place to pasture where the hill country of Nazareth is. :con2:

If there is no pasture, how did they survive? Take in each other's washing? OK. For shepherd read, goatherd.

That said, if you look at, say, Richard Horsley's Archaeology, History & Society in Galilee, you get a totally different picture, in which Nazareth is a small village. The idea that Nazareth didn't exist is mainly bandied around by Internet skeptics.

But it certainly did not exist as a city as claimed in the New Testament.

That much is true.

OK.

This is false because there is no such prophecy, not even a mention of Nazarenes in the Old Testament.

So it's one of The Great Messianic Prophecies of Moses. If we can't trust ol' Moe, who can we trust?

Wrong. The tribes of Israel were Reuben, Simeon, Levi, Judah, Zebulun, Issachar, Dan, Asher, Naphtali, Ephraim, and Manasseh. No Nazarene in that list.

Lost tribe?

:)

Demigorgon

21st October 2006, 07:16 PM

I thought that there was written Roman record of him, although I can't recall where I heard it, nor ever seeing it. WHO FILLED MY HEAD WITH THIS!?

ChristineR

21st October 2006, 07:41 PM

I thought that there was written Roman record of him, although I can't recall where I heard it, nor ever seeing it. WHO FILLED MY HEAD WITH THIS!?

Pliny the Younger (112 AD) and Tacitus (c. 115 AD) are the earliest Roman reference to Christians, people who follow "Christ." Suetonius (115 AD) makes reference to a Jewish agitator named Chrestus, but that was a fairly common name.

Apparently the first Roman reference that actually refers to Jesus is Celsus (178 AD) who is known mostly from Origen's Contra Celsus written about 60 years later. Celsus' would fit in pretty well on this board--he doesn't question the existence of a historical figure, but points out that all the stories seem to be lifted right out of Roman myth and repeatedly talks about "lies" and "fabrications" and fictions.

jjramsey

21st October 2006, 07:50 PM

Given that many, many people over many many decades have studied this question with no definitive, widely accepted resolution at hand, why are you the final authority?

Quite simply, the premise that "many people ... have studied this question with no definitive, widely accepted resolution at hand" is false. It would have been true in the 19th century and at the turn of the 20th. What happened, though, is that what the Jesus-mythers kept coming up with was pretty awful. For some historical perspective, this is what S. J. Case, writing in 1912, had to say:

A second type of this general skepticism admits the reality of Paul as an important individual for the founding of the new religion, but holds that his letters in their present form are the result of considerable reworking on the part of later Christians. Drews in particular would save Paul in so far as the latter can be cited as the exponent of a religion built upon faith in an idea--the item which Drews regards as central in all religion. As might be expected, the fundamental problems of Pauline study are scarcely touched and no fixed principles of critical investigation are followed. One takes from the literature what he pleases and leaves what he pleases. We are told at the start that no compelling proof for the authenticity of any of the letters can be produced, and yet from them a somewhat elaborate and confident exposition of alleged Pauline thought is derived. Anything in these writings supposedly pointing to the historicity of Jesus is explained otherwise, or is called a later insertion. Finally it is asserted that "the Pauline letters contain no compulsion of any sort for the supposition of a historical Jesus, and no man would be likely to find such there if it were not already for him an established assumption."

At once several familiar passages demand explanation. For instance I Cor. 11:23ff., describing the last supper on the night of Jesus' betrayal, seems to point very clearly to a specific event in the life of a historical individual. This difficulty is avoided by assuming that "we have here to do with a clearly later insertion," at least the reference to the betrayal is "certainly inserted." Similarly the implication of a historical Jesus in I Cor. 15:5ff. is either another interpolation, or else these experiences are purely ecstatic in character and do not imply, as is commonly supposed, any thought of a definite historical person whose death preceded these unusual manifestations. It is a convenient elasticity of critical method which can allow these options. Again, the mention of "brothers" of the Lord, as in I Cor. 9:5 and Gal. 1:19, is to be understood in the sense of community brotherhood. Yet we are not told why Paul in the same context should not have included Peter and Barnabas in this brotherhood. Moreover brothers in the Lord, not brothers of the Lord, is Paul's mode of thought for the community relationship. These are typical examples of both the brevity and the method Drews uses in disposing of the Pauline evidence. It is difficult to take arguments of this sort seriously, particularly when they are presented so briefly and with no apparent ground of justification except the presupposition that a historical Jesus must not be recognized.

From http://www.christianorigins.com/case/ch3.html

After a while, the Jesus-mythers stopped being taken seriously by the biblical scholars. The best of the Jesus-mythers seems to be Doherty, and what he has to offer is some of the same old junk regarding James and convoluted speculation about how Jesus was crucified in a sublunar heaven. As a scholar, he's an excellent rhetoretician. At the worst is stuff that tries to claim that Christianity derives from paganism, and this relies on vagueness and pseudohistory. For example, if you try to Freke & Gandy's endnotes in The Jesus Mysteries, you'll find that the references are often selectively quoted or just don't back him up at all. In one case, I found that they misquoted a source who in turn misquoted its source!

Kevin_Lowe

22nd October 2006, 04:30 AM

After a while, the Jesus-mythers stopped being taken seriously by the biblical scholars. The best of the Jesus-mythers seems to be Doherty, and what he has to offer is some of the same old junk regarding James and convoluted speculation about how Jesus was crucified in a sublunar heaven. As a scholar, he's an excellent rhetoretician. At the worst is stuff that tries to claim that Christianity derives from paganism, and this relies on vagueness and pseudohistory. For example, if you try to Freke & Gandy's endnotes in The Jesus Mysteries, you'll find that the references are often selectively quoted or just don't back him up at all. In one case, I found that they misquoted a source who in turn misquoted its source!

This all sounds good until you remember that your idea of rigorous argument is "Well, I would never make something like that up, so I believe that it is an accurate historical account and you should too".

The amount of real evidence (as opposed to evidence found in a work of fiction) of a unitary historical Jesus is absolutely pitiful, and there is no getting around that. So you are reduced to trying to pull yourself up by the bootstraps, using the Bible to prove that the Bible is an accurate historical account.

The best that you could possibly hope to achieve that way would be to show that the Bible is believable fiction. That's what it means when you read a work of fiction and think "Wow, that could really have happened". It doesn't mean the work of fiction is real.

davefoc

22nd October 2006, 05:22 AM

Another was Jesus real thread.

I guess it's that time of year. I kind of like the idea, our own little JREF tradition where somebody starts a "was Jesus real" thread every October.

I'm pretty much in the jjramsey camp on the issue. I think there are several pieces of evidence that when looked at in totality argue fairly strongly that an historical Jesus did exixt. My list in order of the strength of the evidence.

1. Early existence of Jewish Christians described by early Church writers and alluded to in the bible.
2. Paul's writings which seem to clearly refer to a flesh and blood Jesus.
3. Josephus references, particularly James, brother of Jesus reference.
4. Mark
5. Other new testament writings, in particular other Gospels that strongly suggest existence of the earlier writing known as q.
6. A few other early writing in particular gospel of Thomas and gospel of egerton

Put altogether they make something of a cohesive story about how the early Christian Church arose and how one of its early leaders was James the probable natural brother of Jesus. One of the problems with the Jesus mythicist view is that it doesn't provide an alternative description of how the early church formed that is as straightforward and as well documented as the more mainstream view that Jesus was real.

But I think we have very little information about several of the most interesting questions about Jesus. In particular, "was he executed and if so for what?" strikes me as a complete unknown unless one accepts the NT accounts and I tend not to on this.

Kevin_Lowe

22nd October 2006, 05:36 AM

My list in order of the strength of the evidence.

1. Early existence of Jewish Christians described by early Church writers and alluded to in the bible.
2. Paul's writings which seem to clearly refer to a flesh and blood Jesus.
3. Josephus references, particularly James, brother of Jesus reference.
4. Mark
5. Other new testament writings, in particular other Gospels that strongly suggest existence of the earlier writing known as q.
6. A few other early writing in particular gospel of Thomas and gospel of egerton

1. This is not evidence of a unitary historical Jesus.
2. You can't use the Bible to prove the Bible is not fiction.
3. This is not evidence of a unitary historical Jesus, it just refers to a Rabbi called something like Jesus. Apart from the name and the job the individual referenced in Josephus has none of the characteristics that make the alleged Biblical Jesus important.
4. You can't use the Bible to prove the Bible is not fiction.
5. You can't use the Bible to prove the Bible is not fiction.
6. You can't use the Bible to prove the Bible is not fiction.

ChristineR

22nd October 2006, 05:42 AM

DangerousBeliefs

22nd October 2006, 07:35 AM

Except that the NT was written by many different people and you have to establish how and why they copied from one another. For example, you have to explain that Paul's references to a historical person were late additions and that Mark is whole-cloth fiction, and you have to be able to defend your claims. No one has done that to my satisfaction--the claim that Paul latched onto an existing cult and added all sorts of "revelation" fits the text much better.

No, first you have to establish that the history in OT was real. Unfortunately, the more research is done, the less likely a good chunk of OT is real. Oh sure, they add some contemporary (to them) information, as any good fiction writer does, but that's about it.

If OT is fiction, then NT must be fiction. Why? Because Jesus quotes OT as the truth. Early revisionist Christians are caught in their own history re-writing.

And here's the real kicker, if OT is fiction and NT is fiction, then Islam and all other Torah-based religions are fiction as well.

Hey, I wonder if that's why apologists defend OT so ridiculously? Because the house of cards all falls down... for what? 60-70% of the population?

Give the followers of Islam time, they too will eventually become skeptical.

Jekyll

22nd October 2006, 07:41 AM

If OT is fiction, then NT must be fiction. Why? Because Jesus quotes OT as the truth.
So if I agree that to be or not to be is, in fact, the question am I going to disappear in a puff of mythology?

jjramsey

22nd October 2006, 07:53 AM

This all sounds good until you remember that your idea of rigorous argument is "Well, I would never make something like that up, so I believe that it is an accurate historical account and you should too".

Actually, this is another example of "This is your brain. This is your brain on Jesus-mythers' junk scholarship." The argument that you attribute to me is one that I never gave. This is what I wrote in the original thread on the SkepticWiki article about the existence of Jesus:

Strawman. Mark 6:1-6 isn't too consistent with the author of the Gospel of Mark intending to write fiction. It looks suspiciously like a failure of Jesus to induce a placebo effect. Moreover, it looks like an attempt to explain away a failure. When fictional characters fail, it is by the will of the author, so there is no need to explain away such a failure; it's part of the plot. If Jesus is mythical, why is he shown failing in the way a charlatan would, or the way an ordinary man who has delusions of having powers to heal would? If Jesus was supposed to fail, why is Mark looks like he is trying to obscure the failure?

From http://forums.randi.org/showpost.php?p=1575307&postcount=41

This is what I wrote earlier on this thread:

This is a subtle strawman, but a strawman nonetheless. It isn't that if I were making this stuff up I would make Jesus do miracles all the time. It is that if I were making this stuff up, it would be an awfully strange coincidence if what I wrote looked just like what I would write if I were trying to rationalize away my hero doing the kind of failure that an ordinary man would have if he really only could "heal" by the power of suggestion.

This quote from you is further telling:

you are reduced to trying to pull yourself up by the bootstraps, using the Bible to prove that the Bible is an accurate historical account.

I've referred to the Gospels as propaganda, which hardly speaks to their accuracy.

3. Josephus references, particularly James, brother of Jesus reference.
3. This is not evidence of a unitary historical Jesus, it just refers to a Rabbi called something like Jesus. Apart from the name and the job the individual referenced in Josephus has none of the characteristics that make the alleged Biblical Jesus important.

You mean, apart from the name "James" and the reference to "brother of Jesus called Christ". So I guess you are either arguing that any number of Jameses could have had a "brother of Jesus called Christ" or (far more likely) that the passage was an interpolation. Note that if you are arguing the latter, you are on much weaker footing than you are in the case of the Testimonium Flavianum, which has, at the very least, been tampered with by Christian scribes and is far less neutral in tone than the passage about "brother of Jesus called Christ," which only mentions Jesus incidentally.

As the apologist-in-skeptic-clothing

From my experience at IIDB, "apologist" is what atheist and agnostic biblical scholars are called when then call BS on Jesus-myth arguments. :)

Frankly, whether or not he had brothers is completely irrelevant to whether or not he existed at all.... every single point you've tried to make, exists in pure fantasy works as well.

So I gather that you believe that the letters of Paul are pure fantasy works? I guess a fantasy writer might pen his/her works in the form of letters, but one has to wonder then why these supposed fantasy works have so little narrative content, and look instead like letters to churches about doctrinal issues. I suppose that you could try to argue instead that Paul's reference to "brother(s) of the Lord" was a title, but then you'd have to explain why one should favor this interpretation when there is no evidence of it being a title and interpreting "brother" as literal here fits neatly with both the Gospels and Josephus.

ChristineR

22nd October 2006, 09:18 AM

No, first you have to establish that the history in OT was real. Unfortunately, the more research is done, the less likely a good chunk of OT is real. Oh sure, they add some contemporary (to them) information, as any good fiction writer does, but that's about it.

If OT is fiction, then NT must be fiction. Why? Because Jesus quotes OT as the truth. Early revisionist Christians are caught in their own history re-writing.

And here's the real kicker, if OT is fiction and NT is fiction, then Islam and all other Torah-based religions are fiction as well.

Hey, I wonder if that's why apologists defend OT so ridiculously? Because the house of cards all falls down... for what? 60-70% of the population?

Give the followers of Islam time, they too will eventually become skeptical.

I don't think most of the people here are arguing for Biblical inerrancy. There is a big stretch between historically inaccurate and fiction. And large parts of the OT have been pretty well established as fiction. That the authors of the NT thought the OT was inerrant really doesn't prove that there was no historical Jesus.

davefoc

22nd October 2006, 10:50 AM

1. This is not evidence of a unitary historical Jesus.
2. You can't use the Bible to prove the Bible is not fiction.
3. This is not evidence of a unitary historical Jesus, it just refers to a Rabbi called something like Jesus. Apart from the name and the job the individual referenced in Josephus has none of the characteristics that make the alleged Biblical Jesus important.
4. You can't use the Bible to prove the Bible is not fiction.
5. You can't use the Bible to prove the Bible is not fiction.
6. You can't use the Bible to prove the Bible is not fiction.

My first comment to your response is that you seem to be looking at a somewhat different question with your responses. The search for an historical Jesus is like the search for an answer to many historical questions. One is taking the best available evidence and making the best estimate based on that available evidence is of what the underlying facts are. Your question seems to be: "Is there incontrovertible evidence for an historical Jesus?" Although jjramsey might quibble I think he would agree that there is not incontrovertible evidence for an historical Jesus in the same way there is for instance incontrovertible evidence that the American civil war happened.

As to the details of a response, several people have made, the relevant responses so mostly what is below is a summary of what as been said above.

1. Existence of Jewish Christians not evidence of a historical Jesus.
I agree and disagree. Exactly how the Jewish Christians practiced their faith and what they believed in has been lost. It is likely that they were mostly wiped out by the Romans with the rest of the inhabitants of Jerusalem in 65 AD. Still in some way, today's Christianity seems to have been derived from their ideas and it seems like quite a stretch that the Pauline Christians went to a faith based on a real historical Jesus from a Jewish Christian faith based on a nonexistant entity. Early Christian writings are critical of the Jewish Christians but they aren't criticizing the Jewish Christians because they don't believe in a real historical Jesus.

2. You can't use the NT to prove the NT is not fiction:
Others have already commented on this. The NT is not a single work written by a single individual. There is no evidence that Paul even knew of the Gospels. So for your idea to be right here Paul, the author of Mark and the author(s) of q had to either independently create this myth or get together and create this myth. But if they got together the evidence is lost for that (except that the author of Acts and Luke were probably the same person and the author of Acts may have traveled with Paul (a disputed issue)) and if they did get together they were unsuccessful at producing a consistent narrative.

3. Josephus not evidence of a unitary Jesus.
There are two references to Jesus in Josephus writings. Although there is a universal secular consensus that they were modified, there is also apparently a scholarly consensus that the reference to James the brother of Jesus is legitimate. This fact shoehorns nicely with references to James in the Gospels and Acts and this helps to flesh out at least a plausible theory about the early Christian Church.

4. Mark is just a part of the bible and therefore can't be used to verify the bible:
Mark is generally believed to have been the first Gospel written and represents at least one independent data point concerning the existence of an historical Jesus. Having said that, the book is filled with stories of miracles and other stuff that didn't happen. In addition the last section of Mark was added to support later theology. So you'll get no argument from me that it isn't all that reliable, I just think that its existence helps build the circumstantial case that Jesus existed.

5. Other gospels don't provide any other evidence for the existance of Jesus:
Matthew and Luke were clearly dependent on two sources. One of which is Mark and the other of which is the hypothetical q document. The q document represents at least one more independent source arguing for the existance of an historical Jesus.

6. Because the Gospel of Thomas and the Egerton Gospel are in the bible they aren't independent evidence for the existance of an historical Jesus:
These writings are not in the bible. The didache is also an interesting document with regard to this question.

SezMe

22nd October 2006, 12:26 PM

Quite simply, the premise that "many people ... have studied this question with no definitive, widely accepted resolution at hand" is false.
I am sure you have heard of the Jesus Seminar (http://www.westarinstitute.org/Jesus_Seminar/jesus_seminar.html). As stated in that link, it was founded in 1985 and now consists of over 200 scholars who pursue the very question of Jesus' existence...with no definitive result.

I have thus demonstrated with evidence that your assertion above is incorrect. So my original question remains on the table: What makes you more knowledgeable than everyone else?

ceo_esq

22nd October 2006, 02:00 PM

Pliny the Younger (112 AD) and Tacitus (c. 115 AD) are the earliest Roman reference to Christians, people who follow "Christ."

Although depending on how one defines a "Roman reference", arguably Paul's much earlier letters qualify.

jjramsey

22nd October 2006, 02:07 PM

I am sure you have heard of the Jesus Seminar (http://www.westarinstitute.org/Jesus_Seminar/jesus_seminar.html). As stated in that link, it was founded in 1985 and now consists of over 200 scholars who pursue the very question of Jesus' existence...with no definitive result.

I have thus demonstrated with evidence that your assertion above is incorrect.

No, what you have demonstrated is that you don't know much about the Jesus Seminar. The Jesus Seminar pursues the question of what the historical Jesus said and did, not whether he existed.

SezMe

22nd October 2006, 02:12 PM

jjramsey

22nd October 2006, 02:18 PM

There are two references to Jesus in Josephus writings. Although there is a universal secular consensus that they were modified, there is also apparently a scholarly consensus that the reference to James the brother of Jesus is legitimate.

A quibble. The majority opinion is currently that the paragraph about Jesus in Josephus' Antiquities, the Testimonium Flavianum, has been doctored, while a significant minority of scholars believe that it was a total interpolation. The scholarly consensus regarding the briefer mention in Antiquities of "brother of Jesus called Christ" is that it is authentic and not doctored.

jjramsey

22nd October 2006, 02:43 PM

The very first sentence on their web site is:
The Jesus Seminar was organized under the auspices of the Westar Institute to renew the quest of the historical Jesus and to report the results of its research to more than a handful of gospel specialists.
My emphasis.

When scholars refer to the quest for the historical Jesus, they refer to the question of what he actually said and did, as opposed to what the Gospels, etc., said he did. You can even find references to the "first quest" in the 19th century, the "second quest" (or "new quest") starting in the 1950s, and the "third quest" continuing to the present. (Whether the Jesus Seminar belongs to the "second quest" or "third quest" depends on who you ask. :)) Good grief! Even Doherty has complained (http://home.ca.inter.net/~oblio/preamble.htm) that the Jesus Seminar doesn't seriously deal with the question of Jesus' existence. I'm surprised you misinterpreted "quest" that grossly. More from the site:

The goal of the Seminar was to review each of the fifteen hundred items [sayings] and determine which of them could be ascribed with a high degree of probability to Jesus. The items passing the test would be included in a database for determining who Jesus was. But the interpretation of the data was to be excluded from the agenda of the Seminar and left to individual scholars working from their own perspectives.

--snip--

For those who believe the Bible to be the word of God a 16% historical accuracy rate may seem ridiculously low. Why did the Seminar end up with so many black (largely or entirely fictive) and gray (possible but unreliable) reports? The results should not be surprising to critical scholars--those whose evaluations are not predetermined by theological considerations. Nevertheless, it is important to both the general reader and the scholars who participated in the Seminar to be as clear as possible about the reasons for this result.

I think it's pretty clear, even from the page you cite, that the Jesus Seminar deals with the question of what Jesus said and did, not whether he ever walked the earth.

ceo_esq

22nd October 2006, 03:15 PM

When scholars refer to the quest for the historical Jesus, they refer to the question of what he actually said and did, as opposed to what the Gospels, etc., said he did. You can even find references to the "first quest" in the 19th century, the "second quest" (or "new quest") starting in the 1950s, and the "third quest" continuing to the present. (Whether the Jesus Seminar belongs to the "second quest" or "third quest" depends on who you ask. :)) Good grief! Even Doherty has complained (http://home.ca.inter.net/~oblio/preamble.htm) that the Jesus Seminar doesn't seriously deal with the question of Jesus' existence. I'm surprised you misinterpreted "quest" that grossly. More from the site:

I think it's pretty clear, even from the page you cite, that the Jesus Seminar deals with the question of what Jesus said and did, not whether he ever walked the earth.

I agree. There might be a tiny handful of Christ-mythers among the Jesus Seminar members, but it's clear from the Seminar's publications that the Seminar's overwhelming and "official" position is that Jesus existed and that he said and did at least a core minority of the sayings and (non-miraculous) deeds attributed to him by the Gospels.

Moreover, there are many recognized New Testament scholars who are not part of the Jesus Seminar, and among the pre-eminent names outside the Seminar, the weight of opinion seems to favor, if anything, an even better-developed historical figure than the one espoused by the "Seminarians".

There are next to no expert scholars currently publishing in relevant disciplines who seriously dispute the existence of a historical Jesus. The notion that there was never a historical Jesus enjoyed a brief period of notoriety and interest as a thesis in the academy in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (we surveyed the relevant literature in a long-ago thread). Then it faded back into relative obscurity among historians. Even at its peak of popularity in scholarly publishing, the Christ-myth thesis was never more than a tiny minority position, and as we saw in some past threads, the proponents were often writing outside of their fields of specific expertise. That doesn't mean that it was necessarily a faulty thesis, just that there's never been a very good argument from scholarly authority to support it.

ceo_esq

22nd October 2006, 03:59 PM

Celsus' would fit in pretty well on this board--he doesn't question the existence of a historical figure, but points out that all the stories seem to be lifted right out of Roman myth and repeatedly talks about "lies" and "fabrications" and fictions.

I'm not certain I agree there. As UVa's R.L. Wilken points out in The Christians as the Romans Saw Them (http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=0300098391) (Yale UP) - highly recommended, by the way - "[I]t is clear from a closer reading of Celsus's work that he recognized, as did Galen, that Christianity had set forth some new and original religious teachings, and these are the chief target of his polemic."

Also, I'm not sure how well Celsus's repeated suggestions that Jesus was an evil sorcerer (who used black magic to perform miracles) would fit in on this board.

Kevin_Lowe

23rd October 2006, 06:20 AM

I'll make this as simple as I can.

The Bible is a work of fiction.

Saying that "Look, this bit looks just like a letter would look like" or "This bit looks just like someone modified this other bit because they didn't like it" just means that it is the particular kind of fiction you personally think could really have happened. You can chase your own tail as long as you like but you will never succeed in bootstrapping yourself into evidence that the contents of the fictional work are non-fictional.

Just to focus on the incident of Jesus failing in his home town, you've already been shown repeatedly a perfectly acceptable explanation for that event's first appearance in christian holy text. Someone originally made it up because to them it made a better or more effective story that way. That's a possibility you cannot merely dismiss, and any amount of future embroidery on the original story proves nothing except that future writers for one reason or another did not deviate too far from the original fairy tale.

As for Josephus, at best it shows that there existed at some time a guy called something like Jesus with a brother called James. That's great, but there's no evidence the guy referred to in Josephus did or said any of the things the Biblical Jesus is supposed to have done.

We don't know for sure either way whether there was a person called Jesus who said and did things vaguely resembling the Gospel events, but the evidence in favour of that position is incredibly tenuous.

davefoc

23rd October 2006, 10:30 AM

I don't think anything that you said is wrong Kevin. I think, though, you are interpretting what people are saying in a way somewhat different than what is intended.

The fact that you are alluding to is that there are very few corroborated facts concerning the history of the early Christian relgion. No one disputes that.

Jesus was absolutely not the leader of a large movement that had a large impact on the area he lived in his time. Josephus referred to John the Baptist more than ten times. He arguably makes a few passing mentions of Jesus. No writings by Jesus have survived, No significant writings about Jesus or the nature of his ministry have survived outside the NT and these writings were done long after the events and they were done by people promoting a religion and by people who were clearly just making stuff up.

What historians are left with here is making best case estimates of the history based on the few facts that have survived to this day. What most of the people that have posted in this thread are saying is that the most likely scenario based on the few known facts is that the secular mainstream minimalist Jesus story is the best fit for the known facts. The fact that there are a whole range of other scenarios that can't be ruled out based on known facts illustrates just how few facts are actually known.

Marc L

23rd October 2006, 10:48 AM

Jesus was "born" at Nazareth to satisfy the "prophecy" that he be a Nazarene. This was one of the smaller tribes of Isreal not a place. An easy mistake to make if you are not too smart and making the story up.

The closest I could find to "Nazarene" was "Nazarite". The Nazarites were Jewish ascetics. Here is a link from Wikipedia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazarite

My guess is that Jesus either was, or was assumed to be a Nazarite. A later writer misunderstood what a Nazarite was, and came up with the Nazarene link.

Marc

CapelDodger

23rd October 2006, 03:00 PM

davefoc

23rd October 2006, 03:33 PM

... A historical Jesus may not even have been as central to the putative Jerusalem Church as he is to Pauline Christianity. We don't know much at all about the Jerusalem Church apart from it not rejecting the Old Covenant in favour of the New, as Paul did.

That's an interesting idea. It kind of fits in with Kevin's idea that there is so little reliable information that nothing is knowable. There is the whole idea of the fact that John the Baptist seems to have been a more significant player in the evangelical business than Jesus and what to make of that. There is also the possibility that a major driving force for at least Jewish Christianity was James who managed to promote his brother's death as some sort of a religious event and who may have grown his organization by recruting the JTB followers. Of course, the information doesn't exist today to evaluate ideas like this very well and all we are left with is the informed speculation of some scholars and the uninformed speculation of thousands of other people.

One area that I would be interested in people's thoughts on is the death of Jesus. What is the most likely scenario here? How strong is the evidence that he was executed? Is the idea that Jewish Religious establishment wanted him dead and the Romans complied plausible? Is it more likely that he had pissed off the Romans the Jewish religious establishment wasn't involved?

jjramsey

23rd October 2006, 06:04 PM

The only way that what you write makes sense is if you actually believe that the Bible is an elaborate forgery.

Saying that "Look, this bit looks just like a letter would look like" ... just means that it is the particular kind of fiction you personally think could really have happened.

Ok, so you apparently believe the letters of Paul aren't really letters. Now the fact that they actually look just like ancient letters is good prima facie evidence that they are letters. What counterevidence do you have to overturn the prima facie case?

Saying that ... "This bit looks just like someone modified this other bit because they didn't like it" just means that it is the particular kind of fiction you personally think could really have happened.

Ok, so you apparently believe that one person authored Synoptic Gospels. Now they obviously share a lot of content, but they are different works written in different styles, so that is prima facie evidence that they were written by different authors who copied from one another. Again, what counterevidence do you have to overturn the prima facie case?

Just to focus on the incident of Jesus failing in his home town, you've already been shown repeatedly a perfectly acceptable explanation for that event's first appearance in christian holy text. Someone originally made it up because to them it made a better or more effective story that way.

Except that I've pointed out why that isn't a very good explanation. When we see writers use their character's weaknesses to make a better or more effective story, we don't see them trying to downplay or hide the weaknesses from the readers. Indeed, that would defeat the point of introducing the weaknesses in the first place. Yet as I've pointed out to you before, downplaying and hiding is what we do see in the Gospels, even in the Gospel of Mark that originally introduced it. Also, your argument doesn't address why Jesus just so happens to fail in a way that has an obvious natural explanation.

Kevin_Lowe

23rd October 2006, 07:35 PM

What historians are left with here is making best case estimates of the history based on the few facts that have survived to this day. What most of the people that have posted in this thread are saying is that the most likely scenario based on the few known facts is that the secular mainstream minimalist Jesus story is the best fit for the known facts. The fact that there are a whole range of other scenarios that can't be ruled out based on known facts illustrates just how few facts are actually known.

I'm happy to agree with that.

I think jjramsey exaggerates the significance of his case by padding out the tiny scraps of real evidence with Biblical navel-gazing, and then presents the case as the product of weighty scholarly consensus which gives a very misleading picture.

I think that it's true to say a guy called Jesus was very slightly more likely to have existed than not to have existed. Maybe there's a 55% chance there was some kind of historical Jesus behind the fairy tales, and a 45% chance that Jesus was and is as fictional as Moroni.

The appeal of a historical Jesus to academics, I imagine, is that once you have bootstrapped yourself into the assumption there was such a creature you can then have all sorts of fun trying to figure out how all the different bits of the Bible fit together. Whereas if you err on the side of caution and assume Jesus was a pure confabulation then there's no such fun to be had.

The only way that what you write makes sense is if you actually believe that the Bible is an elaborate forgery.

Yes. If it's news to you that religious writers lie then I would like you to read about the Book of Mormon.

Ok, so you apparently believe the letters of Paul aren't really letters. Now the fact that they actually look just like ancient letters is good prima facie evidence that they are letters. What counterevidence do you have to overturn the prima facie case?

People can and have forged letters in the past, and the idea that someone did so to give their church false authenticity is far from ridiculous.

Ok, so you apparently believe that one person authored Synoptic Gospels. Now they obviously share a lot of content, but they are different works written in different styles, so that is prima facie evidence that they were written by different authors who copied from one another. Again, what counterevidence do you have to overturn the prima facie case?

Why on earth am I compelled to believe any such thing? One person could have made it up and others copied from them, or a prior author could have made it all up and each individual Gospel writer done their own knockoff.

Except that I've pointed out why that isn't a very good explanation. When we see writers use their character's weaknesses to make a better or more effective story, we don't see them trying to downplay or hide the weaknesses from the readers. Indeed, that would defeat the point of introducing the weaknesses in the first place. Yet as I've pointed out to you before, downplaying and hiding is what we do see in the Gospels, even in the Gospel of Mark that originally introduced it. Also, your argument doesn't address why Jesus just so happens to fail in a way that has an obvious natural explanation.

:rolleyes: It is not an answer to say "No, look, this bit of this fictional work is really believable! It really could have happened!". That just means that to you it's believable fiction.

The fact that you wouldn't have written it that way yourself means nothing. Maybe the author is smarter than you are when it comes to writing believable fiction. Maybe a prior version did not downplay Jesus' failure and the version we have downplayed it because that author did not like that bit.

You can't pull fact out of fiction any more than you can sum negative numbers and end up with a positive.

jjramsey

23rd October 2006, 07:47 PM

The closest I could find to "Nazarene" was "Nazarite". The Nazarites were Jewish ascetics. Here is a link from Wikipedia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazarite

My guess is that Jesus either was, or was assumed to be a Nazarite. A later writer misunderstood what a Nazarite was, and came up with the Nazarene link.

There is no tradition of Jesus not cutting his hair (even the longish hair in the pictorial depictions is shoulder-length) and he was portrayed offhandedly as drinking wine. One would think that if there were a Nazirite-Nazarene confusion, some fossils of this tradition would be left, even if Jesus were a myth.

Also, the site of Nazareth exists. Interestingly enough, there is even an inscription in a synagogue in Caesarea Maritima mentioning that Jews fled to Nazareth in the aftermath of the Bar Kochba revolt in 135 C.E. I suppose that one could argue that Nazareth the real village was founded after Christians invented the imaginary version in the Gospels. However, one would then either have a case where Jews happened to have named a village such that it had the same name as a village in the Gospels, or Christians founded the village, in which case one wonders why Jews would choose to flee there, as it would likely be hostile territory. If the inscription reflects events closer to 135 C.E. than to the time that it was inscribed in the 3rd or 4th century, then Christians founding the village would be even more unlikely, as they hardly had the resources to do such a thing even if they wanted to. One could also argue that Nazareth didn't exist in the first century and that references to Nazareth are an anachronism from Gospels that were really written in the second century. If this were the case, then it is rather odd, since this would mean that the Synoptic Gospel writers put words into the mouth of Jesus that would be obviously false at the time, such as Mark 9:1, "there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see that the kingdom of God has come with power." Such a prediction makes far more sense if written in the first century, when there was a reasonable chance that some of the people who supposedly saw Jesus around 30 C.E. were still alive.

thaiboxerken

23rd October 2006, 07:54 PM

jjramsey

23rd October 2006, 08:48 PM

Yes. If it's news to you that religious writers lie then I would like you to read about the Book of Mormon.

Oh, no, it's not news that religious writers lie. But there is a big difference between a collection of letters and propagandistic biographies and writing a work that is forged to look like such a collection.

People can and have forged letters in the past, and the idea that someone did so to give their church false authenticity is far from ridiculous.

Even forged letters are usually still letters, just not from the person that purportedly wrote them. You wrote, "Saying that 'Look, this bit looks just like a letter would look like' ... just means that it is the particular kind of fiction you personally think could really have happened.." This implies that what appears to be a letter isn't a letter, period. Indeed, your response to davefoc pointing out that "Paul's writings which seem to clearly refer to a flesh and blood Jesus" was "You can't use the Bible to prove the Bible is not fiction," and as both ChristineR and davefoc pointed out, that objection only works if the Bible is a unitary work. In that case, the Pauline letters would not be forgeries in the sense of being letters that are not really from Paul, but forgeries in the sense of pretending to be separate works when they really were part of a unitary work masquerading as a collection of letters and propagandistic biographies.

Ok, so you apparently believe that one person authored Synoptic Gospels.Why on earth am I compelled to believe any such thing?

Because you wrote, "'This bit looks just like someone modified this other bit because they didn't like it' just means that it is the particular kind of fiction you personally think could really have happened." The implication is that one person wrote both bits and creatively left behind apparent markers that one "author" fixed the versions of the other "author."

I realize that I am attributing to you conclusions that you really do not hold. However, you are providing the fodder for these conclusions by either careless wording or careless thinking or both.

Except that I've pointed out why that isn't a very good explanation. When we see writers use their character's weaknesses to make a better or more effective story, we don't see them trying to downplay or hide the weaknesses from the readers. Indeed, that would defeat the point of introducing the weaknesses in the first place. Yet as I've pointed out to you before, downplaying and hiding is what we do see in the Gospels, even in the Gospel of Mark that originally introduced it. Also, your argument doesn't address why Jesus just so happens to fail in a way that has an obvious natural explanation.The fact that you wouldn't have written it that way yourself means nothing.

Except here I'm not comparing Mark to what I would do, but to what other writers have already done when showing heroes with weaknesses and noting that it doesn't quite match up with what Mark did in verses 6:1-6.

Maybe the author is smarter than you are when it comes to writing believable fiction.

If you are writing a book that is trying to convince people that Jesus is Lord and Savior, and you include a bit that would point in the opposite direction, how is that smart? You are using the "maybe the author is smarter than you" bit as a way of handwaving when someone points out the inconsistencies in the "it's just really clever fiction."

davefoc

23rd October 2006, 08:48 PM

The jesus that is described in the bible simply did not exist. That character is a mythical hero modelled after many other mythical heroes that predate the gospels.

This, coupled with the fact that there is no valid evidence that such a person existed simply leads to the conclusion that jesus did not exist.

In every one of these threads somebody says something like this. Is it always thaiboxerken (an aside, I'd never figured out that your name came from the idea that you are a thai boxer named ken before) or is it different people?

thaiboxerken

23rd October 2006, 09:03 PM

Perhaps those are just intelligent people that understand reality.

Whether or not a guy named jesus existed is irrelevant, the deity that is described as jesus in the bible certainly did not. This fact alone renders all of christianity false.

davefoc

23rd October 2006, 09:14 PM

I'm happy to agree with that.

I think jjramsey exaggerates the significance of his case by padding out the tiny scraps of real evidence with Biblical navel-gazing, and then presents the case as the product of weighty scholarly consensus which gives a very misleading picture.

I think jjramsey exaggerates the strength of his case a bit also, but after reading his posts and other stuff for a few years now I think he's worn me down a bit or maybe he's just right and I am just slow at coming to complete acceptance of that.

I think that it's true to say a guy called Jesus was very slightly more likely to have existed than not to have existed. Maybe there's a 55% chance there was some kind of historical Jesus behind the fairy tales, and a 45% chance that Jesus was and is as fictional as Moroni.
I agree except that my number would be more like 89.7 % than 55% and I don't know who or what moroni was/is.

The appeal of a historical Jesus to academics, I imagine, is that once you have bootstrapped yourself into the assumption there was such a creature you can then have all sorts of fun trying to figure out how all the different bits of the Bible fit together. Whereas if you err on the side of caution and assume Jesus was a pure confabulation then there's no such fun to be had.

This I completely agree with and I think you said it particularly well. Scholars that have spent their whole lives studying the issues we have been talking about have a huge bias against deciding that the whole thing was just a fancy slowly evolving scam without any underlying Jesus character. But still, after sorting through what several of them have had to say about this I find that there is enough objectivety in the secular scholars that have written and studied this period that it is reasonable to give them some credibility.

Warning off topic digression about to occur:

My favorite story along these lines is the one about the interpretation of linear b the ancient written language of the myceneans.

At the time most scholars thought the Myceneans weren't actually Greek and based on that had made various attempts at intepretting linear B (their written language). The scholars felt that they had made some success at decipering the linear B script when Michael Ventris came along and published his own deciphering of the linear B script based on his assumptin that the myceneans spoke ancient Greek. His effort was pretty much universally rejected by scholars that knew that the Myceneans didn't speak Greek and whose decipherments were inconsistent with Ventris's. So one might say that there was a scholarly consensus that Ventris was full of crap.

Then an engraving was found wtih linear b writing and pictures of the objects represented by the writing and Ventris's decipherment was shown to be correct and the scholarly consensus slowly came to acknowledge that.

[off topic digression over]

Kevin_Lowe

23rd October 2006, 11:30 PM

Oh, no, it's not news that religious writers lie. But there is a big difference between a collection of letters and propagandistic biographies and writing a work that is forged to look like such a collection.

What on Earth makes you think that? If I want to pretend my doctrine has special authority, I might well make up a letter that purports to show my doctrine is correct. If I'm embellishing an existing story it might well end up looking like a propaganda version, much as the modern versions of fairy tales are Bowdlerised versions of older tales and include events that make little sense in any other context.

Just because in older versions of Little Red Riding Hood grandma is killed, and in more modern versions grandma pops out of the wolf intact when the lumberjack kills it, it does not follow that there once was a real grandma who was really eaten by a talking wolf.

Even forged letters are usually still letters, just not from the person that purportedly wrote them. You wrote, "Saying that 'Look, this bit looks just like a letter would look like' ... just means that it is the particular kind of fiction you personally think could really have happened.." This implies that what appears to be a letter isn't a letter, period. Indeed, your response to davefoc pointing out that "Paul's writings which seem to clearly refer to a flesh and blood Jesus" was "You can't use the Bible to prove the Bible is not fiction," and as both ChristineR and davefoc pointed out, that objection only works if the Bible is a unitary work.

:rolleyes: That's a totally ridiculous argument. There is absolutely no need for the Bible to be a unitary work. You only need religious kooks to have independently confabulated, or to have based their work on earlier confabulations.

Paul's letters referring to a real Jesus are no more evidence of a flesh and blood Jesus than Smith's book is evidence of the existence of Moroni.

In that case, the Pauline letters would not be forgeries in the sense of being letters that are not really from Paul, but forgeries in the sense of pretending to be separate works when they really were part of a unitary work masquerading as a collection of letters and propagandistic biographies.

No.

Because you wrote, "'This bit looks just like someone modified this other bit because they didn't like it' just means that it is the particular kind of fiction you personally think could really have happened." The implication is that one person wrote both bits and creatively left behind apparent markers that one "author" fixed the versions of the other "author."

As I said clearly earlier, all this shows is that later writers for whatever reason did not deviate too far from the established stories.

Except here I'm not comparing Mark to what I would do, but to what other writers have already done when showing heroes with weaknesses and noting that it doesn't quite match up with what Mark did in verses 6:1-6.

Easily explained by the aforementioned means.

If you are writing a book that is trying to convince people that Jesus is Lord and Savior, and you include a bit that would point in the opposite direction, how is that smart? You are using the "maybe the author is smarter than you" bit as a way of handwaving when someone points out the inconsistencies in the "it's just really clever fiction."

Maybe the intended audience had already heard some version of the Jesus myths? Maybe the author felt the previous version of the myth was a sacred text and didn't want to go too far in their alterations?

How many times do I have to say this? It's epistemologically impossible to pull facts out of a work which is known to be fiction by rearranging the pieces. You can't prove Jesus was real by examining Jesus-fiction any more than you can prove Lancelot was real by examining the text of grail myths and saying "Well, I certainly wouldn't have put that bit in unless I was faithfully recounting real events!".

If that's not exiting enough for you, my understanding is that some or all of the early Christian subgroups were mystery cults with distinct layers of doctrine for different insiders and outsiders. It seems to me that an obvious if slightly more complicated possibility is that the authors of some bits of the Bible considered the flashy superpower stuff to be for outsiders and gullible recruits, and that insiders should know that the business with miracles and ascension to heaven was all metaphorical. Such people might well deliberately write stories that painted Jesus as human and fallible at some points, and then later more credulous writers might try to "fix" their version.

Marc L

24th October 2006, 06:14 AM

There is no tradition of Jesus not cutting his hair (even the longish hair in the pictorial depictions is shoulder-length) and he was portrayed offhandedly as drinking wine. One would think that if there were a Nazirite-Nazarene confusion, some fossils of this tradition would be left, even if Jesus were a myth.

Good point. Like I said, it was just a guess.

Also, the site of Nazareth exists. Interestingly enough, there is even an inscription in a synagogue in Caesarea Maritima mentioning that Jews fled to Nazareth in the aftermath of the Bar Kochba revolt in 135 C.E. I suppose that one could argue that Nazareth the real village was founded after Christians invented the imaginary version in the Gospels.

Actually, I'd argue that Nazareth could have existed at the time of the writings of the Gospels, just not at the time of Jesus. Or if it did exist at the time of Jesus, it wasn't the city that the Gospels make it out to be (c.f. the link posted earlier about it). Even if we accept an early date of the writings (I think 60 C.E. is the earliest I've seen. I could be misremembering, though), we're still looking at a few decades from when Jesus is supposed to have lived.

However, one would then either have a case where Jews happened to have named a village such that it had the same name as a village in the Gospels, or Christians founded the village, in which case one wonders why Jews would choose to flee there, as it would likely be hostile territory.

I'm not familiar with accounts of Jews being persecuted by Christians that early in Church history. Christianity was still fairly new in 135 C.E., and while they may have been separating themselves from Judaism, they weren't necessarily "hostile".

If the inscription reflects events closer to 135 C.E. than to the time that it was inscribed in the 3rd or 4th century, then Christians founding the village would be even more unlikely, as they hardly had the resources to do such a thing even if they wanted to. One could also argue that Nazareth didn't exist in the first century and that references to Nazareth are an anachronism from Gospels that were really written in the second century. If this were the case, then it is rather odd, since this would mean that the Synoptic Gospel writers put words into the mouth of Jesus that would be obviously false at the time, such as Mark 9:1, "there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see that the kingdom of God has come with power." Such a prediction makes far more sense if written in the first century, when there was a reasonable chance that some of the people who supposedly saw Jesus around 30 C.E. were still alive.

This of course, assumes that the Gospels were written all at once (or at least Mark). Even assuming that Mark got somethings correct, it doesn't mean he got everything correct. Remember, we're talking three decades after the event. Even today, with modern media, we don't always get events correct. Look how many conspiracy theories abound regarding Kennedy.

Marc

Marc L

24th October 2006, 06:22 AM

I agree except that my number would be more like 89.7 % than 55% and I don't know who or what moroni was/is.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moroni_%28prophet%29

Marc

Gord_in_Toronto

24th October 2006, 08:22 AM

. . .
Also, the site of Nazareth exists. Interestingly enough, there is even an inscription in a synagogue in Caesarea Maritima mentioning that Jews fled to Nazareth in the aftermath of the Bar Kochba revolt in 135 C.E.

But not a CITY as the NT claims.

. . . if written in the first century, when there was a reasonable chance that some of the people who supposedly saw Jesus around 30 C.E. were still alive.

And at the same time these people would say, "What CITY of Nazareth are you talking about?"

drkitten

24th October 2006, 08:28 AM

This I completely agree with and I think you said it particularly well. Scholars that have spent their whole lives studying the issues we have been talking about have a huge bias against deciding that the whole thing was just a fancy slowly evolving scam without any underlying Jesus character. But still, after sorting through what several of them have had to say about this I find that there is enough objectivety in the secular scholars that have written and studied this period that it is reasonable to give them some credibility.

Warning off topic digression about to occur:

My favorite story along these lines is the one about the interpretation of linear b the ancient written language of the myceneans.

I'm afraid that this example isn't quite as clear-cut as you would like to make it seem.

At least not in my understanding.

At the time most scholars thought the Myceneans weren't actually Greek and based on that had made various attempts at intepretting linear B (their written language). The scholars felt that they had made some success at decipering the linear B script when Michael Ventris came along and published his own deciphering of the linear B script based on his assumptin that the myceneans spoke ancient Greek. His effort was pretty much universally rejected by scholars that knew that the Myceneans didn't speak Greek and whose decipherments were inconsistent with Ventris's. So one might say that there was a scholarly consensus that Ventris was full of crap.

Then an engraving was found wtih linear b writing and pictures of the objects represented by the writing and Ventris's decipherment was shown to be correct and the scholarly consensus slowly came to acknowledge that.

I think this description misrepresents both the degree of resistance and the duration. There's a pretty good (chapter-length) description of the Linear B solutions in Kahn's The Codebreakers to which I refer you.

But the idea that there was a lot of entrenched resistance that only slowly crumbled doesn't really match the historical timescale. According to Kahn, Ventris started working on Linear B in May, 1950. Most of the tablets that Ventris studied were first published in 1951, the same year that
Ventris published his first "Work Note" (which more or less just summarized the current accepted
state of the art, but reported no research results).

Work Note 20 was the last one Ventris published (June 1, 1952), at which point Ventris was using the working assumption that Linear B was written in a Greek dialect, but an assumption that he expected was false. (Quote: "If pursued, I suspect that this line of decipherment would sooner or later come to an impasse, or dissipate itself in absurdities.") Of course, it didn't. By the end of June, 1952, he was convinced that he had in fact solved Linear B, and he and John Chadwick submitted their report to Journal of Hellenic Studies later that year.

The editors were sufficiently impressed with this paper that they pushed papers out of the way (some of which had been waiting for publication since the Second World War) in order to make room for it in the 1953 volume. Even back then, for a paper to be published within a year of submission was nearly unheard of and represented a recognition by the editors of a superb work of tremendous importance.

The first independent confirmation of the validity of the Ventris/Chadwick was reported by Carl Blegan -- one of the top Cretan archeologists, who had found something like 80% of the samples available at that time -- in May, 1953.

From zero to widespread acceptance in less than four years can't be considered to be slow acceptance. That's also Kahn's conclusion : "[Ventris and Chadwick's] solution rapidly won acceptance, and classical circles began to use its results."

Bringing this back on topic, I think your complaint about scholarly bias is easily made, but hard to support. Most scholars are happy to follow evidence wherever it leads. The problem in the case of Jesus scholarship is a complete lack of evidence, and a tremendous body of non-scholars who insist that it nevertheless must be true.

davefoc

24th October 2006, 09:28 AM

...

Bringing this back on topic, I think your complaint about scholarly bias is easily made, but hard to support. Most scholars are happy to follow evidence wherever it leads. The problem in the case of Jesus scholarship is a complete lack of evidence, and a tremendous body of non-scholars who insist that it nevertheless must be true.

I don't disagree drkitten with anything tht you said. There is no other subject that I have studied at all in which bias plays such a prominent role in the information available on the subject.

I think there are all sorts of biases floating around in the people that write about this subject. There are true believers who obviously are attempting to validate their relgion, there are Jews who are reasonably enough fairly pissed at Christianity and who might carry that too far in promoting a Jesus as myth idea, there are converted believers who are pissed and want to denigrate Christianity as much as possible, there are scholars who make careers out of teasing out details of truth from obscure texts who may wish to portray more knowledge about these issues than it is possible to derive from the available facts. There are tellers of all persuasions that just want to seem more of an expert than they are (perhaps I should take this one to heart).

All of these biases swirl around a subject for which there is only a small amount of primary source material available and that source material is largely inaccessible to the non scholar because it is not widely distibuted and because it is written in ancient languages. My point here and above was not so much that there wasn't a group of reasonably credible secular scholars on issues of early Christian church history but rather that each individual that has looked at this question brings his own biases into play and somebody that is attempting to figure out what actually went on needs to be constantly aware of that.

jjramsey

24th October 2006, 04:25 PM

there is a big difference between a collection of letters and propagandistic biographies and writing a work that is forged to look like such a collection.

What on Earth makes you think that?

Because in the former case one is dealing with several different works that are loosely connected to each other. If the Bible were a work that is forged to look like a collection of letters and propagandistic biographies, that means that the same hand that wrote Mark wrote Galatians and 1 Corinthians and forged whatever agreements they had. If the Bible really is a collection of letters and propagandistic biographies, then the reliability of, say, Galatians and the reliability of the Gospel of Mark are two very different questions.

If I want to pretend my doctrine has special authority, I might well make up a letter that purports to show my doctrine is correct. If I'm embellishing an existing story it might well end up looking like a propaganda version, much as the modern versions of fairy tales are Bowdlerised versions of older tales and include events that make little sense in any other context.

This is all true, but none of it has anything to do with whether the Bible can be treated as a unitary work.

Just because in older versions of Little Red Riding Hood grandma is killed, and in more modern versions grandma pops out of the wolf intact when the lumberjack kills it, it does not follow that there once was a real grandma who was really eaten by a talking wolf.

True, but of dubious relevance. A talking wolf is an extraordinary thing, while a failure of the power of suggestion is not. Also, the authors of the more modern versions are much further in time from the original authors of the Little Red Riding Hood story and are not even of the same community, so the changes that they made could hardly be indicative of the mindset of the community from which the original author came.

Indeed, your response to davefoc pointing out that "Paul's writings which seem to clearly refer to a flesh and blood Jesus" was "You can't use the Bible to prove the Bible is not fiction," and as both ChristineR and davefoc pointed out, that objection only works if the Bible is a unitary work.

:rolleyes: That's a totally ridiculous argument. There is absolutely no need for the Bible to be a unitary work. You only need religious kooks to have independently confabulated, or to have based their work on earlier confabulations.

If we were talking about the Pauline letters and the Gospels sharing fish stories, that would make sense. Those are easily passed around. However, when we are talking about the evidence that Jesus had physical brothers, we are talking about offhand mentions of Paul unrelated to his main point being consonant with offhand mentions in the Gospels and Josephus. That sort of accidental consonance is not so easy to explain as the product of circulating fish stories.

Paul's letters referring to a real Jesus are no more evidence of a flesh and blood Jesus than Smith's book is evidence of the existence of Moroni.

This is a joke of an analogy. The existence of Moroni is an extraordinary event. The existence of a flesh and blood Jesus is not. The Book of Mormon doesn't remotely agree with what we know of Native American history and can be rejected as unhistorical on those grounds. The letter to the Galatians does not have a similar problem.

As I said clearly earlier, all this shows is that later writers for whatever reason did not deviate too far from the established stories.

Right. It is just a coincidence that the changes made in both Matthew and Luke just happened to appear to remove some damaging implications. Also, did you actually look at the Lukan mutation of Mark 6:1-6. He deviates so far from the original that evangelical harmonies of the Gospels refer to his account as a second visit to Nazareth. That dog won't hunt.

How many times do I have to say this? It's epistemologically impossible to pull facts out of a work which is known to be fiction by rearranging the pieces.

Saying that the Gospels are known to be fiction, rather than a mix of fact and legend, is begging the question. Considering that the Gospels are written as if to convince others that they were fact, and it is hardly unknown for even decent historians to include legends, let alone propagandists, that the Gospels are pure fiction rather than embellished history is not a foregone conclusion at all. And if you want to object that the history is so tainted that we have no chance of sifting the legend from the facts, then I suggest that you look at the case of Apollonius of Tyana (http://www.livius.org/ap-ark/apollonius/apollonius07.html#Evaluation). The sources for him are even worse than those of Jesus, but historians have managed to figure a few things out.

I also suggest that you look at this: http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/jeff_lowder/indconf.html
It's written by an amateur but he has some good points.

You can't prove Jesus was real by examining Jesus-fiction any more than you can prove Lancelot was real by examining the text of grail myths and saying "Well, I certainly wouldn't have put that bit in unless I was faithfully recounting real events!".

There is this, um, small matter that the time between the events of King Arthur's time and the penning of the stories about him could be measured in centuries, not decades, and that we don't have, for example, a royal letter that offhand mentions Lancelot, etc.

If that's not exiting enough for you, my understanding is that some or all of the early Christian subgroups were mystery cults with distinct layers of doctrine for different insiders and outsiders.

As far as I've seen, that kind of link between Christianity and the mystery cults is recycled 19th century claptrap, now mostly peddled by the likes of Acharya S and Freke & Gandy.

jjramsey

24th October 2006, 05:22 PM

Actually, I'd argue that Nazareth could have existed at the time of the writings of the Gospels, just not at the time of Jesus. Or if it did exist at the time of Jesus, it wasn't the city that the Gospels make it out to be (c.f. the link posted earlier about it). Even if we accept an early date of the writings (I think 60 C.E. is the earliest I've seen. I could be misremembering, though), we're still looking at a few decades from when Jesus is supposed to have lived.

That's why I wrote:

One could also argue that Nazareth didn't exist in the first century and that references to Nazareth are an anachronism from Gospels that were really written in the second century. If this were the case, then it is rather odd, since this would mean that the Synoptic Gospel writers put words into the mouth of Jesus that would be obviously false at the time, such as Mark 9:1, "there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see that the kingdom of God has come with power." Such a prediction makes far more sense if written in the first century, when there was a reasonable chance that some of the people who supposedly saw Jesus around 30 C.E. were still alive.

I suppose that one could say that Nazareth was founded in the late first century as well, and this particular argument would have little to say about that. That would be more of an issue for the archaeology of the site of Nazareth itself (which seems to indicate that serious settlement of the site dates from the second or third century B.C.E., with spates of previously settlement going as far back as the Middle Bronze and Iron Ages).

I'm not familiar with accounts of Jews being persecuted by Christians that early in Church history.

That's why I wrote:

If the inscription reflects events closer to 135 C.E. than to the time that it was inscribed in the 3rd or 4th century, then Christians founding the village would be even more unlikely, as they hardly had the resources to do such a thing even if they wanted to.

The scenario where I wrote:

I suppose that one could argue that Nazareth the real village was founded after Christians invented the imaginary version in the Gospels. However, one would then either have a case where Jews happened to have named a village such that it had the same name as a village in the Gospels, or Christians founded the village, in which case one wonders why Jews would choose to flee there, as it would likely be hostile territory.

was to address the (obviously unlikely) possibility of a Nazareth being founded closer to the date of the Caesarea inscription itself in the 3rd or 4th century, though I did not make myself clear. Sorry about that.

This of course, assumes that the Gospels were written all at once (or at least Mark).

To be precise, it presumes that it is unlikely that all the references to Nazareth in the Gospel of Mark were interpolated after it was written.

Even assuming that Mark got somethings correct, it doesn't mean he got everything correct.

But what does that have anything to do with it? :confused: The argument rests on what Mark not wanting to put in Jesus' mouth an obviously false prediction. It doesn't follow that Jesus actually said, "there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see that the kingdom of God has come with power," though I think it probable that he was preaching that the apocalypse would come Real Soon Now.

Kevin_Lowe

25th October 2006, 12:15 AM

Because in the former case one is dealing with several different works that are loosely connected to each other. If the Bible were a work that is forged to look like a collection of letters and propagandistic biographies, that means that the same hand that wrote Mark wrote Galatians and 1 Corinthians and forged whatever agreements they had. If the Bible really is a collection of letters and propagandistic biographies, then the reliability of, say, Galatians and the reliability of the Gospel of Mark are two very different questions.

Only if it's inconceivable that they copied bits from each other, an idea which I find manifestly reasonable. You do need to make just a little bit of effort to find a reasonable explanation before you declare that you have found evidence of a historical Jesus.

This is all true, but none of it has anything to do with whether the Bible can be treated as a unitary work.

It's not unitary, it's just uniformly unreliable because it's historical fiction made up by frauds and kooks.

True, but of dubious relevance. A talking wolf is an extraordinary thing, while a failure of the power of suggestion is not. Also, the authors of the more modern versions are much further in time from the original authors of the Little Red Riding Hood story and are not even of the same community, so the changes that they made could hardly be indicative of the mindset of the community from which the original author came.

We keep going around in circles. Just because Version 2 is obviously a modification of Version 1 with a different spin is in no way evidence Version 1 is an accurate recounting of historical events. There's absolutely no link between the existence of derivative works and the factuality of the original.

If we were talking about the Pauline letters and the Gospels sharing fish stories, that would make sense. Those are easily passed around. However, when we are talking about the evidence that Jesus had physical brothers, we are talking about offhand mentions of Paul unrelated to his main point being consonant with offhand mentions in the Gospels and Josephus. That sort of accidental consonance is not so easy to explain as the product of circulating fish stories.

Isn't it trivially easy to explain by the later authors having access to the earlier authors, or related works, and including the same trivia?

This is a joke of an analogy. The existence of Moroni is an extraordinary event. The existence of a flesh and blood Jesus is not. The Book of Mormon doesn't remotely agree with what we know of Native American history and can be rejected as unhistorical on those grounds. The letter to the Galatians does not have a similar problem.

Correct me if I am wrong, but all of the Bible was written and/or edited long after Jesus' supposed death by people who believed in the existence and divinity of Jesus, right?

So saying that one bit or the other counts as real because it includes no obvious absurdities on the level of Moroni is just silly. The Bible is not a unitary whole, but as a whole it's still a totally unreliable source.

You want to be able to say "Look, this one bit of the Bible might be real, can you prove it's not?". I don't have to falsilfy each chapter, verse or book individually, it is an unreliable source until proven otherwise.

Right. It is just a coincidence that the changes made in both Matthew and Luke just happened to appear to remove some damaging implications. Also, did you actually look at the Lukan mutation of Mark 6:1-6. He deviates so far from the original that evangelical harmonies of the Gospels refer to his account as a second visit to Nazareth. That dog won't hunt.

At thhis point I'm convinced you are simply irrational on this topic. As I have repeatedly told you, the fact that Version 2 is a spin doctoring of Version 1 gives us absolutely no information as to whether or not Version 1 is factually accurate or a confabulation.

I'll put it another way for you. At the time Version 1 was written it was either true or false. Either someone wrote down things that actually happened, or they did not, or they wrote down some mix of true and false things. Now people could write Versions 2 through 1000000 after that and they would have absolutely no effect on the status of Version 1. They would give us absolutely no information about the issue of whether Version 1 was accurate. The very idea that they give us any information about it is absurd.

Saying that the Gospels are known to be fiction, rather than a mix of fact and legend, is begging the question. Considering that the Gospels are written as if to convince others that they were fact, and it is hardly unknown for even decent historians to include legends, let alone propagandists, that the Gospels are pure fiction rather than embellished history is not a foregone conclusion at all. And if you want to object that the history is so tainted that we have no chance of sifting the legend from the facts, then I suggest that you look at the case of Apollonius of Tyana (http://www.livius.org/ap-ark/apollonius/apollonius07.html#Evaluation). The sources for him are even worse than those of Jesus, but historians have managed to figure a few things out.

I also suggest that you look at this: http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/jeff_lowder/indconf.html
It's written by an amateur but he has some good points.

Let's clear up the absurdities on our plate already, before getting into Apollonius or any other distractions.

There is this, um, small matter that the time between the events of King Arthur's time and the penning of the stories about him could be measured in centuries, not decades, and that we don't have, for example, a royal letter that offhand mentions Lancelot, etc.

I'm criticising your methodology, not saying the cases are equivalent. Your methodology involves wild leaps to silly conclusions.

As far as I've seen, that kind of link between Christianity and the mystery cults is recycled 19th century claptrap, now mostly peddled by the likes of Acharya S and Freke & Gandy.

There are specific Biblical quotations about giving people milk before meat that are used today by the more repugnant christian cults to justify lying to potential victims. I think it's clear that some members of the early church had separate insider and outsider doctrines, whether or not there is a direct lineage from mystery cults to early christianity. I doubt there is a direct lineage between mystery cults and the moonies either but they have insider and outsider doctrines.

pipelineaudio

25th October 2006, 02:05 AM

This is a joke of an analogy. The existence of Moroni is an extraordinary event. The existence of a flesh and blood Jesus is not. The Book of Mormon doesn't remotely agree with what we know of Native American history and can be rejected as unhistorical on those grounds. The letter to the Galatians does not have a similar problem.

This seems rather telling

jjramsey

25th October 2006, 07:12 PM

I'll deal with some points out of order, because I think there are some comments that could be addressed together.

It's not unitary, it's just uniformly unreliable because it's historical fiction made up by frauds and kooks. [emphasis mine]

The phrase "historical fiction" is just a way to sneak in assumptions about the Gospels in the backdoor by equivocation. Here's how:

Step 1: Use the phrase "historical fiction" loosely as a way to indicate that a work misrepresents history.

Step 2: When someone argues that some bits of the Gospels are factual, switch to using "historical fiction" in the sense of being a novel like, say, Johnny Tremain, and argue that using the criteria intended to sift fact from fiction could be used to argue that Johnny Tremain really worked on Sunday when he wasn't supposed to. The catch here is that you've never actually demonstrated that the Gospels should be treated as if they were wholesale fiction rather than the propaganda that they appear to be, but merely asserted it.

Step 3: Use the fact that the Gospels are bundled in an anthology to justify calling the other works in the anthology "historical fiction," in order to imply that they are just as unreliable as the Gospels on matters pertaining to the historical Jesus. The catch here is that, again, you've never actually justified this.

Only if it's inconceivable that they copied bits from each other, an idea which I find manifestly reasonable.

Sometimes it is reasonable to expect that authors were copying from one another and sometimes not. Is it reasonable to expect that Matthew copied from Mark? Sure. Not only does Matthew contain the bulk of Mark's content and follows Mark's outline, but it is hardly unexpected that someone attempting to write a "history" would use another work of "history" as a source. Would one expect Mark to have even read Paul? That is dicier. Mark's Christology is arguably lower than Paul's, and he may have been part of a different faction of Christianity. It's hard to say. More to the point, is Mark likely to have gotten his information about Paul through the letters of his that we have? Paul's mentions of "brother(s) of the Lord" are very offhand and peripheral to his main points (which, BTW, is why they would be relatively reliable in the first place (http://ntgateway.com/weblog/2006/02/historical-jesus-forgotten-criteria-i.html)) and not something likely to stick in Mark's memory.

Just because Version 2 is obviously a modification of Version 1 with a different spin is in no way evidence Version 1 is an accurate recounting of historical events.

That depends. If a Bush crony reluctantly says something that looks suspiciously like a moment of accidental candor, and Bush's press secretary comes along and says, oh no, that's not how it happened at all, I'd take the press secretary's remarks as evidence (but weak evidence) that the crony did have that accidental moment of candor.

This is a joke of an analogy. The existence of Moroni is an extraordinary event. The existence of a flesh and blood Jesus is not. The Book of Mormon doesn't remotely agree with what we know of Native American history and can be rejected as unhistorical on those grounds. The letter to the Galatians does not have a similar problem.

Correct me if I am wrong, but all of the Bible was written and/or edited long after Jesus' supposed death by people who believed in the existence and divinity of Jesus, right?

I can easily quibble about the divinity part, but that is beside the point.

You want to be able to say "Look, this one bit of the Bible might be real, can you prove it's not?".

Actually, I've pointed to specific reasons why some bits are more likely to be reliable than others, and your attempts at rebuttal have relied on bad analogies and vague generalities.

I don't have to falsilfy each chapter, verse or book individually

No, but you do have to account for why you consider the Bible uniformly unreliable when it isn't all that uniform, period. Treating an offhand mention of an ordinary thing in a letter as if it were a deliberately told fish story in a "history" is just bad methodology, and it doesn't model human behavior well at all.

I'm criticising your methodology, not saying the cases are equivalent.

You are, however, saying, that the cases are close enough for comparison, which leads you to, ahem, "wild leaps to silly conclusions."

There are specific Biblical quotations about giving people milk before meat that are used today by the more repugnant christian cults to justify lying to potential victims. I think it's clear that some members of the early church had separate insider and outsider doctrines

It is clear from the "milk and meat" passages there were basic doctrines and more advanced ones on top of those. It does not follow that the milk was the "flashy superpower stuff" and the meat was doctrine that said that all of flashy stuff was metaphorical. Plutarch and Emperor Julian certainly had ideas that the pagan myths were really metaphors with higher meaning that the vulgar took literally, and perhaps that is where your understanding about the mystery cults had originally come from, but it does not follow that Plutarch and Julian's opinions reflected what pagan myth really was rather than what they wanted it to be, nor can one deduce from this that Christian doctrine was like what they claimed pagan myth to be.

jjramsey

26th October 2006, 04:41 AM

That depends. If a Bush crony reluctantly says something that looks suspiciously like a moment of accidental candor, and Bush's press secretary comes along and says, oh no, that's not how it happened at all, I'd take the press secretary's remarks as evidence (but weak evidence) that the crony did have that accidental moment of candor.

I should clarify this.

In the example of the Bush crony, what do we have?

The hypothetical Bush crony says something that works against his own agenda. That in itself is the main reason for believing he is telling the truth. When people lie or even just bend the truth, they usually do it to help their agenda. This is called the criterion of embarassment.

Someone from the Bush crony's own "team" contradicts him. This confirms that, yes, what the crony originally said was embarassing, which reinforces that he was telling the truth.

In the case with Mark, what do we have?

Mark says something that works against his own agenda. That in itself is the main reason for believing he is telling the truth. Again, the criterion of embarassment is at work.

Someone from Mark's own "team" contradicts him. This confirms that, yes, what he originally said was embarassing, which reinforces that he was telling the truth.

In my original argument, Matthew and Luke's takes on the Markan account played a relatively minor role. They were never the primary reason for believing the Markan account. We got on a major tangent because SezMe thought that I was "assuming that there is reason to think that the authors of the gospels would be concerned with consistency between their various accounts," and I pointed out that this was obviously not the case since I was pointing to inconsistencies between the Gospels.

26th October 2006, 05:24 AM

You're still insisting it NEVER happens that way in fiction or myth or legend. So, please, point to a specific incident (by chapter and verse), and let's see if there's ever been a purely fictional incident of the same nature in other works.

If we do find such a parellel, we either have to concede that the account in the gospel still might be pure fiction, or we have to concede the other mythological story might be factual.

Kevin_Lowe

26th October 2006, 06:08 AM

The phrase "historical fiction" is just a way to sneak in assumptions about the Gospels in the backdoor by equivocation. Here's how:

Step 1: Use the phrase "historical fiction" loosely as a way to indicate that a work misrepresents history.

Step 2: When someone argues that some bits of the Gospels are factual, switch to using "historical fiction" in the sense of being a novel like, say, Johnny Tremain, and argue that using the criteria intended to sift fact from fiction could be used to argue that Johnny Tremain really worked on Sunday when he wasn't supposed to. The catch here is that you've never actually demonstrated that the Gospels should be treated as if they were wholesale fiction rather than the propaganda that they appear to be, but merely asserted it.

There's no equivocation, I'm quite up front about using the term in the second sense from the very beginning.

What you want to do is say "Well, this bit of the Bible was obviously made up out of whole cloth. This other bit too. All of this bit as well. Let's see, the bit where he comes back from the dead, that was made up. Ah! This one passage contains no obvious absurdities, so now it's reliable historical data until proven otherwise!". Even though the bit you like was written by the same kind of kook as wrote the rest of the rubbish, and compiled by the same kooks who compiled the rest of the rubbish.

That just doesn't strike me as logic so much as a need to get to a particular conclusion by any means necessary.

Step 3: Use the fact that the Gospels are bundled in an anthology to justify calling the other works in the anthology "historical fiction," in order to imply that they are just as unreliable as the Gospels on matters pertaining to the historical Jesus. The catch here is that, again, you've never actually justified this.

They were all produced and edited by the same or similar kooks. Assuming that they are accurate historical accounts until proven otherwise is just silly.

Sometimes it is reasonable to expect that authors were copying from one another and sometimes not. Is it reasonable to expect that Matthew copied from Mark? Sure. Not only does Matthew contain the bulk of Mark's content and follows Mark's outline, but it is hardly unexpected that someone attempting to write a "history" would use another work of "history" as a source. Would one expect Mark to have even read Paul? That is dicier. Mark's Christology is arguably lower than Paul's, and he may have been part of a different faction of Christianity. It's hard to say. More to the point, is Mark likely to have gotten his information about Paul through the letters of his that we have? Paul's mentions of "brother(s) of the Lord" are very offhand and peripheral to his main points (which, BTW, is why they would be relatively reliable in the first place (http://ntgateway.com/weblog/2006/02/historical-jesus-forgotten-criteria-i.html)) and not something likely to stick in Mark's memory.

That's what the evidence of a historical Jesus comes down to? "I don't think it's the kind of thing that's likely to stick in your memory"?

I notice you omit another relevant possibility which is that both works were influenced by a third work or a body of oral tradition.

That depends. If a Bush crony reluctantly says something that looks suspiciously like a moment of accidental candor, and Bush's press secretary comes along and says, oh no, that's not how it happened at all, I'd take the press secretary's remarks as evidence (but weak evidence) that the crony did have that accidental moment of candor.

In your analogy the secretary is presumably privy to what actually happened. We do not know that to be the case in the issue at hand. It's entirely possible that the spin-doctored version draws entirely on earlier fictional accounts and then attempts to "fix" them.

Actually, I've pointed to specific reasons why some bits are more likely to be reliable than others, and your attempts at rebuttal have relied on bad analogies and vague generalities.

It's historical fiction. Simple fact. It's tainted with material that is made up. You can't get around that. You do not know which bits are lies and which are not, and you cannot help yourself to the assumption that certain bits are not lies just because they seem plausible to you personally.

No, but you do have to account for why you consider the Bible uniformly unreliable when it isn't all that uniform, period. Treating an offhand mention of an ordinary thing in a letter as if it were a deliberately told fish story in a "history" is just bad methodology, and it doesn't model human behavior well at all.

Your personal ideas about modelling human behaviour are not evidence.

What's so inconceivable about a forger using available bits of trivia to add verisimilitude to a forgery? Have you ruled this out by "modelling human behaviour"?

It is clear from the "milk and meat" passages there were basic doctrines and more advanced ones on top of those. It does not follow that the milk was the "flashy superpower stuff" and the meat was doctrine that said that all of flashy stuff was metaphorical. Plutarch and Emperor Julian certainly had ideas that the pagan myths were really metaphors with higher meaning that the vulgar took literally, and perhaps that is where your understanding about the mystery cults had originally come from, but it does not follow that Plutarch and Julian's opinions reflected what pagan myth really was rather than what they wanted it to be, nor can one deduce from this that Christian doctrine was like what they claimed pagan myth to be.

You're jumping backwards and forwards here. A minute ago you were threatening to quibble with the idea early christians thought Jesus was divine, and now you're arguing that a passage that shows Jesus to be less than divine could not have been made up by an early christian.

Paulhoff

26th October 2006, 06:40 AM

This is still going on, (well of course, 2000 years now) about a man that in no way was the son of any so-called god.

Paul

:) :) :)

drkitten

26th October 2006, 08:57 AM

You're still insisting it NEVER happens that way in fiction or myth or legend. So, please, point to a specific incident (by chapter and verse), and let's see if there's ever been a purely fictional incident of the same nature in other works.

Let's be reasonable here for a moment.

Much of fiction is based on a re-telling of old stories, and of course the traditions and conventions of fiction writing change over time. You can't dismiss the historical reality of Christ by pointing out that ET was a fictional character who shared many characteristics of Christ. ET was not just a fictional character, but a deliberate "Christ-figure," written as a re-telling of the story after society had had centuries to develop the tradition of Christian symbolism in fiction.

Let me give a specific example, which I stole from C.S. Lewis:

3 And the scribes and Pharisees brought unto him a woman taken in adultery; and when they had set her in the midst,
4 They say unto him, Master, this woman was taken in adultery, in the very act.5 Now Moses in the law commanded us, that such should be stoned: but what sayest thou?
6 This they said, tempting him, that they might have to accuse him. But Jesus stooped down, and with his finger wrote on the ground, as though he heard them not.
7 So when they continued asking him, he lifted up himself, and said unto them,
He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.
8 And again he stooped down, and wrote on the ground.

I want to focus specifically on the literary aspect of Jesus scribbling in the dirt.

It adds nothing to the story. To my knowledge, there is no moral lesson that derives from John 8:8; no bit of doctine hangs on it.

By today's standards of fiction, we have come to expect that kind of irrelevant detail as a way of lending verisimitude to a narrative. It makes the characters "more real." But that's a relatively recent development in fiction; in English literature, you don't see it develop until the Rennaisance or much later. (Check out Canturbury Tale or Piers Plowman if you want examples of what writing was like earlier.) It's also -- to the best of my knowledge, and I'm willing to be corrected here -- not characteristic of either 1st century Jewish literature, or of 1st century Roman literature or in "morally-uplifting" histories and such like. We do, however, see some of these elements in contemporary non-fiction, when people are simply reporting events.

Do you know of any other contemporary parallels for this kind of irrelevant details in fiction?

if so, I'd like to hear about them.

If not -- which is more likely, that the author of John was 1500 years ahead of his time in literary style, or that he was reporting events?

davefoc

26th October 2006, 09:24 AM

Your example might have been a bit unfortunate drkitten, this particular passage according ehrman in "Misquoting Jesus" is almost universally believed by scholars to have been a later addition to the Gospel of John.

In various early versions of John and even Luke it is added in different places. But arguing a bit for the authenticity of the tale if not its initial inclusion in John is the idea that scholars suspect that it was part of an early oral tradition.

26th October 2006, 11:38 AM

Plus, it's hardly an 'irrelevant detail'; it's showing how he's simply ignoring most of their rantings as nonsense. It's the same as 'twiddling his thumbs' or 'reading a book' or some such. He's doodling; doing something mundane that one does when bored or uninterested in the matter at hand. Their cries for attention of what to do with the person was unimportant to him, so he said his piece and went back to his doodles.

What bored activity would you have him do? Scratching his nuts?

davefoc

26th October 2006, 12:00 PM

I think to some degree people are coming from two different places in this discussion. The mythicists are coming from the place of arguing that little bits of circumstantial evidence in favor of an historical Jesus are not determinative and other explanations are possible for each of the bits The non-mythicists are saying that each of their little bits of circumstantial evidence while not necessarily determinative add up to strong evidence for the existence of an historical Jesus.

There is no smoking gun answer to this question. All that is available are little bits of evidence. It is easy to argue a mythicist position if one just attacks the available evidence, the individual bits of evidence aren't all that strong. But it is harder to argue a mythicist position if one wants to use the available evidence to support an alternative scenario. IMHO, if one looks at it that way, at least some of the enthusiasm for the mythicist view would fade.

On a slightly different topic:
There seems to be a general consensus in this thread that the birth narratives are complete fiction (does anybody disagree?). Does anybody have any thoughts about how independent authors (Luke and Matthew) came to throw it in to their stories?

Darth Rotor

26th October 2006, 01:14 PM

Give the followers of Islam time, they too will eventually become skeptical.
Or, in another course of action, they will kill off the scoffers and non believers. Or a little of both, with the penchant for ironmongery tending to overwhelm the penchant for debating esoterica.

Why do you believe that followers of The Prophet, the Muslims, will become skeptical? What leads you to that belief?

DR

skeptic griggsy

26th October 2006, 01:17 PM

A silly priest at @ Explore Faith states that the two creation stories being contradictory show that the compilers were not literalists, but just wanted to show God in charge of creation. I challenge that: I aver they were literalists and thought they could reconcile the two as fundamentalists today do. Errantists just are obfuscators in their beliefs as Richard Dawkins shows in "The God Delusion" shows in his commnents on errancy and theistic evolution .We are stronger today in that we have so many books and authors to dispute theism, such that I say we can be strong atheists,knowing that theists just put their old garbage into new cans that we then emptiy . Here absence of evidence is evidence of absence to such a degree that I daresay I have not committed the argument from ignorance . Why does God hate amputees?

Darth Rotor

26th October 2006, 01:30 PM

What bored activity would you have him do? Scratching his nuts?
Him being a guy, yes, but that might have been a taboo in those ancient days. (See also Semitic taboos on left hands, and soles of feet facing a guest) Nut scratching was considered very bad manners when I was a boy, before Major League Baseball package checking on prime time TV passed it into the mainstream.

Reggie Jackson for fifty, Alex. :cool:

DR

Darth Rotor

26th October 2006, 01:37 PM

On a slightly different topic:
There seems to be a general consensus in this thread that the birth narratives are complete fiction (does anybody disagree?). Does anybody have any thoughts about how independent authors (Luke and Matthew) came to throw it in to their stories?
I have heard a number of slants on this, but don't we need to fall back to addressing the root modern assumption of universal literacy? It is my understanding that a great deal of what was known and passed around as knowledge then was by word of mouth. Literacy, though perhaps higher among the Hebrews and in some Roman colonies, was still not universal. Books then were rare and expensive. Only sometimes did a well known tale or account get capturee in print, on stone, ink on papyrus, etc. What has passed down is a portion, a fraction of what was common knowledge then. What wasn't written down was lost.

With a further thirty year remove of the events of birth for the authors of those accounts, however close or far from the actual events on Jesus' birth, the common habit of an aural tradition leaves one guessing, and perhaps pondrering the record keeping habits of Herod, of Romans, and tax dodging habits of Judaic carpenters.

Why would they lie about what was "common knowledge," even if the common knowldege had a bit of urban legend mixed in with substantive detail?

DR

davefoc

26th October 2006, 01:53 PM

DR, sorry but I didn't quite get what you were saying.

Do you think there is some truth to the birth narratives? Which one and which parts?

I think a bigger issue than how common literacy was is the whole process of publishing a story back then. At some point, obviously the Jesus story became popular and was widely disseminated. Was it common for a priest/church leader to go some place and make a copy of a relevant document for his flock? Were original documents commonly passed around? How were Paul's letters distributed? Most of the letters attributed to Paul are general believed to have not been written by him. Was this just SOP for a local priest to start making stuff up when the faithful got bored with his copies of the real stuff? How did Luke and Matthew come by their copies of Mark?

Darth Rotor

26th October 2006, 02:28 PM

DR, sorry but I didn't quite get what you were saying.

Do you think there is some truth to the birth narratives? Which one and which parts?

That he was born, that it was in Bethlehem or very near it, and that they actual year is still a matter of dispute.

How one deals with the stories of the shepdards is another matter.

DR

CapelDodger

26th October 2006, 02:43 PM

Literacy, though perhaps higher among the Hebrews and in some Roman colonies, was still not universal. Books then were rare and expensive.
As a corollary to this, books and papyri were regarded with a degree of awe, and the writing itself was imbued with a degree of magic. This, to my mind, suggests that Paul's letters would have been physically preserved for a good while - many decades. They'd have been important to the Churches involved.

With a further thirty year remove of the events of birth for the authors of those accounts, however close or far from the actual events on Jesus' birth, the common habit of an aural tradition leaves one guessing, and perhaps pondrering the record keeping habits of Herod, of Romans, and tax dodging habits of Judaic carpenters.
The Romans were actually assiduous record-keepers, you don't run an empire like theirs without a serious back-office. Quite a lot of their archives have survived, but there's a noticeable lack when it comes to Judea in the relevant period. Not to say a suspicious lack, given the opportunities Christians had for culling the records after Constantine.

That said, Paul's letters pre-date the First Jewish Revolt of 66CE, so the gap is a lot less than thirty years. Well within living memory. Could an entirely fictional Jesus have been posited so soon? I don't think so.

CapelDodger

26th October 2006, 02:46 PM

What bored activity would you have him do? Scratching his nuts?
Perhaps the original shortest Bible verse was "Jesus farted" :) .

CapelDodger

26th October 2006, 03:17 PM

There is no smoking gun answer to this question. All that is available are little bits of evidence. It is easy to argue a mythicist position if one just attacks the available evidence, the individual bits of evidence aren't all that strong. But it is harder to argue a mythicist position if one wants to use the available evidence to support an alternative scenario. IMHO, if one looks at it that way, at least some of the enthusiasm for the mythicist view would fade.
When I consider irreducibly indeterminate questions such as this one I try to find scenarios (I tend to use the term "narrative") that, while vague, are at least credible given what we know of human behaviour and the circumstances pertaining. In this case I can't see a scenario that doesn't have a physical Jesus for all the subsequent junk to coalesce around. As you say, each piece of junk can be classed as such but why have they all come together without a kernel? Which puts me pretty firmly in the camp of Jesus as this guy, only tangentially related to the mythic Jesus, who did actually exist.

On a slightly different topic:
There seems to be a general consensus in this thread that the birth narratives are complete fiction (does anybody disagree?). Does anybody have any thoughts about how independent authors (Luke and Matthew) came to throw it in to their stories?
I don't doubt at all that they're mythic. Isis gathered the sundered parts of Osiris and hid them in the cow-byre so that Sett wouldn't twig before she got them all together and resurrected Osiris as a (quick-growing) baby. Isis was very popular in the Roman world in the first few centuries CE, and followers would set out little dioramas, shrines, at the time of her festival - 25th December. Isis, the baby Osiris, the cow-byre, the animals ...

Picture a Christian mother asked by a child "What's that, mummy?". "Ummm ... that's the baby Jesus, and Mary his mother". Between Mark and Matthew it became part of the story. As a narrative, that works for me. Paul and Mark not knowing, or choosing not to mention, any of this if it had any substance does not work for me as a narrative.

Paulhoff

26th October 2006, 03:26 PM

I can't wait till this Jesus guy dies, he is nothing but problems.

Paul

:) :) :)

jjramsey

26th October 2006, 04:29 PM

What you want to do is say "Well, this bit of the Bible was obviously made up out of whole cloth. This other bit too. All of this bit as well. Let's see, the bit where he comes back from the dead, that was made up. Ah! This one passage contains no obvious absurdities, so now it's reliable historical data until proven otherwise!". Even though the bit you like was written by the same kind of kook as wrote the rest of the rubbish, and compiled by the same kooks who compiled the rest of the rubbish.

A strawman. Quoting myself:

Paul's mentions of "brother(s) of the Lord" are very offhand and peripheral to his main points (which, BTW, is why they would be relatively reliable in the first place (http://ntgateway.com/weblog/2006/02/historical-jesus-forgotten-criteria-i.html))

This is a bit more than just "This one passage contains no obvious absurdities, so now it's reliable historical data until proven otherwise!"

It's historical fiction. Simple fact. It's tainted with material that is made up. You can't get around that. You do not know which bits are lies and which are not, and you cannot help yourself to the assumption that certain bits are not lies just because they seem plausible to you personally.

This sounds good as a vague generality, but when you start to ask questions like "Are people more like to lie in the direct claims or in the offhand statements that they make?" or "Are people more likely to the be telling the truth when making statements against their interests?", it doesn't wash.

Treating an offhand mention of an ordinary thing in a letter as if it were a deliberately told fish story in a "history" is just bad methodology

What's so inconceivable about a forger using available bits of trivia to add verisimilitude to a forgery?

It's not inconceivable, but you have to establish that a letter was likely to be a forgery. Raising the specter of forgery without any evidence is just banging the table.

You're jumping backwards and forwards here. A minute ago you were threatening to quibble with the idea early christians thought Jesus was divine, and now you're arguing that a passage that shows Jesus to be less than divine could not have been made up by an early christian.

You are equivocating in what you mean by "less than divine." It is one thing to say that some early Christians thought that Jesus was less than divine in the sense that Jesus was an adopted Son of God, or that he was an exalted second-in-command, or that he was a prophet like Moses. It is another thing altogether to question whether a Christian would want to imply that Jesus was less than divine in the sense that he was an ordinary man with no power, not even God-given power.

jjramsey

26th October 2006, 04:39 PM

You're still insisting it NEVER happens that way in fiction or myth or legend. So, please, point to a specific incident (by chapter and verse), and let's see if there's ever been a purely fictional incident of the same nature in other works.

Ok. The chapter and verse is Mark 6:1-6. Note that the part that I say doesn't seem to fit is the way the author seems to try to cover up the failure.

Note, too, that the author here is narrating events as a 3rd person omniscient, rather than being a character himself. I can certainly see a scenario where an author tells the story from the point of view of a character who downplays a hero's weakness. But then the author is also portraying the weaknesses of the character that he casts as the narrator, which is not what we see in Mark.

davefoc

26th October 2006, 05:12 PM

That he was born, that it was in Bethlehem or very near it, and that they actual year is still a matter of dispute.

How one deals with the stories of the shepdards is another matter.

DR

I am afraid that my question was a little ambiguous when I referred to the birth narrative. Since I am in the non-mythicist camp (or about 90.3% of me anyway (after CD's posts on this subject my historical Jesus likelyhood index always goes up a little)) I am also in the Jesus was born camp. What I was referring to with the birth narrative was other bits like the wisemen, the shepards, Mary the Mother, Joseph the father, Herod's mass murder of infants, trips to Egypt, etc.

And in particular the issue I was interested in was how it came to be that Mathew and Luke inserted a birth narrative into their stories. Was this a bit of folk lore floating around that they both picked up on and threw into their stories? Was part of the birth narrative something that came from q? I am sure that the answer or at least a good guess at one is available with a little research but I just thought some of the people in this thread might have something to say about it.

Matthew, was really big on the OT tie in, I wonder if he came up with that emanuel reference on his own. Not much mention is made of it but somebody would have to have been seriously and obsessively into OT lore to come up with some of these obscure (and absurd from my point of view) OT references.

ChristineR

26th October 2006, 05:28 PM

The birth in Bethlehem is from a reading of Micah 5:2.

"But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah, though you are small among the clans of Judah, out of you will come for me one who will be ruler over Israel, whose origins are from of old, from ancient times. "

The flight into Egypt appears be to an echo of the Israelites enslavement in Egypt. I'm not sure of the details of this one. Herod's murder of infants also corresponds to Pharaoh's attempt to murder the Jewish firstborn.

I'm pretty sure you can do this sort of thing with all of the details of the birth story. All in all it seems a rather odd way to behave.

jjramsey

26th October 2006, 05:33 PM

More on the birth narratives here, FWIW:

http://www.skepticwiki.org/wiki/index.php/Birth_narratives_of_Jesus

Kevin_Lowe

26th October 2006, 05:41 PM

This is a bit more than just "This one passage contains no obvious absurdities, so now it's reliable historical data until proven otherwise!"

I'm not going to debate this with you further. You seem immunised against the idea that a fake document could include minor details which match the details floating around elsewhere. Bear in mind this is exactly the thought process behind the Shroud of Turin believers - "No ancient person could be clever enough to make a forgery that looks like it might be real!".

This sounds good as a vague generality, but when you start to ask questions like "Are people more like to lie in the direct claims or in the offhand statements that they make?" or "Are people more likely to the be telling the truth when making statements against their interests?", it doesn't wash.

If the evidence of Jesus' existence is armchair psychology from someone 2000 years removed from the people and events involved, who thinks "It is inconceivable some ancient person would write a story where Jesus fails, even if that failure is the kind of thing that can happen to any faith healer, and the region was infested with faith healers" then the evidence is not too good.

It's not inconceivable, but you have to establish that a letter was likely to be a forgery. Raising the specter of forgery without any evidence is just banging the table.

Not if forgery and confabulation are known traits of religious kooks.

You are equivocating in what you mean by "less than divine." It is one thing to say that some early Christians thought that Jesus was less than divine in the sense that Jesus was an adopted Son of God, or that he was an exalted second-in-command, or that he was a prophet like Moses. It is another thing altogether to question whether a Christian would want to imply that Jesus was less than divine in the sense that he was an ordinary man with no power, not even God-given power.

You are ignoring things you have already been told just because you don't like the conclusions they lead to.

Maybe it was accepted at the time that faith healers failed in their home towns? Maybe the writer was smart enough to include lows as well as highs? Maybe some or all of the events in the Jesus myth were lifted from the lives of real faith healers who had nothing to do with creating the doctrines of the church but were nonetheless popular and charismatic figures?

I think you have to really want to believe before you can handwave away all of the alternative explanations and plump for a unitary historical Jesus who founded the church.

davefoc

26th October 2006, 06:14 PM

I won't say this again since neither jjramsey or Kevin seem to get it, or maybe they're just politely ignoring me because they think I'm full of crap.

jjramsey is not arguing that the little indications that he see's in the text are proof of authenticity. He is saying that in the process of making a reasonable guess as to what went on it is reasonable to take some of these indications into account.

Kevin is clearly not saying that jesus didn't exist because he finds some of these arguments unpersuasive. He has previously put his historical Jesus likelyhood index at 55%.

So in fact Kevin and jjramsey are largely in agreement but don't seem to realize it.

A hypothetical discussion between them:
jj: I find that some of the small details included in the NT writings that seem to provide contrary evidence to an all powerful divine Jesus add some additional evidence to the overall case that an historical Jesus existed.

Kevin: Yes, I suppose it adds a little support for the idea but there are so many other explanations for this kind of thing that I don't find it very persuasive.

jj: You're right, that it's not the strongest evidence but I still think it's a little more persuasive than you do.

Kevin: Put into the context of trying to make an educated guess, I suppose there might be something probative here, but still for me I just can't see that this amounts to much evidence of anything.

jj: I understand how you feel about that.

jjramsey

26th October 2006, 06:44 PM

I'm not going to debate this with you further. You seem immunised against the idea that a fake document could include minor details which match the details floating around elsewhere. Bear in mind this is exactly the thought process behind the Shroud of Turin believers - "No ancient person could be clever enough to make a forgery that looks like it might be real!".

Careful here. One problem with the analogy to the Shroud of Turin is that there is actual evidence against it being real.

More to the point, though, is that the "clever forger" argument can become unfalsifiable:

"This could be a clever forgery."
"But you have no evidence of forgery."
"But the forger could just be really clever."

... and on it goes.

Onto your next point on forgery:

It's not inconceivable, but you have to establish that a letter was likely to be a forgery. Raising the specter of forgery without any evidence is just banging the table.

Not if forgery and confabulation are known traits of religious kooks.

The problem here is that while religious kooks have certainly done forgeries, they also have done plenty of original works, so it does not follow that a work by a religious kook is more likely to be a forgery than an original work. If, say, 90% of religious documents were forgeries, you might suspect forgery by default, but that isn't applicable here.

If the evidence of Jesus' existence is armchair psychology from someone 2000 years removed from the people and events involved, who thinks "It is inconceivable some ancient person would write a story where Jesus fails, even if that failure is the kind of thing that can happen to any faith healer, and the region was infested with faith healers" then the evidence is not too good.

This is backwards. A big part of the reason Mark 6:1-6 looks factual is that what is reported to have happened to Jesus is the kind of thing that can happen to any real-life faith healer. Furthermore, followers of faith healers tend to remember the hits, not the misses, so while it's the kind of failure that one would expect to happen, it is not the kind of failure that one would expect to be reported by the faithful.

Maybe the writer was smart enough to include lows as well as highs?

It's already been pointed out why that doesn't wash.

Maybe it was accepted at the time that faith healers failed in their home towns? ... Maybe some or all of the events in the Jesus myth were lifted from the lives of real faith healers who had nothing to do with creating the doctrines of the church but were nonetheless popular and charismatic figures?

But this is multiplying entities without necessity, especially the latter option.

jjramsey is not arguing that the little indications that he see's in the text are proof of authenticity. He is saying that in the process of making a reasonable guess as to what went on it is reasonable to take some of these indications into account.

That's about the size of it, yes, and I also agree here as well:

But it is harder to argue a mythicist position if one wants to use the available evidence to support an alternative scenario.

My big beef with mythicists is that when they construct their alternative scenarios, they tend to get facts wrong and throw out Occam's razor, and the seeming willfulness with which they do this makes it hard not to conclude that they are being intellectually dishonest.

skeptic griggsy

26th October 2006, 07:10 PM

;) :crowded: As Bart Ehrman says in 'Misquoting Jesus," scribes took flawed oral traditions and changed the wording. Anyway, no god told those writers what to write; they used their own imaginations.

27th October 2006, 01:42 PM

Ok. The chapter and verse is Mark 6:1-6. Note that the part that I say doesn't seem to fit is the way the author seems to try to cover up the failure.

Note, too, that the author here is narrating events as a 3rd person omniscient, rather than being a character himself. I can certainly see a scenario where an author tells the story from the point of view of a character who downplays a hero's weakness. But then the author is also portraying the weaknesses of the character that he casts as the narrator, which is not what we see in Mark.

It's hardly a cover up - nor even a failure, per se.

I'm sure that, on the surface, we're seeing that Jesus was powerless here; but could it not also be that there were simply no great works to be done? We're talking a small village - they had a few sick folk, but were otherwise OK, apparently. Jesus is also attributed as claiming that he has no power of his own; only what the Father gives to him. Besides, from a literary standpoint, would it have made any sense to have these people disbelieve him after he rent the earth asunder and caused tulips to spring from their sandals?

I think, also, the key to understanding this passage could be said to be that those who know a prophet best, are those least likely to believe him a prophet.

There are a number of ways of reconciling this passage - as I'm sure a devout apologist could come up with - and certainly such a passage is consistant even so with a fictional character.

This does illustrate one of your points, though, on 'brother' - the villagers were recognizing Jesus as one of their own, and commenting on his commonality via his relatives. I've often thought it silly to claim that Jesus had no brethren at all, but I'd hardly claim it was inconsistent with a fictional character, to mention his brothers in passing.

But on his 'failure', I think we'll need to examine this bit a little closer before deciding what parallels in fiction exist, since the precise meaning and purpose of this passage is unclear.

ETA: I've already found an apologetics site which essentially translates this to mean that the people, being without faith (trust), would not allow him to do great works there.

http://www.tektonics.org/whatis/whatfaith.html

We've seen a lot of skeptics quote this verse lately, saying that it indicates that Jesus was a charlatan who (like our modern "faith healer" Benny) needed people to have "faith" and excused away ability to heal real diseases as a lack of faith. The word "unbelief" here is apistia, meaning a lack of pistis. In light of our better understanding of pistis, the problem is indeed not with Jesus but with the lack of loyalty and trust by those who reject Jesus. Like the ungrateful client in the client-patron relationship, the people rejected Jesus as a patron in spite of his acts of grace, thereby dishonoring him. (Note how this affects the meaning of Mark 6:4: "A prophet is not without honour, but in his own country, and among his own kin, and in his own house.") To reject a gracious act was the height of dishonor. Jesus could not heal these people not because of a lack of power, but because of ingratitude and a rejection of his gracious patronage! A rejected patron could and would never force his gracious gifts upon a client who didn't want them!

Just goes to show that this passage can be interpreted many ways...

Piscivore

27th October 2006, 02:10 PM

But this is multiplying entities without necessity, especially the latter option.

Did ancient authors never plagarise?

Darth Rotor

27th October 2006, 03:20 PM

Did ancient authors never plagarise?
Good question.

Was there enough stuff out there, and profit motive, for plagiarism to be necessary, or even a reason for there to be a law against copying things?

Borrowed from each other? I'd guess it happened quite a bit.

DR

CapelDodger

27th October 2006, 03:36 PM

Did ancient authors never plagarise?
Heaven forbid!

Piscivore

27th October 2006, 03:38 PM

Speaking as an attempted author, it is very common to use real people and events when constructing fictionalised accounts. It is so common that there is an aphorism, told to the neophyte novelists in both of the creative writing classes I've taken, that you never show your first book to your family. It is such a basic thing that I find it hard to believe that it wouldn't be done, especially in a book that contains obvious fictions. Even respected history writers have been caught copying things from other sources unintentionally. If we take into account the oral factor, then it's almost a free-for-all, isn't it?

To my mind, Kevin's hypothesis is much more in keeping with Occam than deciding that all these little bits of unrelated versimilitude are all accounts of a single person. Especially since this "person" seems to undergo drastic mood swings within the narrative- praising lilies in one chapter and cursing fig trees the next.

jjramsey

27th October 2006, 03:41 PM

I'm sure that, on the surface, we're seeing that Jesus was powerless here; but could it not also be that there were simply no great works to be done?

The problem is that Mark writes that "he could do not deed of power there," and then tacks on a few exceptions. It reads like a Freudian slip, so to speak.

Besides, from a literary standpoint, would it have made any sense to have these people disbelieve him after he rent the earth asunder and caused tulips to spring from their sandals?

Actually, that would be very Old Testament. :) God does all these great works in Exodus and still the Israelites are stiff-necked and want to worship another god. And it's not like the Gospel writers are shy about riffing off the OT.

I think, also, the key to understanding this passage could be said to be that those who know a prophet best, are those least likely to believe him a prophet.

But part of the reason that's true in the first place is that real "prophets" don't have real power and therefore can't use it to persuade the tougher local crowd.

This does illustrate one of your points, though, on 'brother' - the villagers were recognizing Jesus as one of their own, and commenting on his commonality via his relatives. I've often thought it silly to claim that Jesus had no brethren at all, but I'd hardly claim it was inconsistent with a fictional character, to mention his brothers in passing.

The reason the mentioning of his brothers in passing is probative is because his brothers are also mentioned in passing in letters and Josephus. If the brothers were only mentioned in the Gospels, it wouldn't be probative.

ETA: I've already found an apologetics site which essentially translates this to mean that the people, being without faith (trust), would not allow him to do great works there.

http://www.tektonics.org/whatis/whatfaith.html

We've seen a lot of skeptics quote this verse lately, saying that it indicates that Jesus was a charlatan who (like our modern "faith healer" Benny) needed people to have "faith" and excused away ability to heal real diseases as a lack of faith. The word "unbelief" here is apistia, meaning a lack of pistis. In light of our better understanding of pistis, the problem is indeed not with Jesus but with the lack of loyalty and trust by those who reject Jesus. Like the ungrateful client in the client-patron relationship, the people rejected Jesus as a patron in spite of his acts of grace, thereby dishonoring him. (Note how this affects the meaning of Mark 6:4: "A prophet is not without honour, but in his own country, and among his own kin, and in his own house.") To reject a gracious act was the height of dishonor. Jesus could not heal these people not because of a lack of power, but because of ingratitude and a rejection of his gracious patronage! A rejected patron could and would never force his gracious gifts upon a client who didn't want them!
Just goes to show that this passage can be interpreted many ways...

Just goes to show that this passage can be interpreted many ways...

The problem is that there is no indication that the Nazarenes are refusing to let Jesus treat them, or that Jesus is doing the refusing. He's reading that into the passage to avoid its implications.

27th October 2006, 04:00 PM

Actually, in context with the rest of that section, it seems exactly what the passage is implying - that because they were skeptical of him, they were preventing him from showing them great works.

The sensible thing to do, if he were writing about some ancient sham artist and trying to portray him differently, would be to come to outrageous lies or simply omit his return to his home altogether.

I think, perhaps, you're misinterpreting the passage based on the preconceived notion that J. was an ancient con-man, rather than looking at the passage objectively. But that is solely my opinion.

jjramsey

27th October 2006, 04:11 PM

Actually, in context with the rest of that section, it seems exactly what the passage is implying - that because they were skeptical of him, they were preventing him from showing them great works.

The passage is certainly implying that because they were skeptical of him, they were preventing him from showing them great works. The question is how they were preventing him from showing them great works. There is no sign that they are refusing to be healed or being refused by Jesus.

I think, perhaps, you're misinterpreting the passage based on the preconceived notion that J. was an ancient con-man, rather than looking at the passage objectively.

Actually, I think he was deluded rather than a con-man, though It's just that both a con-man who made a misstep and a deluded person who only thinks he can heal would suffer the same kind of failure of the power of suggestion.

28th October 2006, 06:44 AM

Personally, I think the passage was meant to demonstrate the importance of trust - that, because they refused to trust in Jesus, they failed to benefit from his 'Great Works'.

Though apparently your mileage may vary.

Seems quite a pertinent and useful fictional construction, in this light.

Paulhoff

28th October 2006, 07:05 AM

Let us try this one on for size, double think is great.

If one trusts in Jesus completely when one does not need to receive anything from Jesus.
If one does not trust in Jesus completely when one does not get anything from Jesus.

Well this for Jesus is great, he gets to do nothing and still comes out a winner.

Paul

:) :) :)

jjramsey

28th October 2006, 08:38 AM

Personally, I think the passage was meant to demonstrate the importance of trust - that, because they refused to trust in Jesus, they failed to benefit from his 'Great Works'.

But there's that slip: "he could do no deed of power there." It's not like Matthew 13:54-58, where he merely did few deeds of power on account of their lack of faith, or the version of the Nazareth account in Luke 4:14-30 where Jesus basically refuses to do healings for the Nazarenes. In Mark, the lack of faith is apparently lessening Jesus' power, not simply offending him, which this means that using it as a story to demonstrate the importance of trust opens up a can of worms. If Jesus' power can wane that easily, then he is an awfully slender reed to lean on, so why trust in his power? Contrast this with the account where Peter walks on the water:

Immediately he made the disciples get into the boat and go on ahead to the other side, while he dismissed the crowds. And after he had dismissed the crowds, he went up the mountain by himself to pray. When evening came, he was there alone, but by this time the boat, battered by the waves, was far from the land, for the wind was against them. And early in the morning he came walking toward them on the sea. But when the disciples saw him walking on the sea, they were terrified, saying, "It is a ghost!" And they cried out in fear. But immediately Jesus spoke to them and said, "Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid." Peter answered him, "Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water." He said, "Come." So Peter got out of the boat, started walking on the water, and came toward Jesus. But when he noticed the strong wind, he became frightened, and beginning to sink, he cried out, "Lord, save me!" Jesus immediately reached out his hand and caught him, saying to him, "You of little faith, why did you doubt?" When they got into the boat, the wind ceased. And those in the boat worshiped him, saying, "Truly you are the Son of God."

Now this is a story to demonstrate the importance of trust, and it does it very unambiguously. Note that Jesus isn't in an embarrassing position. It's not like he's lost his power and fallen into the water. Only Peter did that. It's almost a ready-made sermon, and if Matthew didn't portray it as if it had happened, it could easily have been a parable. This is a good example of a fish story with a moral point.

28th October 2006, 10:13 AM

Unfortunately, you're wrong about Mark. He did some deeds - he healed a few sick folk. And the 'could' part seems to be interpreted differently in different versions.

So the pertinent question here is, what was the actual term used? And was the implication that he lacked the power, or that he lacked the opportunity?

jjramsey

28th October 2006, 10:57 AM

Unfortunately, you're wrong about Mark. He did some deeds - he healed a few sick folk.

I'm well aware of what the passage says. Quoting myself:

The problem is that Mark writes that "he could do not deed of power there," and then tacks on a few exceptions. It reads like a Freudian slip, so to speak.

So the pertinent question here is, what was the actual term used? And was the implication that he lacked the power, or that he lacked the opportunity?

The word used for "could" is dunamai:

1) to be able, have power whether by virtue of one's own ability and resources, or of a state of mind, or through favourable circumstances, or by permission of law or custom

2) to be able to do something

3) to be capable, strong and powerful

From http://www.blueletterbible.org/tmp_dir/words/1/1162057506-883.html

The word for "could" is fairly generic. I'd say the implication that "could" indicates that he lacked the power rather than the opportunity comes from the way that Mark tacks on "except that he healed a few sick people." It's like he realized what he was writing and then added something to indicate "well, he had some power." If he wanted to indicate that it was a lack of opportunity, it would make more sense to write something like, "And he could do no deed of power there, for the Nazarenes refused his favor." The passage would be closer in tone to its counterpart in Luke.

skeptic griggsy

28th October 2006, 12:40 PM

:boggled: :boxedin: :covereyes Actually, I find it more enlightening to discuss if he had a valid ethic . I think it was dubious.We do not have a just account of his life anyway.From what supposedly shows him in a good light , I don't think so. If he did miralcles they were psychosomatically induced or they were hoaxes . His threat of hell-fire shows a mean heart . His insistence on faith shows logicide . I would not want to meet such a fellow!:crowded: :jaw-dropp

28th October 2006, 01:25 PM

The word for "could" is fairly generic. I'd say the implication that "could" indicates that he lacked the power rather than the opportunity comes from the way that Mark tacks on "except that he healed a few sick people." It's like he realized what he was writing and then added something to indicate "well, he had some power." If he wanted to indicate that it was a lack of opportunity, it would make more sense to write something like, "And he could do no deed of power there, for the Nazarenes refused his favor." The passage would be closer in tone to its counterpart in Luke.

Whereas I disagree with your rather convoluted interpretation of the passage. The few he did heal could also have been a demonstration that not EVERYONE in his hometown doubted him, or were able to prevent his help.

As for the author 'making sense', if we had any indication of 'sense' half the Bible would be gone.

I'd say - given the general style of the rest of Mark, and the obtuse and often ridiculous word choices - his wording in this part was remarkably clear - and pointed to a lack of the opportunity to do great works, due to the lack of faith (trust) of his home villagers.

jjramsey

28th October 2006, 02:15 PM

Whereas I disagree with your rather convoluted interpretation of the passage.

What's so convoluted about noting that Mark's exceptions to "he could do not deed of power there" looks tacked on?

I'd say - given the general style of the rest of Mark, and the obtuse and often ridiculous word choices

Mark has been known for rather crude Greek, but I haven't heard of him being obtuse.

his wording in this part was remarkably clear - and pointed to a lack of the opportunity to do great works, due to the lack of faith (trust) of his home villagers.

Except, as I said, there is no mention of a lack of opportunity. That's something an apologist read into the text.

28th October 2006, 02:41 PM

Just as you read a lack of power into the text.

All that's said is he couldn't do any great deeds there (or wouldn't, depending on translation). We have to use the context to determine what happened.

For some reason, you see it as a lack of ability - and that his healing of a few sick was an apologetic add-on. For some other reason, I see it as a lack of opportunity, and see this confirmed by the underlying message of the rest of this passage. Without further information, I'm afraid this passage is just too ambiguous to come to a certain conclusion.

One thing is for certain, though - there's little reason, from this passage, to assume that it could not be fiction.

jjramsey

28th October 2006, 02:57 PM

Just as you read a lack of power into the text.

The lack of power comes from reading a statement that reads "X couldn't do Y's, except that X did a few small Y's." Taken on its face, that indicates a lessened ability to do Y's.

All that's said is he couldn't do any great deeds there (or wouldn't, depending on translation).

That doesn't depend on the translation so much as whether you read Mark or Matthew. Mark has "couldn't"; Matthew has "didn't".

I see it as a lack of opportunity, and see this confirmed by the underlying message of the rest of this passage.

But as I said, lack of opportunity isn't even indicated. There is no indication of a refusal on either Jesus' side or the Nazarenes.

Paulhoff

28th October 2006, 03:02 PM

Isn’t it amazing how much can be read into what was written so ambiguously from the start, and so many have wasted time on trying to understand it when it was written not be understood but only to be use to control by saying nothing and therefore never wrong.

Paul

:) :) :)

Bottom line, Jesus was no son of any god.

28th October 2006, 03:49 PM

The lack of power comes from reading a statement that reads "X couldn't do Y's, except that X did a few small Y's." Taken on its face, that indicates a lessened ability to do Y's.

...to you. It just doesn't read that way to me - especially given the tone of the piece.

That doesn't depend on the translation so much as whether you read Mark or Matthew. Mark has "couldn't"; Matthew has "didn't".

Several translations seem to disagree, though I tend to prefer 'couldn't', as it's closer to the original text.

But as I said, lack of opportunity isn't even indicated. There is no indication of a refusal on either Jesus' side or the Nazarenes.

Nor is lack of power indicated. There's no indication of any weakness or lack of divinity on Jesus' part.

What there is indicated, is that the townsfolk ridiculed his wisdom, and refused to acknowledge any divinity he may have claimed; and he could do nothing but heal a few sick, and marvelled at their disbelief. It's a small town, with no major catastrophe looming; no chance for Jesus to strut his stuff. And no one to watch if he did try something. He wasn't some street magician, pulling rabbits out of his sleeves or turning day to night for the amusement of people; he seems to (for the most part) be genuinely obsessed with acts of assistance - healing the sick, providing food, etc. Their needs were small, and they wouldn't be swayed by a few acts of faith healing; so he could do no great work there.

I'm sorry, JJ, but this passage is just too weak to say that Mark was trying to cover up a failure. Yes, it reads that way if that's how you want it to read; but it also reads my way if that's how you want it to read. The terms are too ambiguous, and the passages too vague, to determine if he suffered a lack of power, or merely a lack of opportunity.

IMHO, if Mark had been trying to wave off an actual failure, he would have either not mentioned the failure at all, or he would have woven some story around it - like a blind man who remained uncured, yet later was proven to be lying to get people to believe Jesus had failed. It doesn't mesh well saying he would mention a failure, then try to explain it away - especially since he was writing for an audience that likely couldn't ever fact-check his story anyway. Decades had passed, and anyone who knew this priest was likely old, senile, or dead. He had no need to include this 'failure' for credibility. That's just another part of why I think it reads more accurately to say that he lacked opportunity to do great works there.

Alternately, he could also have written about J. doing great works, but going unnoticed or disbelieved... that would have been a better passage, probably. But, Mark was no Will Shakespeare.

jjramsey

28th October 2006, 05:09 PM

It's a small town, with no major catastrophe looming; no chance for Jesus to strut his stuff.

But the text never unpacks it that way. Indeed, Mark doesn't indicate that Nazareth is small, let alone too small to have few chances for Jesus to strut his stuff.

IMHO, if Mark had been trying to wave off an actual failure, he would have either not mentioned the failure at all, or he would have woven some story around it

I'd say that Mark already did weave a story around it, well, tacked it on, anyway--namely the part about healing a few sick people. It's just that he didn't tack it on very well. One might also argue that the mockery diminished Jesus' charisma considerably but he could still convince a few people that they were "healed," so it was only a partial failure. Strictly speaking, then, it would not be correct to say Mark was backtracking as I had written earlier in the thread, but rather using the few healed people as a way to rationalize the venture as not being a total failure.

It doesn't mesh well saying he would mention a failure, then try to explain it away - especially since he was writing for an audience that likely couldn't ever fact-check his story anyway.

That the audience couldn't fact-check the story makes it easier for him to get away with explaining it away.

You did summarize the story well, though:

What there is indicated, is that the townsfolk ridiculed his wisdom, and refused to acknowledge any divinity he may have claimed; and he could do nothing but heal a few sick, and marvelled at their disbelief.

Mark leaves two things just dangling: the ridicule of the Nazarenes, and that that--with a few small exceptions--he could do no miracles. Now of course, Mark never says outright that the ridicule actually reduced Jesus' power, but then, we wouldn't expect him to write anything that obviously damning to Jesus. What he does do is this:

He writes something that indicates that Jesus could do far less than he normally could. That is simply inherent in writing "he couldn't do _blank_, but he did _blank_).

He offers no "out" like the Nazarenes refusing Jesus or vice versa. Note that Luke does the latter.

If he did the latter, the story could easily be written off as fiction. As it stands, though, Mark's account fits all too well with what we know about faith healers.

28th October 2006, 07:19 PM

Given what we've learned via archaeology about Nazareth, I'd say we have every right to consider it a small village.

But as to the rest - we're just going to have to agree to disagree. You see it entirely differently, and I can't imagine how, but somehow, you see a lack of power, rather than a lack of opportunity - and imagine this somehow disproves fiction. I see the reverse. We seem incapable of convincing the other. And I'm not sure if there's much point of us debating for the fence-sitters, since most here are quite happy to agree that Jesus wasn't the Son-of-God or a reasonable source for a major world religion.

I feel he didn't have to offer an 'out' - he was pointing to the failure of the Nazarenes, not of Jesus. You feel differently. Textual analysis can go 'round in circles all day, but without further material, we're left nowhere.

Got another passage?

Ausmerican

29th October 2006, 03:49 AM

I really can't see the importance of a written mistake or weakness in determining the legitimacy of the NT. If I recall in the OT God himself had some trouble with chariots of iron, Samson had bad taste in women, etc. Even in other myths it is a well used device. Hercules messed up some, so did Thor. It is generally used in fiction because infallible people are usually boring subjects to read about.

jjramsey

29th October 2006, 06:54 AM

Given what we've learned via archaeology about Nazareth, I'd say we have every right to consider it a small village.

We have every right to consider it a small village because of what we now know. However, it's not until the Gospel of John that the smallness of Nazareth appears to have been noted. Matthew and Luke explicitly and erroneously call it a city (or a polis to be more precise), while Mark is vague. We certainly cannot assume that Mark expected his readers to know the size of Nazareth.

But as to the rest - we're just going to have to agree to disagree.

Fair enough.

You see it entirely differently, and I can't imagine how, but somehow, you see a lack of power, rather than a lack of opportunity

To see how I see the passage, I guess it would be fair to say that I read "And he could do no deed of power there, except that he laid his hands on a few sick people and cured them" as being similar in structure to "And he could lift no weights there, except that he hefted a few dumbbells."

jjramsey

29th October 2006, 07:05 AM

I really can't see the importance of a written mistake or weakness in determining the legitimacy of the NT.

We're not talking about the legitimacy of the NT, but rather how to read the NT against the grain. Think of it as trying to extract information from a hostile witness who is a known fabricator but has certain patterns to his fabrications.

If I recall in the OT God himself had some trouble with chariots of iron

Which actually is a telling detail. It's just that it's a fossil of early beliefs in a non-omnipotent YHWH.

Samson had bad taste in women, etc. Even in other myths it is a well used device. Hercules messed up some, so did Thor.

In none of those cases, though, are we dealing with stories that have established that they are biased in favor of showing a particular personage in a good light. This is in sharp contrast to the Gospels.

29th October 2006, 10:12 AM

To see how I see the passage, I guess it would be fair to say that I read "And he could do no deed of power there, except that he laid his hands on a few sick people and cured them" as being similar in structure to "And he could lift no weights there, except that he hefted a few dumbbells."

And, again, the cause of why he could lift no weights, has to be drawn from the context of the passage. For example, if all the bigger kids had already invaded the weight room, and all that was left was a couple of dumbbells... [arguing religion, no less]

You apparently read that general structure differently from how I do, and that's an interesting fundamental difference.

jjramsey

29th October 2006, 10:49 AM

And, again, the cause of why he could lift no weights, has to be drawn from the context of the passage. For example, if all the bigger kids had already invaded the weight room, and all that was left was a couple of dumbbells...

But if that was the scenario, the obviously way to describe it would be to say that there was nothing available to lift but the dumbbells. "Could" would be a very poor word choice. By default, "could" tends to refer to someone's ability to do something, and absent a context indicating otherwise, the implication of "he could lift no weights there, except that he hefted a few dumbbells" is that he was weaker than he normally was.

The problem with the Markan passage is that the the indicators that it was a lack of opportunity rather than a lack of ability are missing. Mark never says that the Nazarenes' contempt for Jesus led to them refusing to be healed. There's no sign that anyone was refusing anything. What is left, then, is the default meaning of "could" (or dunamai, actually, which means the same thing).

29th October 2006, 12:29 PM

There is no 'default meaning' of 'could', JJ. You're reading into it a context which is not there.

You're a very poor scholar of English, aren't you?

jjramsey

29th October 2006, 08:12 PM

You're a very poor scholar of English, aren't you?

Sigh. And our debate had been so civil up to now.

The bottom line is that if the passage really said what you thought it said, it would have been written very differently. It would have been trivial for Mark to explicitly state that either that the Nazarenes refused him or vice versa, and it would fit with his apparent agenda to do so. It would have also been trivial for Mark to state that there were few people who needed healing. Yet he did neither. That tells against him saying said what you thought he said.

29th October 2006, 09:54 PM

Just as it would have been trivial for him to state that the power wasn't present.

I don't know why you're so dead-set on this point, JJ - the actual text is inconclusive and ambiguous. It doesn't directly point to a lack of power - only a lack of ability, whose basis is unknown.

If I say I can bake no great pastry, except for a few cookies - is it becaues I lack the skill? The time? The flour? An appropriate oven? We don't know. There's no telling. If I say I can write no great works, except a few limericks, is it due to lack of skill, or do I only have a slip of paper and stub of pencil? We don't know.

The same problem exists in this passage. Mark provides appropriate context in the remaining portions that suggests it was a lack of trust on the part of the villages, and that it resulted in a lack of opportunity. What he does NOT provide is indicators of a lack of power or skill. He didn't try and fail, for example. And he had some power - he healed a few folk.

But you're completely obstinant on this idea that he was weak and puny, and that somehow this passage conclusively demonstrates a living Jesus who was a scam artist.

The fact is, it's not at all conclusive - it's ambiguous and uncertain. It's a rotten passage to demonstrate your point with.

Do you have another?

Piscivore

30th October 2006, 08:20 AM

The bottom line is that if the passage really said what you thought it said, it would have been written very differently.

Maybe it was a weakness in the author. Maybe the word used is a poor choice because the author made a poor word choice. It happens. Seems risky to base an interpretation on a level of detail that small.

Raskolnikov123

30th October 2006, 01:38 PM

Evidence for Jesus' existence isn't conclusive, but I find it highly likely that he existed. By "existed", I mean there was a man named Yeshua, who preached a message of Jewish apocalypticism (The Kingdom of God is at hand...) in Galilee and in Jerusalem, said some or many of the things that are attributed to Jesus, had followers with names that are familiar to readers of the new Testament, ran afoul of the Roman authorities, and was executed by crucifixion under orders of Pontius Pilate. His followers then built upon his teachings in a dozen different directions, eventually yielding the mainline Christian denominations existing today.

Evidence:

1) While early Christian Gospels contradict themselves on many points, there is a core consistency to a lot of what is claimed (not counting the stuff from Mark that Matthew and Luke borrowed). That includes similarities of language between the non-canonical Gospel of Thomas, and the sayings from the Q source or from the Gospel of John. It also includes the passion narrative.

2) Additionally, much of what is in the Gospels has "the ring of truth" - not in a religious sense, but in the sense that they were trying to account for well-known facts associated with Jesus that would have been much easier to simply fictionalize if they had thought they could get away with it. For instance, the Gospels of Luke and Matthew have contradictory birth narratives about how Jesus was born in Bethlehem, the city of David, in compliance with Messianic prophecy. And both Gospels subsequently explain why Jesus then went to Nazareth, a podunk town in the middle of Nowhere. If you were completely fictionalizing a messiah, it would make a lot more sense to have him come right out of Bethlehem, not Nazareth. But Matthew and Luke didn't do that, both coming up with independent birth narratives and relocations to Nazareth. Why bother, unless Jesus really *did* come from Nazareth and everyone knew it? Additionally, nothing in the Messianic prophecies was understood at the time to predict that the Messiah would be ignominously crucified at the hands of the Romans. Its a detail that makes for a hard sell, which means that its probably true.

3) We also have a consistency between the "cast" of the Gospels, and of the book of Acts, and of the letters of Paul. Paul specifically refers to conversations with Peter and James, for instance. The core Pauline letters (Romans, Corinthians, Galatians, etc.) are universally regarded as authentic by historians. So what do we make of this? What seems more plausible, that Paul was simply perpetuating a complex fiction that just happens to have some of the same cast of characters as the Gospels (most of which seem to have been written independent from Paul's ministry), or that he was simply relaying conversations he had with real people - the same people who are described in the Gospels?

4) Lack of parallels. If we believe that Jesus did not exist, we are believing that a very devout religious following can be created based on a fictional founder. There is no precedence for this that we know of. From L Ron Hubbard to Joseph Smith to Mohammed to Jim Jones, there are real people at the roots of the religion. It seems obvious to me that it takes a real personality to create a cult of personality, and such a cult of personality seems necessary for a religion to have any momentum. Given that there were Christianities independent of the mission work of Peter and Paul (the gnostics in particular) it seems clear that the inspiring personality predates their involvement with the religion.

Piscivore

30th October 2006, 02:19 PM

1) While early Christian Gospels contradict themselves on many points, there is a core consistency to a lot of what is claimed (not counting the stuff from Mark that Matthew and Luke borrowed). That includes similarities of language between the non-canonical Gospel of Thomas, and the sayings from the Q source or from the Gospel of John. It also includes the passion narrative.

The same similarity would be observed if they were simply retellings from the same fictional source. Inconclusive.

2) Additionally, much of what is in the Gospels has "the ring of truth"

"sounding good" is not a measure of fact.

- not in a religious sense, but in the sense that they were trying to account for well-known facts associated with Jesus that would have been much easier to simply fictionalize if they had thought they could get away with it. For instance, the Gospels of Luke and Matthew have contradictory birth narratives about how Jesus was born in Bethlehem, the city of David, in compliance with Messianic prophecy. And both Gospels subsequently explain why Jesus then went to Nazareth, a podunk town in the middle of Nowhere.

The contradiction is to be expected. If we have multiple agents independently retelling a story from a single source, especially if doing so orally, diversion is perfectly reasonable.

If you were completely fictionalizing a messiah, it would make a lot more sense to have him come right out of Bethlehem, not Nazareth.

Sense to you perhaps. You can't know what made sense to the authors.

[/quote]But Matthew and Luke didn't do that, both coming up with independent birth narratives and relocations to Nazareth. Why bother, unless Jesus really *did* come from Nazareth and everyone knew it?[/quote]

If the original fiction had him from Nazareth, and the later retellers had to independantly create birth stories for him the result would be the same. Inconclusive.

Additionally, nothing in the Messianic prophecies was understood at the time to predict that the Messiah would be ignominously crucified at the hands of the Romans. Its a detail that makes for a hard sell, which means that its probably true.

Why does it make for a "hard sell"? Given that it did sell, I'd have to say the opposite. I would think that gold plates no one is allowed to see and decoded by magic rocks, telling a story of Isrealites taking over North America and then vanishing, leaving only an angel- that no one else sees- to tell their tale would be a "hard sell". But apparently it is not.

In any case, presumed unpopularity isn't a test for fact either.

3) We also have a consistency between the "cast" of the Gospels, and of the book of Acts, and of the letters of Paul. Paul specifically refers to conversations with Peter and James, for instance. The core Pauline letters (Romans, Corinthians, Galatians, etc.) are universally regarded as authentic by historians. So what do we make of this? What seems more plausible, that Paul was simply perpetuating a complex fiction that just happens to have some of the same cast of characters as the Gospels (most of which seem to have been written independent from Paul's ministry), or that he was simply relaying conversations he had with real people - the same people who are described in the Gospels?

If you were going to convince people that you knew the cast of "Friends", would you present letters to and from Joey and Chandler, or people your targets never heard of? :oldroll:

4) Lack of parallels. If we believe that Jesus did not exist, we are believing that a very devout religious following can be created based on a fictional founder. There is no precedence for this that we know of. From L Ron Hubbard to Joseph Smith to Mohammed to Jim Jones, there are real people at the roots of the religion.

So that means Xenu, Moroni, Allah, and JJ's "Jesus" are all real?

ETA: All the Myths and legends came at some point from the brains of real people- Zeus, Indra, Odin, Quetzucouatl. All of them.

It seems obvious to me that it takes a real personality to create a cult of personality, and such a cult of personality seems necessary for a religion to have any momentum.

There does have to be a real person to start these things, but the focus isn't always on themselves. In fact, in none of your examples is this the case.

There is a reason for this, see if you can guess what it is. Then think about why the creator of Christianity might have done the same thing.

Given that there were Christianities independent of the mission work of Peter and Paul (the gnostics in particular) it seems clear that the inspiring personality predates their involvement with the religion.

Yes, but you have no evidence that person is Jesus. I find it much more plausible the person behind it is a 1st century Joseph Smith/David Koresh than the best friend of a street preacher that for some reason waited a lifetime to write down His story.

pipelineaudio

30th October 2006, 02:23 PM

Raskolnikov123

30th October 2006, 02:59 PM

The same similarity would be observed if they were simply retellings from the same fictional source. Inconclusive.

But that doesn't fly. There are too many dissimilarities. I think you have faulty criteria here. If multiple documents are extremely similar, common sourcing is likely, which is why the historical consensus is that Matthew and Luke both used Mark and a hypthesized Q source as a source. But where there are grave dissimilarities (birth narratives in Matthew and Luke, ministry descriptions in Mark and John), independent sourcing seems very likely. Your criterion doesn't do a good job of explaining how documents with the same source can be radically different while still having a lot in common. Starting from a real historical figure does allow for such an explanation.

the key is in looking for a pattern to the commonalities and exceptions. The commonalities are around a handful of events, biographical details, and sayings. The contradictions tend to be where there was a clear theological incentive to fictionalize (who Jesus met with after the Resurrection, the birth narrative, etc).

Sense to you perhaps. You can't know what made sense to the authors.

If the original fiction had him from Nazareth, and the later retellers had to independantly create birth stories for him the result would be the same. Inconclusive.

Two separate Gospels authors felt the need to contrive an explanation for Jesus' Nazarene roots, which were at odds with prophecy. Why bother, if they could just make things up with impunity?

Why does it make for a "hard sell"? Given that it did sell, I'd have to say the opposite. I would think that gold plates no one is allowed to see and decoded by magic rocks, telling a story of Isrealites taking over North America and then vanishing, leaving only an angel- that no one else sees- to tell their tale would be a "hard sell". But apparently it is not.

It makes for a hard sell because it was at odds with what Jews at the time were expecting in their Messiah. Its the type of detail that tends to come from truth, as it isn't what is generally expected of leaders. Compare with Joseph Smith's murder - that does come from historical fact, not from the tidier Mormon fictions.

If you were going to convince people that you knew the cast of "Friends", would you present letters to and from Joey and Chandler, or people your targets never heard of

Presenting letters from Joey and Chandler would presume that I already knew who the cast of friends were, from a separate source.

What you seem to want to do here is unifying all of the different early Christian writings to a hypothetical single source. As long as we are discussing conclusive sourcing, what is the evidence for your belief there? What criteria would you use to assess independent or dependent sourcing?

So that means Xenu, Moroni, Allah, and JJ's "Jesus" are all real?

Oh, please.

There does have to be a real person to start these things, but the focus isn't always on themselves. In fact, in none of your examples is this the case.

There is a reason for this, see if you can guess what it is. Then think about why the creator of Christianity might have done the same thing.

Nor is this the case with Jesus. He also is relying on God as the mystical unseen presence akin to Moroni and Allah. And note key differences between Jesus and Allah. Most of the actions of Jesus are quite earthly and mundane. Baby kissing, handshaking, preaching. Nothing particularly hard to believe about a person doing those things. The actions of Moroni and Allah are *not* mundane, and such there is a higher threshold of skepticism in claims about their existence.

Yes, but you have no evidence that person is Jesus. I find it much more plausible the person behind it is a 1st century Joseph Smith/David Koresh than the best friend of a street preacher that for some reason waited a lifetime to write down His story.

Of course we have evidence that the person is Jesus. We have many different documents specifically describing how the person is Jesus, with a certain consistency. The debate is over the extent to which those documents can be relied upon for simple biographical details.

In my experience, these debates are mostly about standards of evidence, and the thresholds required before one draws a conclusion. I buy the Occam's razor argument - I think it is far simpler that a real person existed who did many of the things attributed to Jesus than it would be for the entirety of Christianity to be based on a fiction. Particularly considering that there is nothing particularly implausible about most of Jesus' biography.

Raskolnikov123

30th October 2006, 03:02 PM

Raskalikov123, you are commiting the same error jj does, which is attempting to use the bible to prove the bible. I dont know why my old thread about this didnt get so much traction, but I am sure enjoying this one

Um, no I am not. I thought it would be obvious that I was not "proving the Bible". But just in case statements like "early Christian Gospels contradict themselves on many points" and "the Gospels of Luke and Matthew have contradictory birth narratives about how Jesus was born in Bethlehem", I will spell it out. I. am. not. claiming. to. prove. the. Bible.

Clear?

Raskolnikov123

30th October 2006, 03:07 PM

Yes, but you have no evidence that person is Jesus. I find it much more plausible the person behind it is a 1st century Joseph Smith/David Koresh than the best friend of a street preacher that for some reason waited a lifetime to write down His story.

More on this.

It actually sounds like you are agreeing with me here. I am saying that Jesus was like a Joseph Smith or David Koresh. Just one in a less literate era where it took longer before things got written down. Imagine a Joseph Smith who didn't write anything down, conveying things verbally to his followers, who then try to write things down years later after Smith was murdered. That might seem implausible to you in a 19th century America with literacy rates over 90%, but it seems extremely plausible to me in almost entirely illiterate first century Palestine.

Piscivore

30th October 2006, 03:39 PM

But that doesn't fly. There are too many dissimilarities. I think you have faulty criteria here. If multiple documents are extremely similar, common sourcing is likely, which is why the historical consensus is that Matthew and Luke both used Mark and a hypthesized Q source as a source. But where there are grave dissimilarities (birth narratives in Matthew and Luke, ministry descriptions in Mark and John), independent sourcing seems very likely. Your criterion doesn't do a good job of explaining how documents with the same source can be radically different while still having a lot in common. Starting from a real historical figure does allow for such an explanation.

The fact that there are source documents and they were added onto in different ways says nothing about the authenticity of the central character in those source documents.

the key is in looking for a pattern to the commonalities and exceptions. The commonalities are around a handful of events, biographical details, and sayings. The contradictions tend to be where there was a clear theological incentive to fictionalize (who Jesus met with after the Resurrection, the birth narrative, etc).

Again, this is no different from any story that gets added onto. You haven't read much fan fiction, have you?

Two separate Gospels authors felt the need to contrive an explanation for Jesus' Nazarene roots, which were at odds with prophecy. Why bother, if they could just make things up with impunity?

The original author might not have been concerned with those prophecies, but if the later writers expanding the myth were concerned with them they would have to account for it, and each did in his own way.

You seem to be assuming that these gospel authors were working in a vaccuum, but you state in the beginning of the post I'm quoting this was not the case.

It makes for a hard sell because it was at odds with what Jews at the time were expecting in their Messiah. Its the type of detail that tends to come from truth, as it isn't what is generally expected of leaders. Compare with Joseph Smith's murder - that does come from historical fact, not from the tidier Mormon fictions.

Joseph Smith is not the subject of the Book of Mormon. You are confusing the author with the subject, which I think is your whole problem here. Jesus did not write his own story, and I don't know of anyone who claims he did. That there was an author is indisputable. Since that author is not and does not claim to be Jesus, we can not infer Jesus' existance from the author's existence.

Presenting letters from Joey and Chandler would presume that I already knew who the cast of friends were, from a separate source.

Right. No one is disputing there was a source. But that source was not Jesus. Just as the source of "Friends" is not Joey or Chandler.

What you seem to want to do here is unifying all of the different early Christian writings to a hypothetical single source. As long as we are discussing conclusive sourcing, what is the evidence for your belief there? What criteria would you use to assess independent or dependent sourcing?

the historical consensus is that Matthew and Luke both used Mark and a hypthesized Q source as a source.

As I understand it, The "Q" source is thought to be mostly philosphy, which would leave Mark as the "single source" of the biography.

Oh, please.
Please, what? The subject is not the author.

Nor is this the case with Jesus. He also is relying on God as the mystical unseen presence akin to Moronu and Allah. And note key differences between Jesus and Allah. Most of the actions of Jesus are quite earthly and mundane. Baby kissing, handshaking, preaching. Nothing particularly hard to believe about a person doing those things. The actions of Moroni and Allah are *not* mundane, and such there is a higher threshold of skepticism in claims about their existence.

Crediting mundane actions to a guy who heals sick people with magic, drives out real demons out of people, has conversations with angels and demons, raises the dead, walks on water, shrivels fig trees, multiplies foodstuffs, and comes back to life somehow lowers the threshold?

Oh, please.

Of course we have evidence that the person is Jesus. We have many different documents specifically describing how the person is Jesus, with a certain consistency. The debate is over the extent to which those documents can be relied upon for simple biographical details.

We have evidence that the subject was Jesus. We know next to nothing of the author and creator of the cult.

In my experience, these debates are mostly about standards of evidence, and the thresholds required before one draws a conclusion. I buy the Occam's razor argument - I think it is far simpler that a real person existed who did many of the things attributed to Jesus than it would be for the entirety of Christianity to be based on a fiction.

But we have evidence of many many religions being started of fictions- all of the other ones. That does not violate Occam.

ETA: Why didn't the author of the gospels do so in or near Jesus' lifetime? Why did the cult not get started until almost two average lifespans later, if Jesus was a real person?

Particularly considering that there is nothing particularly implausible about most of Jesus' biography.

See above. I find most of it a stinking pile of legend. Only a meager handful of it is remotely plausible.

jjramsey

30th October 2006, 04:13 PM

Just as it would have been trivial for him to state that the power wasn't present.

Trivial, yes, but totally against Mark's agenda. Mark would have very good reasons to say outright that Jesus lacked the opportunity to heal. That would not reflect badly on Jesus. However, he has every reason not to say outright that Jesus lacked the power.

If I say I can bake no great pastry, except for a few cookies - is it becaues I lack the skill?

If the context doesn't indicate otherwise, it probably is because you lack the skill.

Mark provides appropriate context in the remaining portions that suggests it was a lack of trust on the part of the villages, and that it resulted in a lack of opportunity.

Mark certainly indicates a lack of trust, but he doesn't say that it let to a lack of opportunity.

Do you have another?

There is the brothers of Jesus thing that spans the Pauline letters, the Gospels, and Josephus. And Raskolnikov123 has put forth some familiar but good points.

30th October 2006, 04:54 PM

Trivial, yes, but totally against Mark's agenda. Mark would have very good reasons to say outright that Jesus lacked the opportunity to heal. That would not reflect badly on Jesus. However, he has every reason not to say outright that Jesus lacked the power.

If the context doesn't indicate otherwise, it probably is because you lack the skill.

Mark certainly indicates a lack of trust, but he doesn't say that it let to a lack of opportunity.

There is the brothers of Jesus thing that spans the Pauline letters, the Gospels, and Josephus. And Raskolnikov123 has put forth some familiar but good points.

OK. Nice discussion. Thanks for taking the time.

Unfortunately, your interpretation of the baking analogy demonstrates all I need to know.

jjramsey

30th October 2006, 05:14 PM

In my experience, these debates are mostly about standards of evidence, and the thresholds required before one draws a conclusion. I buy the Occam's razor argument - I think it is far simpler that a real person existed who did many of the things attributed to Jesus than it would be for the entirety of Christianity to be based on a fiction.

But we have evidence of many many religions being started of fictions- all of the other ones.

Are you including Islam, Zoroastrianism, or Mormonism in your examples of "many religions being started of fictions"? One can certainly make a case that that Mohammad and Zarathustra probably existed, but that the claims made for them are exaggerated. And of course, no one claims that Joseph Smith is a myth, including those that hardly accept his claims. If you are really using "many religions being started of fictions" in such a loose way, then your snipe at Raskolnikov123 is a thorough non sequitur, since one can likewise say that Christianity "started of fictions", but that Jesus was at least as likely to have existed as Mohammad or Zarathustra.

jjramsey

30th October 2006, 05:37 PM

ETA: Why didn't the author of the gospels do so in or near Jesus' lifetime? Why did the cult not get started until almost two average lifespans later, if Jesus was a real person?

Let's see. Say you are an apocalyptic cult in a largely illiterate world? When are you going to invest the time to write things down, or even to preserve what had been written (as would be the case with the Pauline epistles): when you think the world is going to end any time now, or when it becomes clear that the end is, ahem, a bit behind schedule and there might be at least a generation or two before the apocalypse actually comes?

Piscivore

30th October 2006, 08:43 PM

Are you including Islam, Zoroastrianism, or Mormonism in your examples of "many religions being started of fictions"?

All of them. From the Egyptians and Sumerians to the Raelians. At some point, someone made some s[rule 8] up to explain things they didn't understand and called it fact. They told other people, and those people believed it.

One can certainly make a case that that Mohammad and Zarathustra probably existed, but that the claims made for them are exaggerated.

Mohammed died a only couple of decades before someone wrote his story down. I don't know about Zarathustra.

ETA: To my understanding, it was seventy years before anyone wrote anything down about Jesus- nearly two lifetimes at that time, and what was written (we think) was a spare fraction of what it grew into.

And of course, no one claims that Joseph Smith is a myth, including those that hardly accept his claims.
That's because Smith is the author of the fiction, not the subject. Moroni and the American Jews were the subject, the mythology of which is very much in question.

Jesus is the subject of the gospels, not their author. We don't know crap about the author, other than the fact he existed.

If you are really using "many religions being started of fictions" in such a loose way, then your snipe at Raskolnikov123 is a thorough non sequitur, since one can likewise say that Christianity "started of fictions", but that Jesus was at least as likely to have existed as Mohammad or Zarathustra.

It wasn't meant as a snipe. He said "I think it is far simpler that a real person existed who did many of the things attributed to Jesus than it would be for the entirety of Christianity to be based on a fiction." Yet, the overwhelming majority of the deeds attributed to Christ were fictions, else magic existed for him. That isn't Occam to me.

As for Mohammed, Are there multiple contradictory versions of the Koran? I don't know, but I don't think there are.

Let's see. Say you are an apocalyptic cult in a largely illiterate world? When are you going to invest the time to write things down, or even to preserve what had been written (as would be the case with the Pauline epistles): when you think the world is going to end any time now, or when it becomes clear that the end is, ahem, a bit behind schedule and there might be at least a generation or two before the apocalypse actually comes?

Who said the author bought into it? Has no one ever taken advantage of the belief of others for their own gain? Especially in a culture and environment already primed and ready for the "end of the world"?

You already seem to think Jesus was a con man, why couldn't he be the con? As you say, we are talking about an illiterate culture- two lifetimes was an eternity ago, an author could make up any story he wanted and no one could check.

Piscivore

30th October 2006, 08:52 PM

Sorry, missed this somehow.

More on this.

It actually sounds like you are agreeing with me here. I am saying that Jesus was like a Joseph Smith or David Koresh. Just one in a less literate era where it took longer before things got written down.

That's the same thing I'm saying, only you are assuming Jesus was real and the source of the story. I'm wondering why you are ignoring the author.

Imagine a Joseph Smith who didn't write anything down, conveying things verbally to his followers, who then try to write things down years later after Smith was murdered.

I don't have to imagine, that is the Mohammed scenario. I haven't read the Koran- does Mohammed have a severe personality disorder like the Jesus of the gospels?

That might seem implausible to you in a 19th century America with literacy rates over 90%, but it seems extremely plausible to me in almost entirely illiterate first century Palestine.

I think it is highly plausible in any century. I also think it is plausible that people can make stuff up for personal gain in any century.

I'm also skeptical of your estimation of the American literacy rate in that era, but that's off topic.

Raskolnikov123

31st October 2006, 07:46 AM

The crux of this debate is that Piscivore thinks there was "one author", yet he refuses to address head on the evidence he possess for this, or the criteria with which one can determine whether sources are dependent or independent. This is quite important, as secular Biblical historians believe there about a dozen different new testament authors, often working independently from each other. If you want to argue that they are completely wrong about this, fine, but I think you can't simply brush aside the historical consensus without at least presenting an *argument* against it.

I see the same thing in Pipeline's brief comment, a statement that you can't use the Bible to prove the Bible, indicating that he believes it is a document with a single author, rather than a collection of dozens of different documents that currently are collected within a single binding. Its like arguing that you can't use the federalist papers to corroborate Madison's notes from the Constitutional convention simply because you happen to have them bound together in the same book.

As such, the views of JJ and myself, that Jesus probably existed, are based on knowledge of that historical consensus and some of the historical scholarship around sourcing and interpretation. The current consensus:

1) Mark is the oldest Gospel, and probably the most historically accurate. It is usually dated to around 65-70 AD.
2) Matthew and Luke both used Mark as a source
3) Matthew and Luke both had access to a second source, now lost to history, known as "Q" - a sayings Gospel that contains things like the Sermon on the Mount.
4) Matthew and Luke both had other source material (or fabrications) containing material not found in Mark and Q, unique to each other. These sources are referred to as M and L. Both are dated to around 80 AD.
5) John was written independent from any of the above sources. It is usually regarded as the newest Gospel.
6) The (noncanonical) Gospel of Thomas was written around the same time as the other Gospels, and was independent of all of them.
7) The authentic Pauline letters predate any of the above texts, except *possibly* Q and Thomas. The Pauline letters were unfamiliar to most of the above sources.
8) The Book of Acts and the Gospel of Luke have the same author.
9) It is not believed that any of the Gospels were written by anyone with firsthand experience with Jesus, except *maybe* the Gospel of Thomas (it is the only one that claims to have a disciple as the author).

In order to have a serious discussion about this, one needs to have read and be familiar with the above documents, and the arguments around their dating, authorship, and independence or dependence as sources.

Given familiarity with the above, the claim about a common fictional source to all of them has a very tough row to hoe. Fictionalization requires that either:

1) Historians are completely wrong about the independence of the sources.

and/or

2) They are all commonly dependent on some hypothetical fictional proto-source that was vast enough and distributed widely enough to be a source for all/most of the stories and theology contained in all of those texts, yet never get a single mention in any of those sources, and never be seen by any early church figures who described a lot of other sources that have been lost to time. Additionally, this proto-source, as influential as it must have been, must also have been simultaneously unconvincing or boring, requiring subsequent authors to alter it significantly and randomly, creating a false appearance of textual independence for all of the early Christian texts.

To me, it just seems far more likely that there was a real guy here, even if many of the biographical details are exaggerated or fictionalized.

Raskolnikov123

31st October 2006, 08:17 AM

The fact that there are source documents and they were added onto in different ways says nothing about the authenticity of the central character in those source documents.

But that isn't what the historians are arguing. You seem to be unfamiliar with the arguments for independent authorship. Yes, Matthew and Luke "added on to" Mark, but John didn't, and has many of the same biographical details. Thomas and Q are regarded as independent, but have a lot of sayings in common, but in a very different sequence (unlike Matthew and Luke which use Q and generally keep the same sequence of sayings).

The texts are *not* regarded by any serious historian, to my knowledge, as being rooted in a lost document of single authorship. If you want to claim that they are, let's see your evidence.

The original author might not have been concerned with those prophecies, but if the later writers expanding the myth were concerned with them they would have to account for it, and each did in his own way.

You seem to be assuming that these gospel authors were working in a vaccuum, but you state in the beginning of the post I'm quoting this was not the case.

No, a partial vacuum. My previous post should explain which authors are regarded as being familiar with which texts. Again, you are speculating about an "original author" for which you have provided no evidence, and for which you have ignored centuries of historical scholarship.

Joseph Smith is not the subject of the Book of Mormon. You are confusing the author with the subject, which I think is your whole problem here. Jesus did not write his own story, and I don't know of anyone who claims he did. That there was an author is indisputable. Since that author is not and does not claim to be Jesus, we can not infer Jesus' existance from the author's existence.

That is a trivial distinction as far as authorship was concerned, and it again shows an ignorance of the historical scholarship around authorship. If we believed there was one common author, then fictionalization would be more likely. But with multiple independent attestations (based on evidence and arguments that rules out simply adding on new information for older sources in most cases). Have you even read the Gospels of Mark and John? I don't see how anyone can have read both and believe that either author couuld have been remotely familiar with the other's work, or that they could have had a textual or oral source in common.

As I understand it, The "Q" source is thought to be mostly philosphy, which would leave Mark as the "single source" of the biography.

You ignore the Gospel of John, and the same cast of characters existing between the authentic Pauline letters and the Gospels of John and Mark. Your early arguments dismissing that were once again based on your historically naive views of dependent authorship.

You also ignore commonalities between Thomas and Q. Sayings are a relatively important part of the biography of a preacher, don't you think?

Crediting mundane actions to a guy who heals sick people with magic, drives out real demons out of people, has conversations with angels and demons, raises the dead, walks on water, shrivels fig trees, multiplies foodstuffs, and comes back to life somehow lowers the threshold?

1) Most of the actions in the Gospels *are* mundane. Even most of the miracles are mundane (and thus not really miracles), and parallels can be witnessed today in alternative medicine clinics and faith healing tents, or a pentacostal tent meeting. Someone seeing a laying on of hands, a yelling of "you are healed" and the person walks away believing they are healed, is unfortunately quite commonplace. There have always been people who claimed to have such powers, and people who believed them. So yes, I see a lot that is mundane and plausible in the Gospels.

2) And I would think it obvious that a lower threshold for belief in existence of a person with a mundane biography punctuated with miracle claims is far more likely than a claim about the existence of a divine being is only seen by one person in private. After all, do you doubt the existence of Uri Gellar, The Majareeshi, or Sylvia Browne as much as you doubt the existence of God, Moroni, or Ahura Mazda? Based on your logic, if we didn't have hard evidence of their existence, and only had a dozen different, mostly independent, documents describing their actions written by believers, you would deem it just as improbable that they existed.

But we have evidence of many many religions being started of fictions- all of the other ones. That does not violate Occam.

But all the ones we know of had a real person at the center - a charismatic leader. You agree that there is one at the heart of Christianity. If it isn't Jesus, who is it? It seems you ignoring the elephant in the living room if you deem it more likely that the charismatic was someone other than the person all of the documents *claim* to have inspired them. Gosh, that Barnabas of Tyre is one hell of a speaker when he talks about how wonderful Jesus was. Lets all write about Jesus and completely ignore the guy that converted us and keeps us going to church every sunday. This person would have to have been more influential than Paul, yet somehow completely invisible. And you consider this dude a more plausible "original source" than Jesus?

ETA: Why didn't the author of the gospels do so in or near Jesus' lifetime? Why did the cult not get started until almost two average lifespans later, if Jesus was a real person?

This is what historians call "presentism", the projection of current cultural norms onto past peoples. I think it is preposterous to presume current literacy and authorship behavior onto a largely illiterate culture with no printing presses and where writing materials were extremely expensive. You might as well ask why Pontius Pilate never wrote his memoirs and appear on Larry King.

Raskolnikov123

31st October 2006, 08:23 AM

I'm also skeptical of your estimation of the American literacy rate in that era, but that's off topic.

American literacy rates broke 90% around the time of the American Revolution. Its off topic, but your ignorance of literacy differences does explain why you seem to think Jesus and his followers should have struck a publishing deal with Viking Press in his lifetime.

Piscivore

31st October 2006, 08:42 AM

The crux of this debate is that Piscivore thinks there was "one author", yet he refuses to address head on the evidence he possess for this, or the criteria with which one can determine whether sources are dependent or independent. This is quite important, as secular Biblical historians believe there about a dozen different new testament authors, often working independently from each other. If you want to argue that they are completely wrong about this, fine, but I think you can't simply brush aside the historical consensus without at least presenting an *argument* against it.

I think you are misunderstanding me. I never said their was "one author", just that there was at least one, and that none of them were Jesus himself. AFAIK, no one claims that, and no one thinks that he was. And when I'm talking about an "author" above, I'm speaking only of Mark, as you say, "the oldest gospel", the source of the biographical details.

As such, the views of JJ and myself, that Jesus probably existed, are based on knowledge of that historical consensus and some of the historical scholarship around sourcing and interpretation. The current consensus:

1) Mark is the oldest Gospel, and probably the most historically accurate. It is usually dated to around 65-70 AD.
2) Matthew and Luke both used Mark as a source
3) Matthew and Luke both had access to a second source, now lost to history, known as "Q" - a sayings Gospel that contains things like the Sermon on the Mount.
4) Matthew and Luke both had other source material (or fabrications) containing material not found in Mark and Q, unique to each other. These sources are referred to as M and L. Both are dated to around 80 AD.
5) John was written independent from any of the above sources. It is usually regarded as the newest Gospel.
6) The (noncanonical) Gospel of Thomas was written around the same time as the other Gospels, and was independent of all of them.
7) The authentic Pauline letters predate any of the above texts, except *possibly* Q and Thomas. The Pauline letters were unfamiliar to most of the above sources.
8) The Book of Acts and the Gospel of Luke have the same author.
9) It is not believed that any of the Gospels were written by anyone with firsthand experience with Jesus, except *maybe* the Gospel of Thomas (it is the only one that claims to have a disciple as the author).

Except for the "probably the most historically accurate" bit I disagree with none of that. If I do somehow unintentionally, please show me.

None of those facts contradict the position that "Jesus" is a fabricated composite character, possibly of several contemporary "prophets" of the time.

Given familiarity with the above, the claim about a common fictional source to all of them has a very tough row to hoe.

I didn't say that.

Fictionalization requires that either:

1) Historians are completely wrong about the independence of the sources.

People can, and do, write their own stories about characters they only hear about. It is your own point that literacy was low in the region and era in question, which means stories would be first tranmitted orally.

and/or

2) They are all commonly dependent on some hypothetical fictional proto-source that was vast enough and distributed widely enough to be a source for all/most of the stories and theology contained in all of those texts,

The exact same criteria have to apply if they were historical accounts as well. Remember, none of them were contemporary.

yet never get a single mention in any of those sources,

"This is the story of Jesus the Christ, which I didst crib from tales told to me by Petros the Fishmonger." :)

Does Matthew say his source was Mark and "Q"? This criticism also applies if they are historical accounts.

and never be seen by any early church figures who described a lot of other sources that have been lost to time.
Oral stories wouldn't be "seen", and absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Additionally, this proto-source, as influential as it must have been, must also have been simultaneously unconvincing or boring, requiring subsequent authors to alter it significantly and randomly, creating a false appearance of textual independence for all of the early Christian texts.

"Unconvincing and boring" are not the only reason stories are added to or altered.

To me, it just seems far more likely that there was a real guy here, even if many of the biographical details are exaggerated or fictionalized.

Many? Almost all.

drkitten

31st October 2006, 08:57 AM

The exact same criteria have to apply if they were historical accounts as well. Remember, none of them were contemporary.

Except that if the accounts were historical, then there's an obvious candidate for the ur-source; the historical events themselves, which would have been widely witnessed and re-told.

The basic problem -- a fictional account implies a creator-of-fiction. GIven the similarity between the various gospel narratives, it also implies a single ur-source. (Or to put it another way -- if people were making up stories about "characters they only hear about," then where did they all hear about those characters?)

I assume you're not going to suggest that Mark and Luke independently invented the story of Jesus the Christ. Ditto Q, M, Thomas, and the Pauline letters. But if they didn't invent it independently, then they shared a common source. But if there were a single-source tale that they shared, -- and it was widespread enough that all these people knew it --- then that raises the question: who wrote it -- and why hasn't it survived?

Piscivore

31st October 2006, 08:59 AM

But all the ones we know of had a real person at the center - a charismatic leader. You agree that there is one at the heart of Christianity. If it isn't Jesus, who is it? It seems you ignoring the elephant in the living room if you deem it more likely that the charismatic was someone other than the person all of the documents *claim* to have inspired them. Gosh, that Barnabas of Tyre is one hell of a speaker when he talks about how wonderful Jesus was. Lets all write about Jesus and completely ignore the guy that converted us and keeps us going to church every sunday. This person would have to have been more influential than Paul, yet somehow completely invisible. And you consider this dude a more plausible "original source" than Jesus?

What is wrong with Paul? He's influential, literate, motivated. His letters promoting the religion predate the stories "documenting" the central character. Almost like he was spreading this story around before it was written down.

This is what historians call "presentism", the projection of current cultural norms onto past peoples. I think it is preposterous to presume current literacy and authorship behavior onto a largely illiterate culture with no printing presses and where writing materials were extremely expensive. You might as well ask why Pontius Pilate never wrote his memoirs and appear on Larry King.

My point was that these stories were floating around for sixty years as oral legend before being written, yet you expect them to remain historically accurate. You also seem to think that the only source for someone's written account is another written account.

Piscivore

31st October 2006, 09:01 AM

American literacy rates broke 90% around the time of the American Revolution. Its off topic, but your ignorance of literacy differences does explain why you seem to think Jesus and his followers should have struck a publishing deal with Viking Press in his lifetime.

I wouldn't have guessed that. Thanks.

ETA: I'm not really sure why you think since I thought that Americans of Joseph Smith's day were less literate than they actually were that I should think that 1st Century Palestinians would be more literate.

drkitten

31st October 2006, 09:07 AM

What is wrong with Paul? He's influential, literate, motivated. His letters promoting the religion predate the stories "documenting" the central character.

Except that this theory contradicts one of the "established" results of scholarship; that the writers of the Gospels were not familiar with the Pauline letters. (I think that's #7 in the above list.)

Out of everyone living in the first century AD, Paul of Tarsus is one of the few people that scholars can comfortably say did not make up the myth of Jesus.

Piscivore

31st October 2006, 09:15 AM

Except that this theory contradicts one of the "established" results of scholarship; that the writers of the Gospels were not familiar with the Pauline letters. (I think that's #7 in the above list.)

Why should they have been?

Out of everyone living in the first century AD, Paul of Tarsus is one of the few people that scholars can comfortably say did not make up the myth of Jesus.

Why?

drkitten

31st October 2006, 09:31 AM

Why should they have been?

There are too many common elements between apparently "independent" sources -- e.g., Mark, Q, Thomas, and the Pauline letters -- for there to be no common source(s) that they shared, whether from first-hand observation of events, oral tradition, or fictional narratives. If you and I sit down to write stories, the odds against us simply having our main characters have the same name are astronomical.

Therefore, if the Jesus-story is fictional, it derives from a source that all four of the above listed "authors" had access to. And if it is indeed fictional, it derives from a mythologizer who was, in the words above, "someone other than the person all of the documents *claim* to have inspired them," someone who "is one hell of a speaker when he talks about how wonderful Jesus was. Lets all write about Jesus and completely ignore the guy that converted us and keeps us going to church every sunday. This person would have to have been more influential than Paul, yet somehow completely invisible."

You suggested that Paul himself might have been that "one hell of a speaker."

But if so, then you're explicitly suggesting that Mark, Q, and Thomas were influenced by Paul.

Unfortunately, Mark, Q, and Thomas did not know know Paul (unless you want to argue that #7 above is wrong, in which case you have several centuries of Biblical analysis to contend with). So he couldn't have been the person that influenced, inspired, and converted them.

Why?

Because too many of our primary sources are unaware of Paul and his writings. It's almost the intellectual equivalent of an alibi -- too much of the writing happened while he was demonstrably not in the area of influence.

The same argument applies for Mark, Thomas, and the author(s) of Q. We can't rule out an unnamed individual (Barnabas, son of Matthias the tinker, son of Sir Not-Appearing-in-this-Story), nor perhaps the idea that another of the disciples (Peter?) managed to lay this huge line out that everyone else bought. But whoever laid down the line wasn't Paul -- because Mark and Q didn't know what Paul was saying....

Piscivore

31st October 2006, 09:56 AM

Therefore, if the Jesus-story is fictional, it derives from a source that all four of the above listed "authors" had access to. And if it is indeed fictional, it derives from a mythologizer who was, in the words above, "someone other than the person all of the documents *claim* to have inspired them," someone who "is one hell of a speaker when he talks about how wonderful Jesus was. Lets all write about Jesus and completely ignore the guy that converted us and keeps us going to church every sunday. This person would have to have been more influential than Paul, yet somehow completely invisible."

But since none of the gospel writers were contemporaries of Jesus there was some unknown person that converted them, wasn't there? And why does this person have to be particularly charismatic? We are talking oral transmission, that's friend of a friend.

ETA: Urban legends don't get spread with a header listing the people through which the story comes, why should we expect that here?

You suggested that Paul himself might have been that "one hell of a speaker."

But if so, then you're explicitly suggesting that Mark, Q, and Thomas were influenced by Paul.

Unfortunately, Mark, Q, and Thomas did not know know Paul (unless you want to argue that #7 above is wrong, in which case you have several centuries of Biblical analysis to contend with). So he couldn't have been the person that influenced, inspired, and converted them.

Because too many of our primary sources are unaware of Paul and his writings. It's almost the intellectual equivalent of an alibi -- too much of the writing happened while he was demonstrably not in the area of influence.

Again, why did they have to get it first hand?

The same argument applies for Mark, Thomas, and the author(s) of Q. We can't rule out an unnamed individual (Barnabas, son of Matthias the tinker, son of Sir Not-Appearing-in-this-Story), nor perhaps the idea that another of the disciples (Peter?) managed to lay this huge line out that everyone else bought. But whoever laid down the line wasn't Paul -- because Mark and Q didn't know what Paul was saying....

Is it just that they didn't know the content of the letters, or is there something else?

If it isn't Paul, what about Peter?

Raskolnikov123

31st October 2006, 10:14 AM

I think you are misunderstanding me. I never said their was "one author", just that there was at least one, and that none of them were Jesus himself. AFAIK, no one claims that, and no one thinks that he was. And when I'm talking about an "author" above, I'm speaking only of Mark, as you say, "the oldest gospel", the source of the biographical details.

That was not at all clear from your frequent mention of "the author" of the Gospels. But its a good clarification.

None of those facts contradict the position that "Jesus" is a fabricated composite character, possibly of several contemporary "prophets" of the time.

They make it extremely hard. Once you take those arguments about sourcing, you have to explain how a fabrication can:

1) simultaneously result in a certain consistency about mundane biographical details but have gross inconsistency regarding supernatural claims.

2) Have no discernable influence on the structure and phrasing of documents that are based on the original fiction.

3) Not be mentioned in any of the sources we do have, including early Christian writings that describe noncanonical texts.

Let me clear: I am not ruling out the possibility of a fiction. An orchestrated web of lies is always a possibility, which is why conspiracy theories can never be completely disproven - you just posit that the source for any contradictory claim is part of the conspriacy. My point is that with independent sourcing, a common fabrication becomes a far less likely explanation than a real historical person.

I didn't say that. [with regards to a common fictional source]

Then I am unclear what you *are* saying. The commonalities between the sources in attributing biographical details and sayings to Jesus are so strong that they obviously can't be due to chance. A real person and real events are one explanation for the commonalities. If your rule that out, as you seem to do, the only thing I see left is a common fictional source for all of the different documents. But now you say that isn't what you are saying. So what is left? What's your theory?

Does Matthew say his source was Mark and "Q"? This criticism also applies if they are historical accounts.

The existence of Q can be discerned through textual analysis. Very similar phrasing between the two books, ane the sayings follow a similar sequence. I am *not* arguing that the authors would have been obliged to cite a source. I am instead saying that for you to make a plausible empirical claim that such a source existed, you need to have evidence either from citing texts that refer to the source, or from textual analysis ala the Q theory. You have provided neither.

People can, and do, write their own stories about characters they only hear about. It is your own point that literacy was low in the region and era in question, which means stories would be first tranmitted orally.

Yes, but you ignore the patterns to the continuities and discontinuities between the texts. "Good stories" usually catch on via merit. But it is the "good stories" in the Gospels that seem to be unique to each source (the Lazarus story is unique to John, for instance). Its the boring, mundane details that seem to be consistent across texts: a fondness for agricultural parables, roots in Nazareth, association with John the Baptist, being killed during Passover week, a message of Jewish apocalypticism, the names of his disciples, the names of some members of his immediate family.

Thats the type of pattern one gets when fictions are being attributed to real people and events (George washington and the cherry tree, for instance). It isn't the pattern one gets out of an original complete fiction, where what you instead see is commonality in *theme* and *character* (Arthurian Legends, Robin Hood, Paul Bunyan, Brer Rabbit, etc.)

Oral stories wouldn't be "seen", and absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

True, but it still means you have zero evidence for your claims of common fictional sourcing. Usually that is a position that skeptics find uncomfortable as a foundation from which to make claims.

What is wrong with Paul? He's influential, literate, motivated. His letters promoting the religion predate the stories "documenting" the central character. Almost like he was spreading this story around before it was written down.

Thats what he *was* doing. Here are the problems with Paul as the "ultimate" source:

1) Read Paul's letters. Several of them (Galatians, 1st Corinthians most notably) are in response to one of his churches coming into contact with a competing Christian sect, and he is arguing why his views should take precedence. Similarly, there is evidence of the early Christian schism over circumcision and compliance with the Jewish law. Its hard to argue for him as the ultimate source when Paul himself is acknowledging the existence of competing sources without denying the legitimacy of their claims to speak for Jesus. Paul acknowledges James as Jesus' brother, and Peter as one of Jesus' followers, even as he argues against them, and makes no claim to primacy *over* them. Notice how different this is from Mohammed and Joseph Smith (and Moses for that matter), who asserted a monopoly on receiving and interpreting divine messages. In contrast, Paul *knows* that James and Peter have primacy in many ways over him, so he is careful in not denouncing them, and instead talks about his personal visions of Jesus. The latter is similar to Smith and Mohammed, but the former is not. That smacks of someone who is a Johnny-come-lately to the religion, careful not to piss off the hierarchy *too* much. Additionally, we have other historical documents that confirm the existence of more Jewish-oriented Christian sects (Google the Ebionites).

2) There are inconsistencies between Mark, the earliest Gospel, and the Pauline letters, in terms of message. Mark is much more descriptive, rather circumspect about theology, whereas Paul dives into theology headfirst. But the letters predate Mark by a couple decades. That would be very odd if Mark was an offshoot from Paul's ministry rather than a source that was created independent from it (Christian tradition says Mark was Peter's secretary, which seems plausible given the prominent role Peter has in the book - he is much diminished in John, but it certainly isn't conclusive).

3) Thomas is gnostic, and implies a theology very different from that of Paul. Very hard to argue that its source was rooted in Paul rather than something, or someone, who predates Paul.

4) Matthew emphasizes Jesus Jewishness, drawing parallels with Moses and positing Jesus as an expert on Jewish Law. Paul wanted to throw Jewish law out the window. So again, Matthew was off-message, but curiously *on*-message with regard to one of the Christian sects that Paul is in opposition to (Matthew was indeed the only Gospel accepted by the Ebionites). Again, hard to argue that it is rooted in Paul.

My point was that these stories were floating around for sixty years as oral legend before being written, yet you expect them to remain historically accurate. You also seem to think that the only source for someone's written account is another written account.

I expect neither.

Piscivore

31st October 2006, 10:52 AM

They make it extremely hard. Once you take those arguments about sourcing, you have to explain how a fabrication can:

1) simultaneously result in a certain consistency about mundane biographical details but have gross inconsistency regarding supernatural claims.

Because the supernatural claims were added by the people that later separately expanded the story.

2) Have no discernable influence on the structure and phrasing of documents that are based on the original fiction.

Each author that is recording the oral tradition is writing in his own "voice."

3) Not be mentioned in any of the sources we do have, including early Christian writings that describe noncanonical texts.

It isn't common for people retelling an oral legend to say from whom they heard it.

Let me clear: I am not ruling out the possibility of a fiction. An orchestrated web of lies is always a possibility, which is why conspiracy theories can never be completely disproven - you just posit that the source for any contradictory claim is part of the conspriacy. My point is that with independent sourcing, a common fabrication becomes a far less likely explanation than a real historical person.

It doesn't require an orchestrated web of lies, it only takes one that gets repeated.

The only "author" required is some guy ca. 45 AD starting a legend about this preacher his dad knew from two towns over that said we shouldn't be dicks to each other anymore.

[with regards to a common fictional source]

Then I am unclear what you *are* saying. The commonalities between the sources in attributing biographical details and sayings to Jesus are so strong that they obviously can't be due to chance. A real person and real events are one explanation for the commonalities. If your rule that out, as you seem to do, the only thing I see left is a common fictional source for all of the different documents. But now you say that isn't what you are saying. So what is left? What's your theory?

I'm saying that not all the documents' creators had first hand access to the fictional source, and that it was possible that the original fictional source was added to and expanded.

Let's say I go back in time and stand in the marketplace in 25 BC, and I tell the story of "Star Wars"- with the characters and events reframed to be plausible for the region- to the local populous. If it catches on, wouldn't we expect the story to spread out, mutate, then get refined into a new story as the different versions collide and are rectifed with each other, until by the time it is written down a generation (or two- what was the average life expectancy back then?) later, some of the details are the same as the original, while some of the mutations are accepted as "real" parts of the story, and other legitimate details are lost? Wouldn't some of the tellers recast the characters with traits of people they know? Might not other minor local legends be appended?

None of this requires a conspiricy, just a single lie and normal human behaviour.

The existence of Q can be discerned through textual analysis. Very similar phrasing between the two books, ane the sayings follow a similar sequence. I am *not* arguing that the authors would have been obliged to cite a source. I am instead saying that for you to make a plausible empirical claim that such a source existed, you need to have evidence either from citing texts that refer to the source, or from textual analysis ala the Q theory. You have provided neither.

The "Q" document had to come from somewhere. I'm not saying I know where, but if Jesus didn't write down his own words, his own philosophy, someone else did, and given that, and that we don't have the "Q" document, how can we know it was originally Jesus' philosophy?

ETA: Let me clarify- I'm not saying that "Q" and Mark had the same source. For all we know, "Q" was entirely unrelated philosophy from some other guy that got added to the Jesus myth.

Yes, but you ignore the patterns to the continuities and discontinuities between the texts. "Good stories" usually catch on via merit. But it is the "good stories" in the Gospels that seem to be unique to each source (the Lazarus story is unique to John, for instance). Its the boring, mundane details that seem to be consistent across texts: a fondness for agricultural parables, roots in Nazareth, association with John the Baptist, being killed during Passover week, a message of Jewish apocalypticism, the names of his disciples, the names of some members of his immediate family.

I guess we have a misunderstanding on what is a mundane detail. What you describe above is a basic character outline.

Thats the type of pattern one gets when fictions are being attributed to real people and events (George washington and the cherry tree, for instance). It isn't the pattern one gets out of an original complete fiction, where what you instead see is commonality in *theme* and *character* (Arthurian Legends, Robin Hood, Paul Bunyan, Brer Rabbit, etc.)

King Arthur is a great example. We have a lot of agreement in the stories about where Arthur lived, with whom he associated, who his family was, how and where he died. There is far more commonality between the Jesus and Aurthur stories than Jesus and Washington.

True, but it still means you have zero evidence for your claims of common fictional sourcing. Usually that is a position that skeptics find uncomfortable as a foundation from which to make claims.

I'm not quite making a claim, but your point is taken.

Thats what he *was* doing. Here are the problems with Paul as the "ultimate" source:

Good info, thanks.

Raskolnikov123

31st October 2006, 10:57 AM

[But since none of the gospel writers were contemporaries of Jesus there was some unknown person that converted them, wasn't there? And why does this person have to be particularly charismatic? We are talking oral transmission, that's friend of a friend.

The question is what started all this. Every modern religious movement that we can see, that has *any* success, is centered around a charismatic leader. There is a cult of personality. Jim Jones. Hubbard. Smith. Rael. The Mahareeshi. Reverend Moon. William Miller, etc. Same thing with the ancient religions about which we have more historical documentation, such as Mohammed and the Buddha.

Oral transmission was extremely dependent on charisma. How the hell do you get people to listen to you if you are a boring speaker. The friend-of-a-friend network is how conversions spread, but at the heart there always seems to be a charismatic, and that person is always identified as the church founder, or prophet, or leader. Eventually you reach a point where you have enough followers, or a good recruitment machine, or you simply outbreed the competition, and the leader isn't all that important for religious success.

ETA: Urban legends don't get spread with a header listing the people through which the story comes, why should we expect that here?

Name a religion for which we have good documentation about origins where the charismatic figure somehow never managed to get the credit, and fell into obscurity.

Again, why did they have to get it first hand?

They didn't. The problem, however, is that their stories are so different from that of Paul that it is hard to argue that they got it from him at all, whether 2nd, 3rd or 4th hand. Again, this comes back to method - how do you determine whether sources are dependent or independent of each other? I will certainly admit that this isn't an exact science, but there are centuries of historical scholarship that have concluded, based on textual and historical evidence, that the Pauline letters are independent from most of the other sources (Luke is always a possible exception here, as Luke was possibly one of Paul's followers). Once you have independent sources, a common fiction becomes far less likely.

Is it just that they didn't know the content of the letters, or is there something else?

In many cases, they are off-message with regard to Paul's theology and teachings. Paul's letters are mostly about theology and law, not about Jesus. the Gospels, in contrast, are almost entirely about Jesus, with very little of Paul's theology and law evidenced within. For example, given Paul's annoyance with Jewish cultural laws, you would think any fiction that he pushed would have Jesus criticizng circumcision. But there ain't no such thing. As such, there is no evidence for dependency.

If it isn't Paul, what about Peter?

Why not Sir-Not-Appearing-in-this-Film? My point is that you are off into the realm of conjecture, ignoring the elephant in the living room, that all of the damned documents say that the charismatic leader at the heart of the religion was Jesus.

We probably don't have any surviving documents from Peter (The letters from Peter in the NT are probable forgeries), and Peter's theological views are hard to discern in the other texts (Paul has him as a sort of fence-straddler) so there isn't much we can do to test that notion. But nor is there any evidence for it. It's conjecture.