Did Jesus the Man Exist?
Contrarius
Many people who don't believe in the divinity of Jesus (the miracles, the
resurrection, etc.) seem to agree with the Christians that Jesus existed as
a historical figure. The secular media, while leaving the divinity question
open, actively promote the idea that there was an historical Jesus.
Others, like Earl Doherty and George Wells, contend that the whole thing was
a fiction from start to finish. They say that although a "Jesus" was
mentioned in Q and Thomas, he was most likely an amalgam of the preachers
and philosophers who wandered Galilee during the first century. Or a
mythical figure derived from the Wisdom stories in the Talmud. They both
suggest that Paul's urban Christians believed in a Christ who lived in only
a spiritual realm similar to that inhabited by the Greek gods, the rural
Jesus and Paul's Jerusalem Christ finally merging in the gospel of Mark,
written in about 70 AD.
Well, which is it? Aside from phrases (Jesus said...) used to introduce
sayings in Q and Thomas, I can't seem to find any evidence of Jesus'
earthly existence until Mark's gospel. In his first century epistles, Paul
makes no connection between his Christ and any historical time or place.
There was certainly no Roman or Jewish confirmation. And no archeological
evidence. Despite all that, the historicity of Jesus Christ seems to be
widely accepted in non-Christian circles.
How come? With such a total absence of evidence, why are non-Christians so
willing to go along with Christian assumptions? Are they just trying to be
agreeable?
--
Contrarius
contr...@hotmail.com
Aaron Boyden
> How come? With such a total absence of evidence, why are non-Christians so
> willing to go along with Christian assumptions? Are they just trying to be
> agreeable?
It's a good question. I haven't studied the primary sources extensively
myself, and to be honest haven't even read Wells (I've gotten the
Wellsian argument indirectly, from Michael Martin's _The Case Against
Christianity_ and from a classics professor I knew at the University of
Minnesota, and from some Christian writers who have tried to argue
against it), but what I've heard about the evidence from both the
Wellsians and their critics has made me think Wells has a pretty good
case. Maybe the particular critics I've encountered are just inept, but
I doubt that's all there is to it; the Wells argument at least deserves
more attention than it has gotten.
--
Aaron Boyden
"I may have done this and that for sufferers; but always I seemed to
have done better when I learned to feel better joys."
-Thus spoke Zarathustra
Actuary X
> Did Jesus exist? Or was he an urban legend?
A myth, certainly, but the term "urban legand"
is probably not appropriate, and is generally
not applied to religious stories.
> How come? With such a total absence of evidence, why are
> non-Christians so willing to go along with Christian
> assumptions? Are they just trying to be agreeable?
Maybe because, to non-Christians, the existence or not
of Jesus is not very important? They go along
with the Santa Claus thing, so what the heck.
--
"...Jesus was almost certainly not 'of Nazareth'. An
overwhelming body of evidence indicates that Nazareth
did not exist in biblical times. The town is unlikely
to have appeared before the third century."
[Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln, _The Messianic Legacy_]
Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Before you buy.
Russell Turpin
> Well, which is it? Aside from phrases (Jesus said...) used
> to introduce sayings in Q and Thomas, I can't seem to find
> any evidence of Jesus' earthly existence until Mark's gospel.
> In his first century epistles, Paul makes no connection
> between his Christ and any historical time or place. There
> was certainly no Roman or Jewish confirmation. And no
> archeological evidence. Despite all that, the historicity of
> Jesus Christ seems to be widely accepted in non-Christian
> circles.
What tends to be forgotten -- on both sides of this issue --
is the general paucity of written documentation for most of
ancient history, as compared to modern times. While
Contrarius's points are well taken, and serve to scope the
probability that Jesus the man ever existed, the same is
true for many famous figures from the same time, many of
whom are known only from indirect reference in a text or two, or
whose existence is inferred from their consequence and
reputation in subsequent times. To see how bad this is, try
something simple, like tracing the rulers of England back
to when the Romans left.
Nonetheless, we have an affinity for players in our history,
and so historians do their best to figure out who these
players are, knowing full well that they are sometimes
guessing, and are sometimes wrong. Did Jesus the man exist?
That is much like asking whether Agamemnon existed? Such
questions have a simple answer -- "maybe" -- and a more
complex answer -- "how much does he have to be like the
stories that are told about him to count as THE Agamemnon?"
Schliemann discovered Troy, and someone's death mask behind
the Lion Gates of Mycenae. Is that evidence for Agamemnon?
Or do you want the answer in probabilities? We certainly
have more evidence for most Americans of the last century
than we do for most figures of ancient history. And Jesus?
I suspect it is more likely he existed than Solomon. Maybe
even more likely that he existed than Agamemnon. Of course,
it is even more likely that Mycenae existed and had some
kings, even if Homer's Agamemnon was a composition of two
or three of them. But that kind of history is complex, and
we do like our main characters.
Russell
Jason Lee Quinn
>
> Did Jesus exist? Or was he an urban legend?
>
> resurrection, etc.) seem to agree with the Christians that Jesus existed as
> a historical figure. The secular media, while leaving the divinity question
> open, actively promote the idea that there was an historical Jesus.
>
>
> --
> Contrarius
> contr...@hotmail.com
This is a tough one. Wither there actually was a historical Jesus will
probably never be proven one way or another.
I tend to believe that Jesus probably did exist. That he was an actual
person despite the fact that I am an atheist. I reason that the founders
of religions are normally well-known while they live. And so when they
die, they are well-remembered. For example: Mohammed, Siddhartha
Gautama, Rev. Sun Myung Moon, L. Ron Hubbard, David Koresh. I could cite
some more examples too. I find it much more plausible that a person
named Jesus existed than a massive conspiracy to invent him took place.
It takes a charismatic person to start a religion. Something to cause
people to follow them. Jesus was probably just that -- very charismatic
and he probably preached with intense emotion. Perhaps because he
actually believed what he was saying was true or perhaps he was just a
fraud. Who knows?
Given that Jesus existed, the question is "Was he human or the son of
God?" If he is the son of God, we should believe the stories of his
miracles. But the bottom line is all rational thinking people must
conclude that miracles don't happen. The laws of physics are what they
are (insert high-level meta-physical discussion). This is how a miracle
should be defined -- as nature not working in accordance with
*well-understood* laws of physics, e.g. an apple falling upwards. When a
person claims that because their kid survived a car accident it must be
a miracle, they are abusing the word and deluding themselves.
As anyone who has been to a magic show knows that despite
appearances, there is always a trick or an illusion caused by
misunderstanding. So the stories of Jesus walking on water and turning
water into wine are utter bullcrap. Wither this are based on illusions
that people actually witnessed or are just the result of the "Paul
Bunyan" effect is unknowable.
jason
Larry W Loen
>
> Did Jesus exist? Or was he an urban legend?
>
[snip]
> Others, like Earl Doherty and George Wells, contend that the whole thing was
> a fiction from start to finish. They say that although a "Jesus" was
> mentioned in Q and Thomas, he was most likely an amalgam of the preachers
> and philosophers who wandered Galilee during the first century. Or a
> mythical figure derived from the Wisdom stories in the Talmud. They both
> suggest that Paul's urban Christians believed in a Christ who lived in only
> a spiritual realm similar to that inhabited by the Greek gods, the rural
> Jesus and Paul's Jerusalem Christ finally merging in the gospel of Mark,
> written in about 70 AD.
>
It's been a while since I've read a Bible, but I think Paul pretty much
claims or comes close to claiming that Jesus is a real historical
figure.
It is true that his own personal "meetings" with Jesus are in the
spiritual
or imaginative realm. He admits and concedes he never, himself, met
Jesus
in the flesh. But, the fact that the topic comes up is suggestive. It
suggests he thought others _did_. I can't quote chapter and verse,
but I think this whole topic came up more than once. Paul was
forever applogizing for his earlier persecution.
Likewise, the Acts, which is largely a paean to Paul and his work,
also claims that Paul personally knew the principal apostles.
Acts certainly suggests that the original, surviving twelve thought
Jesus an actual person. Of course, Luke/Acts is just another
Gospel account, so one can't take it with full seriousness.
After all, this could all be made up or tidied up long after the
fact (the first surviving fragments of the NT date from 150 AD
and full bibles only to about 300 AD). But, a really unified
Christianity didn't exist until Nicea. So, to say that Jesus was
made up requires a particular reading of Paul (possible, but
not how I'd read it) and then a successful conspiracy prior to
and following the authorship of Mark that somehow gets to
a fragmented, widely flung Christian community, already
widely flung to Rome by around AD 60 and certainly after
AD 70 when the temple was destroyed (if we can rely on
any fact in this era, the dispersion of Christiantity after
the temple was sacked is that event).
You also have to do some real imaginative
work about how the other Gospels
were written, which is a knotty enough problem without
this kind of conspiritorial overlay (Mark is clearly
_not_ the source for much of what is in Luke and
Matthew in particular and John is pretty much
independent of Mark even if not written until after
90 AD).
Which reminds me, the parousia was tied to those who actually saw Jesus.
The covering up of the not-so-quick-as-one-generation parousia came
later and was not entirely erased from the New Testament. But, such
a doctine (which has its embarassing aspects given the rather long
delayed second coming) would seem a very strange _idea_ to arise in
a group which made up Jesus from whole cloth or amalgamated him from
many sources. James, in particular, was looked to as kind of
a bellweather. Jesus was supposed to come before he died
(at least until James died ;-) ).
I think it is very hard to read Paul as stating that Jesus did not
have an incarnated existence, but of course some of "Paul's letters"
aren't really written by Paul in toto, so maybe some of the more credal
statements aren't original. There's evidence enough of tampering
in the Gospels, after all.
There was a gnostic movement that tried to make Jesus wholly
spiritual, but that is far into the future and long after Paul
was dead. It was firmly resisted and eventually written out
of Christianity pretty thoroughly. But, of course, that doesn't
mean that Jesus existed. It does mean that, from early times,
no later than AD 90 and probably earlier, the Christian community
took Jesus to be a real person, even so far as having a surviving
brother (James) still alive amongst them as a key element
of the story line through the end of the first century.
> Well, which is it? Aside from phrases (Jesus said...) used to introduce
> sayings in Q and Thomas, I can't seem to find any evidence of Jesus'
> earthly existence until Mark's gospel. In his first century epistles, Paul
> makes no connection between his Christ and any historical time or place.
> There was certainly no Roman or Jewish confirmation. And no archeological
> evidence. Despite all that, the historicity of Jesus Christ seems to be
> widely accepted in non-Christian circles.
>
It would be exceedingly unlikely that an iterant preacher who never
had much money would leave much of a trace in ancient times.
This is not Ramses II, with 30 foot monuments in every town;
this is a peasant with very little
money and, if we can beleive anything
whatever written about him, someone uninterested in "monuments."
That may all be a nice dodge if you're right, but one must be careful
about what cart goes before what horse. Documentation of nonroyalty
in ancient times is pretty sparse. Do we even know the names of, say,
15 Senators of Rome throughout its history? If you worked at it,
maybe. But, I'd think you'd find the "archaeology" of the average
Senator pretty slim, especially if for some reason you picked some
_particular_ Senator whose main claim to fame was getting lynched
by the Emporer on some trumped up charge.
And, any of them were much more prominent than Jesus.
> How come? With such a total absence of evidence, why are non-Christians so
> willing to go along with Christian assumptions? Are they just trying to be
> agreeable?
> --
> Contrarius
> contr...@hotmail.com
Because there's no good reason not to suppose Jesus existed. The
thinness of the record doesn't cut against Jesus' existence per se
and it's a simpler explanation for the historical facts of Christianity
to suppose that the early Christians did have some specific person
in mind for their cult. Remember that the
Christians were few and powerless during the first century AD, and
so it seems entirely plausible that most of the "evidence" disappeared,
especially in an age were "archaeology" in the sense of a nontrophy
or nonpropaganda sense had yet to be invented and
where many of the principals of the Christian community still
expected (during the first century, anyhow) to have the world immenently
destroyed.
Thin documentation of ancient people is the rule, not the
exception. If we choose to be that demanding about documentation,
a surprisingly long list of historical figures would also get the
verdict "case not proved." For example, many a figure is only
mentioned in Josephus. They may not be particularly important
people, but it makes the point that the ancient past has
largely been erased by the intervening past.
Robert Johnston
the
> resurrection, etc.) seem to agree with the Christians that Jesus
existed as
> a historical figure. The secular media, while leaving the divinity
question
> open, actively promote the idea that there was an historical Jesus.
>
thing was
> a fiction from start to finish. They say that although a "Jesus" was
> mentioned in Q and Thomas, he was most likely an amalgam of the
preachers
> and philosophers who wandered Galilee during the first century. Or a
> mythical figure derived from the Wisdom stories in the Talmud. They
both
> suggest that Paul's urban Christians believed in a Christ who lived
in only
> a spiritual realm similar to that inhabited by the Greek gods, the
rural
> Jesus and Paul's Jerusalem Christ finally merging in the gospel of
Mark,
> written in about 70 AD.
>
introduce
> sayings in Q and Thomas, I can't seem to find any evidence of Jesus'
> earthly existence until Mark's gospel. In his first century epistles,
Paul
> makes no connection between his Christ and any historical time or
place.
> There was certainly no Roman or Jewish confirmation. And no
archeological
> evidence. Despite all that, the historicity of Jesus Christ seems to
be
> widely accepted in non-Christian circles.
>
Christians so
> willing to go along with Christian assumptions? Are they just trying
to be
> agreeable?
Frankly, I don't think the question is even coherent. What would
constitute a "historical Jesus?" If all the term means is "a person who
was claimed to be the Jewish Messiah," then there were probably
thousands of historical Jesuses. Would a historical Jesus have to be a
product of virgin birth, a Jew, a magician/performer of miracles,
crucified 2000 years ago, a decendant of Jewish Kings, or some
combination of these and other biblical traits? I've never seen this
question answered by anyone claiming that a historical Jesus existed.
Robert Johnston, a.a. atheist #1760
--
"I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death
that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it
to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn
the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be
nothing. Only I will remain."--Bene Gesserit 'Litany against Fear'
Paul Filseth
> ... I can't seem to find any evidence of Jesus' earthly existence
> until Mark's gospel. ... There was certainly no Roman or Jewish
> confirmation. And no archeological evidence. Despite all that, the
> historicity of Jesus Christ seems to be widely accepted in non-Christian
> circles.
What do you mean, no evidence? The well-known amateur
archeologist Dave Foley found some!
"Hi! As I'm sure you're all aware, there's a movement amongst
archaeologists to attempt to reconcile the biblical account of
history with the archaeological record. Now, I'm an intellectually
curious young man with, let's face it, no real job. So, I've
done some exploring of my own in this vain. The Bible tells us
that Christ was trained as a carpenter. But in my most recent
digs, I've found artifacts that show He was not a very good
carpenter.
This chair, for example. One of the legs is significantly shorter
than the other. This causes a certain degree of _wobbling_ and
a more subtle defect, no lower back support. Over here we have
a table. Now this table has only two legs. Now, I've conferred
with many leading contemporary carpenters and they all agree that
three is the bare minimum required for stability. Observe. [lets
go of table and it falls down]. Even taking into account the
primitive times, this portrays a shocking lack of craftsmanship.
Now over here we have this, and frankly, I have no idea what
this is. For a while I thought it might be a spice rack of some
sort. But watch. If I take this jar of crushed cumin seed and
place it here...[jar rolls off onto the floor] Clearly, if it is
a spice rack, it is not a spice rack of the best ilk.
Conclusions: Yes, Christ was a great philosophical and religious
leader; perhaps, even as some maintain, the Savior or Messiah.
But it seems clear that He had few career options. As a carpenter,
He was incompetent. He would've been unable even to construct
the simple crucifix upon which ultimately He met his martyrdom.
Now, I know that these views are going to be controversial. But
I am also aware that if Christina Applegate were to express them
wearing a halter top, you'd eat it up. Thanks!"
(Source: http://www.kithfan.org/sindex.html)
--
Paul Filseth To email, delete the x.
Do not flatter your benefactor. - Buddha
John Secker
<rmjohn...@my-deja.com> writes
>Frankly, I don't think the question is even coherent. What would
>constitute a "historical Jesus?" If all the term means is "a person who
>was claimed to be the Jewish Messiah," then there were probably
>thousands of historical Jesuses. Would a historical Jesus have to be a
>product of virgin birth, a Jew, a magician/performer of miracles,
>crucified 2000 years ago, a decendant of Jewish Kings, or some
>combination of these and other biblical traits? I've never seen this
>question answered by anyone claiming that a historical Jesus existed.
>
whom can be traced back the stories and legends which eventually wound
up as the New Testament? Or was the whole thing deliberately invented by
one or more people? If such a person existed then they would probably
have some of the attributes you list (almost certainly a Jew, possibly
crucified, not a product of a virgin birth). This is a question which
will almost certainly never be answered with any degree of certainty,
unless some surprise archaeological discovery such as a contemporary
Roman written account comes to light. Failing this, it simply depends on
what you personally think is the most likely explanation of the
unarguable existence of the Bible and the Christian church. My take is
that I don't like conspiracy theories, they are too complicated, and it
seems most likely to me that there was a person, an itinerant preacher
or rabble rouser, who caused some unrest and was executed, and whose
followers then left behind oral tales, which grew in the telling, as
these things do, until they were written down many years later. The lack
of contemporary records is not surprising, and it certainly does not
provide proof that Jesus did not exist.
--
John Secker
Paul Filseth
> "Contrarius" <contr...@earthlink.net> wrote:
> > With such a total absence of evidence, why are non-Christians so
> > willing to go along with Christian assumptions? Are they just trying
> > to be agreeable?
>
> constitute a "historical Jesus?" If all the term means is "a person who
> was claimed to be the Jewish Messiah," then there were probably
> thousands of historical Jesuses. Would a historical Jesus have to be a
> product of virgin birth, a Jew, a magician/performer of miracles,
> combination of these and other biblical traits? I've never seen this
> question answered by anyone claiming that a historical Jesus existed.
define "historical Jesus": by a single defining event or by some kind
of weighted sum over many events.
Imagine you're a time-traveling cop. Not a Columbo, who instantly
knows who to fasten onto, but one of the guys on "Law and Order", where
we get to see all the painful tracking down of witnesses. You've been
sent back in time to find out what really happened to start all these
stories. So you ask St. Paul who he heard the Jesus stories from, you
ask that guy who _he_ heard it from, and so forth. You assume all your
sources may be lying and check everything. You cross-examine all the
witnesses, catch them in inconsistencies, and browbeat the truth out of
them. You construct an artificial paper trail showing how any given
detail of the story in fact got into the story.
If we focus on one defining event, such as the resurrection, you
track it back to its source. If you find out it was cribbed from some
other religion, or somebody made it up, or somebody stole a body and
somebody else guessed that the body came back to life, then we conclude
there was no historical Jesus. If we pick a different defining event,
such as the composition of the Sermon on the Mount, it evidently
happened, so there was a historical Jesus by definition. And if you
find out it was originally given on a Mount, by some Rabbi named David,
in 70 AD, but actually his wife Esther wrote all his sermons for him,
then we conclude there was a historical Jesus and he was a she.
If, on the other hand, we define "historical Jesus" as a weighted
sum, then you have to track down the sources of enough of the pieces
of the story to see if the bulk of them point at one person. Suppose,
just as an example, you find that the resurrection story came from
Osiris, Esther wrote the sermon, the crucifixion part was put in by
somebody who mixed up the savior of the Jews with the savior of Rome's
slaves, and the idea that he lived in Nazareth came from Greeks who
couldn't tell the difference between the Aramaic words for Nazarene
and Nazareth; on the other side of the scale, you find the name
"Jesus", the idea that the Jews killed him, the idea that he was the
Messiah, the label "Nazarene", and the traditional names of several
of the disciples, all came from one guy, named Yeishu ben Pandeira,
whom the Jewish priesthood stoned to death for heresy in about 100
B.C. If you discovered all that, then I'd say it's enough weight
that we'd have a fair claim to having found "the" historical Jesus.
Anyway, that's just a fantasy to clarify the definition of what
it _means_ for somebody to be the historical Jesus. It depends
entirely on the actual path information took getting from events in
the ancient world to showing up in modern Bibles. Since we don't have
any time-traveling cops, it's pretty hard to apply this in practice;
we can only guess that some bit of information took this route and not
that route. The Christians will claim information never got copied
from Pandeira's life and death into their Christ stories, and the
parallels are coincidence. If they're right, that leaves the question
of whether there was a historical Jesus open -- we need our time-cop
to track down the real sources of the information. But if they're
wrong, then maybe we've got our man.
Mark Folsom
news:xdvUUJAI...@secker.demon.co.uk...
> >constitute a "historical Jesus?" If all the term means is "a person who
> >was claimed to be the Jewish Messiah," then there were probably
> >thousands of historical Jesuses. Would a historical Jesus have to be a
> >product of virgin birth, a Jew, a magician/performer of miracles,
> >combination of these and other biblical traits? I've never seen this
> >question answered by anyone claiming that a historical Jesus existed.
> >
> whom can be traced back the stories and legends which eventually wound
> up as the New Testament? Or was the whole thing deliberately invented by
> one or more people?
Your argument presents a false dichotomy. The Jesus story could easily have
been written intentionally and knowingly as myth and then presented later as
truth by someone other than the author(s), along with originally unrelated
material.
> If such a person existed then they would probably
> have some of the attributes you list (almost certainly a Jew, possibly
> crucified, not a product of a virgin birth). This is a question which
> will almost certainly never be answered with any degree of certainty,
> unless some surprise archaeological discovery such as a contemporary
> Roman written account comes to light.
Tracing the origins of the new testament stories can be a convincing way of
reducing the credibility of the "real jesus" hypothesis.
> Failing this, it simply depends on
> what you personally think is the most likely explanation of the
> unarguable existence of the Bible and the Christian church. My take is
> that I don't like conspiracy theories,
There is good evidence of conspiracy, as in the case of Eusebius's
insertions in the writings of Josephus and widespread allusions among early
Christian fathers of the church as to the efficacy of lying in pursuit of
spreading the "higher truth." How, without conspiracy, could there have
been dozens of Christ's foreskins scattered about Europe's cathedrals at one
time? Miracles?
> they are too complicated, and it
> seems most likely to me that there was a person, an itinerant preacher
> or rabble rouser, who caused some unrest and was executed, and whose
> followers then left behind oral tales, which grew in the telling, as
> these things do, until they were written down many years later. The lack
> of contemporary records is not surprising, and it certainly does not
> provide proof that Jesus did not exist.
You conveniently neglect the fact that he was written about as a mythical
figure over a long period when no mention was made of him as a flesh and
blood person. Paul lived when he could have known Jesus the Christ, if
there had been such a person, unlike the Gospel writers. However, none of
the biographical events and none of his teachings from the Gospels made it
into "Paul's" writings.
Mark Folsom
Jeffrey Straszheim
> Frankly, I don't think the question is even coherent. What would
> constitute a "historical Jesus?" If all the term means is "a person
> who was claimed to be the Jewish Messiah," then there were probably
> thousands of historical Jesuses. Would a historical Jesus have to be
> a product of virgin birth, a Jew, a magician/performer of miracles,
> crucified 2000 years ago, a decendant of Jewish Kings, or some
> combination of these and other biblical traits? I've never seen this
> question answered by anyone claiming that a historical Jesus
> existed.
The question is vague in just the way you suggest, but it is possible
that there was an itinerate preacher for Nazareth named Jesus who was
crucified by Pilate at the request of the Jewish authorities. If these
things were true, and if also his followers started a small cult that
later attracted the following of a certain Paul of Tarsus, I would be
willing to suppose that the statement "Jesus existed" was true.
-- Jeffrey Straszheim | A sufficiently advanced
-- Systems Engineer, Programmer | regular expression is
-- http://www.shadow.net/~stimuli | indistinguishable from
-- stimuli AT shadow DOT net | magic
Robert Johnston
John Secker <jo...@secker.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> In article <8fvuij$2f5$1...@nnrp1.deja.com>, Robert Johnston
> <rmjohn...@my-deja.com> writes
> >Frankly, I don't think the question is even coherent. What would
> >constitute a "historical Jesus?" If all the term means is "a person
who
> >was claimed to be the Jewish Messiah," then there were probably
> >thousands of historical Jesuses. Would a historical Jesus have to be
a
> >product of virgin birth, a Jew, a magician/performer of miracles,
> >crucified 2000 years ago, a decendant of Jewish Kings, or some
> >combination of these and other biblical traits? I've never seen this
> >question answered by anyone claiming that a historical Jesus existed.
> >
> to whom can be traced back the stories and legends which eventually
> wound up as the New Testament? Or was the whole thing deliberately
> invented by one or more people?
Thank you for demonstrating exactly why the matter is not clear! You
present a false dichotomy--either it was all made up, or the stories
all trace back to a historical figure. Reality does not work that way.
When people claim the existance of a historical Jesus, they are
claiming precisely that some, but not necessarily all, of the Jesus
mythology is based on a particular historical figure. What the
claimants never make clear is *which* parts of the jesus mythology
allegedly trace back to a historical figure, and which parts may be
later embelishment.
Most people--though certainly not all--would agree, for example, that a
historical Jesus would not have to have been the son of god, nor would
he have to have been the product of a virgin birth. Beyond that, I
doubt you'll find any significant agreement about which pieces of the
Jesus mythology would have to have a historical basis in an individual
for that individual to be a historical Jesus. Would a historical Jesus
have to have been an oldest child? Would he have to have had twelve
disciples? Would he have to have been born and died about 2000 years
ago? Would some of his contemporaries have to have declared him to be
the jewish messiah? Would he have to have been named Yeshu? There are
no agreed upon answers to these questions, and therefore the question
of the existance of a historical Jesus is incoherent in the absense of
the specification of exactly which pieces of the Jesus mythology such a
figure would have to have fullfilled.
JMason
themselves would be trumpeting the facts. The lack of such presentation
amounts to an admission to lack of evidence. The only "references" I have ever
seen from religious sources are clearly religious writings.
John Mason
Contrarius
> <rmjohn...@my-deja.com> writes
> >Frankly, I don't think the question is even coherent. What would
> >constitute a "historical Jesus?" If all the term means is "a person who
> >was claimed to be the Jewish Messiah," then there were probably
> >thousands of historical Jesuses. Would a historical Jesus have to be a
> >product of virgin birth, a Jew, a magician/performer of miracles,
> >crucified 2000 years ago, a decendant of Jewish Kings, or some
> >combination of these and other biblical traits? I've never seen this
> >question answered by anyone claiming that a historical Jesus existed.
> It seems perfectly clear to me. Was there an individual who lived and to
> whom can be traced back the stories and legends which eventually wound
> up as the New Testament?
Exactly. Yes, for this purpose the term "Jesus" isn't precisely defined. But
it doesn't have to be.
> Or was the whole thing deliberately invented by
> one or more people? If such a person existed then they would probably
> have some of the attributes you list (almost certainly a Jew, possibly
> crucified, not a product of a virgin birth). This is a question which
> will almost certainly never be answered with any degree of certainty,
> unless some surprise archaeological discovery such as a contemporary
> Roman written account comes to light. Failing this, it simply depends on
> what you personally think is the most likely explanation of the
> unarguable existence of the Bible and the Christian church. My take is
> that I don't like conspiracy theories, they are too complicated, and it
> seems most likely to me that there was a person, an itinerant preacher
> or rabble rouser, who caused some unrest and was executed, and whose
> followers then left behind oral tales, which grew in the telling, as
> these things do, until they were written down many years later.
I don't like conspiracy stories either, but, as you suggest, a conspiracy
isn't necessarily at the heart of every myth. Myths don't need an actual
"founder figure." They can develop in many ways, especially from popular
writings (the Book of Wisdom is often mentioned in this regard), and from
national aspirations and the need to believe in a glorious past and/or a
vindicating future.
I think it's a mistake to assume that the Galilean preacher and the
Jerulsalem messiah were based on the same legend, however. The two seem to
come from completely different roots, i.e., Paul is silent on the life of
Jesus of Nazareth, including his teachings and his miracles, and he provides
no historical context for the crucifixion. OTOH, Thomas and Q consist almost
entirely of sayings, and contain nothing about about the trial, crucifixion,
and resurrection. Not until Mark, 40 years after the purported crucifixion,
do we see any biographical information about Jesus, or is there historical
context for the crucifixion. (BTW, antecedents for much of the Passion
account can be found in the Old Testament.)
> The lack
> of contemporary records is not surprising,
While it's true that Judea may have been something of a backwater from the
Roman point of view, the events - Jesus' great public miracles, the
geophysical/supernatural events which supposedly took place at his execution
at Roman hands, and the immediate reaction of his followers to those
events - would surely have created a stir in the literate Roman ruling class
and the Hellenized intelligencia. But we have no indication that the Romans
were even aware of the Jesus story until well into the 2nd century.
But the most remarkable "lack" is the lack of specific historical references
in Paul's epistles, written as early as 40 AD. This isn't a lack of
extra-biblical confirmation, this is a lack of INTRA-biblical confirmation.
> and it certainly does not
> provide proof that Jesus did not exist.
Of course it doesn't. But negative proofs are hard to come by, especially
when the "testimony" doesn't include dates and places or other contextual
information, making the accounts impossible to contradict, i.e., "You must
have just missed it!" (Paul's puzzling silences, however, do verge on
"negative evidence.")
"Proof" isn't really the issue. Since there's no proof one way or the other,
common sense has to come into play. Putting aside the miracles,
resurrection, etc., the question is "Is there historical evidence to support
the belief that a (divine or non-divine) figure resembling the biblical
Jesus(s) actually existed?" The answer, even if one allows for that
possibility, is a resounding "NO."
Despite the lack of historical documentation, non-Christians, including
those in the media, persist in presenting the Jesus story as history. By way
of concession to our "Christian nation," we seem to have gone along by
creating a secular sub-myth ("a great teacher and reformer") to complement
the religious one we can't accept.
--
Contrarius
contr...@hotmail.com
C. H. MacLeod
Jeffrey Straszheim <sti...@shadow.net> wrote:
>Robert Johnston <rmjohn...@my-deja.com> writes:
>
>> Frankly, I don't think the question is even coherent. What would
>> constitute a "historical Jesus?" If all the term means is "a person
>> who was claimed to be the Jewish Messiah," then there were probably
>> thousands of historical Jesuses. Would a historical Jesus have to be
>> a product of virgin birth, a Jew, a magician/performer of miracles,
>> crucified 2000 years ago, a decendant of Jewish Kings, or some
>> combination of these and other biblical traits? I've never seen this
>> question answered by anyone claiming that a historical Jesus
>> existed.
>
>that there was an itinerate preacher for Nazareth named Jesus who was
>crucified by Pilate at the request of the Jewish authorities. If these
>things were true, and if also his followers started a small cult that
>later attracted the following of a certain Paul of Tarsus, I would be
>willing to suppose that the statement "Jesus existed" was true.
>
Somewhat on topic, has anyone seen the movie Jesus de Montreal? In this
movie, the idea of a historical Jesus that the church would rather not
know about (the catholic church, in this instance) was developed.
(Plot summary for anyone who hasn't a clue what I'm talking about: An
actor is hired by St. Joseph's Oratory in Montreal to "update" their
passion play a bit. He gathers together a bunch of actors and talks to
a couple archaeologists and puts on a play that explores who the "real"
Jesus could have been, and tries to put him into a historical context.
Priest who hired him gets upset, more plot ensues, meanwhile, all sorts
of biblical analogies are used to liken the actor to jesus of the bible)
Anyhow, I was fascinated by some ideas presented in this film,
particularly, the priest who said that his job had little to do with any
ultimate truth, but that he ministered to the hopeless, giving them hope
by saying Jesus loves them. In contrast to the priest, we have the
idealistic actor who comes to believe that he is there to give a message
that no one wants to hear.
ObAtheism: I am atheist, and have been reading this group for a while.
As an atheist brought up in a Catholic environment, I found this movie
insightful, but your milage may vary. If anyone has seen it, I wouldn't
mind discussing.
-Care
John Secker
<fols...@redshift.com> writes
>> It seems perfectly clear to me. Was there an individual who lived and to
>> whom can be traced back the stories and legends which eventually wound
>> one or more people?
>
>Your argument presents a false dichotomy. The Jesus story could easily have
>been written intentionally and knowingly as myth and then presented later as
>truth by someone other than the author(s), along with originally unrelated
>material.
>
one or more people".
<snip>
>There is good evidence of conspiracy, as in the case of Eusebius's
>insertions in the writings of Josephus and widespread allusions among early
>Christian fathers of the church as to the efficacy of lying in pursuit of
>spreading the "higher truth." How, without conspiracy, could there have
>been dozens of Christ's foreskins scattered about Europe's cathedrals at one
>time? Miracles?
>
and fraudulently displayed or sold them for profit. What role do you
think "conspiracy" had in this? Do you imagine that some Foreskin
Godfather was responsible for all of them, bootlegging foreskins to all
the major cathedrals of Europe? It was lots of individuals all doing
what individuals usually do, which is to see an opportunity to improve
their own lot and taking it.
--
John Secker
John Secker
Contrarius <contr...@earthlink.net> writes
>"Proof" isn't really the issue. Since there's no proof one way or the other,
>common sense has to come into play. Putting aside the miracles,
>resurrection, etc., the question is "Is there historical evidence to support
>the belief that a (divine or non-divine) figure resembling the biblical
>Jesus(s) actually existed?" The answer, even if one allows for that
>possibility, is a resounding "NO."
>
the evidence available - most notably the Bible and the existence of the
Christian church - more likely the result of a single figure who formed
the archetype of the Jesus myth, or not?". My personal feeling is that
the observed facts are more likely to have been the result of some
person active around 2000 years ago, on whom the legends later settled.
I am quite happy to stipulate that no historical evidence for this
person exists. The point is that the existence of an itinerant preacher
or showman at that time would not have been an extraordinary event, so I
don't need extraordinary evidence - simply the balance of probability.
This is of course a subjective judgement, and I am quite happy to
concede that others may come to the opposite judgement. I simply observe
that for some people this opposite conclusion seems to be a matter of
extreme importance, leading to an almost religious or evangelical
fervour.
--
John Secker
John Secker
<rmjohn...@my-deja.com> writes
>> It seems perfectly clear to me. Was there an individual who lived and
>> to whom can be traced back the stories and legends which eventually
>> wound up as the New Testament? Or was the whole thing deliberately
>> invented by one or more people?
>
>
>present a false dichotomy--either it was all made up, or the stories
>all trace back to a historical figure. Reality does not work that way.
>When people claim the existance of a historical Jesus, they are
>claiming precisely that some, but not necessarily all, of the Jesus
>mythology is based on a particular historical figure. What the
>claimants never make clear is *which* parts of the jesus mythology
>allegedly trace back to a historical figure, and which parts may be
>later embelishment.
>
will never know the answers, so we are not going to have a proof either
way. What good would it do to try to get agreement on which precise
items are to be traced back to the putative historical role model? All
we can do is this. Imagine we were presented in some manner with the
undisputed truth about the source of every Biblical fact about Jesus.
Some of them were made up, some were real acts of a specific individual
X, and some were real acts of other people scattered in space and time.
Would we, knowing the full truth, convict X of being the historical
"Jesus" or not?
Now we don't and never will have such miraculous access to the truth. My
position is simply this - I think it is likely that IF WE DID then we
would indeed find some single person X whom we should describe as the
historical model for Jesus. I believe this too for the case of King
Arthur - although I am pretty certain that in this case the "historical
Arthur" was not called Arthur, didn't have a round table and didn't live
at Camelot.
>
>Most people--though certainly not all--would agree, for example, that a
>historical Jesus would not have to have been the son of god, nor would
>he have to have been the product of a virgin birth. Beyond that, I
>doubt you'll find any significant agreement about which pieces of the
>Jesus mythology would have to have a historical basis in an individual
>for that individual to be a historical Jesus. Would a historical Jesus
>have to have been an oldest child? Would he have to have had twelve
>disciples? Would he have to have been born and died about 2000 years
>ago? Would some of his contemporaries have to have declared him to be
>the jewish messiah? Would he have to have been named Yeshu? There are
>no agreed upon answers to these questions, and therefore the question
>of the existance of a historical Jesus is incoherent in the absense of
>the specification of exactly which pieces of the Jesus mythology such a
>figure would have to have fullfilled.
>
ones you mention, and then create a huge number of cases, in which
varying combinations of these facts were true or false about our
candidate Jesus. For each case we could then say whether the candidate
qualified. (In the extremes, if every fact was true he would be a sure
thing, if every one was false he would clearly fail). The question then
reduces to "Was there a historical person who matches one of the valid
cases"? Neither I nor anybody is likely to bother listing all the cases
and analysing them, but there is nothing to prevent it.
--
John Secker
Dan Bongard
> Mark Folsom writes
>>> It seems perfectly clear to me. Was there an individual who lived and to
>>> whom can be traced back the stories and legends which eventually wound
>>> up as the New Testament? Or was the whole thing deliberately invented by
>>> one or more people?
>> Your argument presents a false dichotomy. The Jesus story could easily have
>> been written intentionally and knowingly as myth and then presented later as
>> truth by someone other than the author(s), along with originally unrelated
>> material.
> That would qualify exactly under the category "deliberately
> invented by one or more people".
Only if everyone involved was deliberately constructing a myth.
If most of those involved were simply repeating what they'd
heard and trying to fit it into the rest of the local belief
system, the end result would be "the whole thing is ACCIDENTALLY
invented by one or more people".
Look at urban legends -- there's usually some truth behind them,
but sometimes there isn't. In all cases the legends are repeatedly
re-told (and accidentally changed) by people who honestly
believe they are true.
-- Dan
Larry Loen
>
[snip]
> While it's true that Judea may have been something of a backwater from the
> Roman point of view, the events - Jesus' great public miracles, the
> geophysical/supernatural events which supposedly took place at his execution
> at Roman hands, and the immediate reaction of his followers to those
> events - would surely have created a stir in the literate Roman ruling class
> and the Hellenized intelligencia. But we have no indication that the Romans
> were even aware of the Jesus story until well into the 2nd century.
>
Well, this is not as clear-cut as you think. Near as I can tell, even
from non-Bibilical sources such as Josephus, "miracle-workers" were
pretty
commonplace in those days.
Indeed, near as I can tell, if you weren't able to miraculously
cleanse lepers, it doesn't seem you had much credibility
as a healer. The standards were a bit different back then ;-).
The earthquakes at the crucificion would have stood
out a little more, but does one have to take _those_ as
historical in order to have a historical Jesus?
There's a bit of a false dichotomy here -- its like
you're arguing that it is either all true or else Jesus
is made up in toto. Whatever the truth is here,
I don't think it is quite so either-or. History, especially
ancient history, is seldom so clear-cut.
Meanwhile, there is the claim floating about that
the Christians were blamed for the burning of Rome in Nero's
time -- which is around 60AD or so. And, what of some modest
persecutions before 100 AD under both Nero and Domitian?
Are you saying all of these bits of history
survive only in Christian sources?
Moreover, there is the destruction of Jerusalem in
70 AD, something the Romans certainly did (the column
describing it survives). While there
may not be clear-cut records on what the Romans did
to the Christians at that time, the subsequent history
makes two things clear: There were Christians and
right about then, they were treated differently by
nearly everyone. They ceased being treated as a Jewish
sect right about then however they were treated before.
So, I think your claim that the Roman authorities
knew nothing about Christianity before, say, 200 AD,
is a bit too strong for the facts to support. The
facts just as readily support a small, pretty much
powerless group that the Roman intermittently
persecuted and probably largely ignored.
If you're trying to argue that Christianity arose
after 150 AD and that there is no prologue at all --
or at least that the Christianity of Paul and
the Gospels (however separate) was entirely eliminated and
replaced at some magical point circa (say) 150 AD,
then I think your thesis reaches too far and
mis-understands the normal way the historical
sources of those days are customarily used.
The one thing that Christianity does seem to have
been is scattered early and often. This argues
against the ability to have a unified story.
Indeed, until Nicea and Constantine, they
didn't have it and they didn't maintain
it much after. Schism is the norm.
Moreover, if you accept Paul as being
at all historical, and I read you as doing
so, then I don't see how you
can avoid the fact that Christians were
widely scattered in the Empire from the start.
Such an admission has implications for
your thesis, because there are traditions,
at least, left behind in many of these places,
some claimed to be quite old.
Before you can eliminate a "historical" Jesus,
you have to not only stare down the Gospels,
but also a lot of ancient tradition. It may
all be bunk, but you just can't wave if off
as easily given you accept the existence of
Paul.
Now, I admit you can always say "case not
proved" but that's a long way from saying
"case _dis_ proved".
Dan Bongard
>Contrarius wrote:
>>
>[snip]
>> While it's true that Judea may have been something of a backwater from the
>> Roman point of view, the events - Jesus' great public miracles, the
>> geophysical/supernatural events which supposedly took place at his execution
>> at Roman hands, and the immediate reaction of his followers to those
>> events - would surely have created a stir in the literate Roman ruling class
>> and the Hellenized intelligencia. But we have no indication that the Romans
>> were even aware of the Jesus story until well into the 2nd century.
>>
> Well, this is not as clear-cut as you think. Near as I can tell, even
> from non-Bibilical sources such as Josephus, "miracle-workers" were
> pretty commonplace in those days.
"Miracle workers", yes. Miracles, no.
When Jesus died, if we are to believe the Bible, there was an
eclipse, an earthquakes, the temple curtain was torn in two, scads
of people came back from the dead and wandered around downtown,
after which there was a SECOND earthquake. And no educated citizen
of Judea so much as made a note in his diary about it, so far
as we can tell.
> The earthquakes at the crucificion would have stood
> out a little more, but does one have to take _those_ as
> historical in order to have a historical Jesus?
What one needs is some non-Church-affiliated source that
indicates the man existed in any form at all. We don't
have that, ergo it makes little sense to accept the existance
of a historical Jesus; he ranks up there with a historical Zeus.
-- Dan
Contrarius
Christian theology.
The early church was torn with controversy over that very issue. There were
several versions of docetism, the belief that Jesus, being completely
without sin, could not have been a man, and thus was actually a spirit, an
emanation of God, a man only in appearance, etc. For a time, the
Marcionites, whose theological predecessor was Paul, were a serious threat
to what are now called orthodox beliefs. There were great (written)
theological debates between him and his orthodox opponents, Ignatius and
Justin Martyr.
In contrast to Paul and the gnostics, the synoptic gospels make it very
clear that Jesus is to be thought of as a real man, an historical figure.
Unlike Paul, the synoptic authors even added historicity by creating a role
for Pilate, a known historical figure. With the gospels' inclusion in the
canon and the adoption of the Nicene Creed ("Jesus Christ... was incarnate
of the Holy Ghost and of the Virgin Mary and was made man") in the fourth
century, the matter was pretty well settled. But docetism kept resurfacing
well into the 2nd millenium, the French Cathars (aka Albigensians) being a
notorious example.
Whew! That's mostly from memory, but I'm pretty sure the basic facts are
right. In any event, Christianity without belief in a historical, human
Jesus would be a far different religion than it is today. It may not have
even survived, given its otherworldly tenets.
I used the term "urban legend" because it refers to a kind of mythmaking
resembling what took place in the eastern Mediterranean region during the
first century. Attempts to trace urban legends back to real events have
rarely been successful, and the mere existence of a legend does not
guarantee that a similar event ever took place.
The handwringing over the definition of "the historical Jesus" seems
unnecessarily fastidious to me. If you reject supernatural events a priori,
keep in mind that such events are the key elements in Jesus' biography. They
drive the story. Same for all the talk about the Father, same for his
"messiah-ship" and the crucifixion/resurrection. Leave those pieces out, and
you don't end up with much of a tale. It would be like a biography of Lenin
with no mention of the Russian Revolution.
Nonetheless, the popular media tries to straddle the fence by presenting the
case for a saintly Jesus whose supernatural acts are termed "unanswered
questions" or "mysteries" or "sanctified traditions." Voice over: "Did Jesus
exorcise evil spirits? Many think so, and there's nothing in the
archeological record to contradict that belief. In fact, the historian
Josephus said..". And so on, ad nauseum.
Seems like non-believers ought to stand up and say, "Hey! That's rubbish.
There's no evidence, so stop with all the equivocation."
(George Wells wrote an excellent book called "Did Jesus Exist?" Is that an
"incoherent" title? It's certainly not an incoherent book!)
--
Contrarius
contr...@hotmail.com
"Actuary X" <d_ho...@my-deja.com> wrote in message
news:8frm92$741$1...@nnrp1.deja.com...
> "Contrarius" <contr...@earthlink.net> wrote:
> > Did Jesus exist? Or was he an urban legend?
>
> A myth, certainly, but the term "urban legand"
> is probably not appropriate, and is generally
> not applied to religious stories.
>
>
> > How come? With such a total absence of evidence, why are
> > non-Christians so willing to go along with Christian
> > assumptions? Are they just trying to be agreeable?
>
> Maybe because, to non-Christians, the existence or not
> of Jesus is not very important? They go along
> with the Santa Claus thing, so what the heck.
>
>
> --
>
> "...Jesus was almost certainly not 'of Nazareth'. An
> overwhelming body of evidence indicates that Nazareth
> did not exist in biblical times. The town is unlikely
> to have appeared before the third century."
> [Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln, _The Messianic Legacy_]
>
>
>
John Secker
<dbon...@netcom.com> writes
>>>> It seems perfectly clear to me. Was there an individual who lived and to
>>>> whom can be traced back the stories and legends which eventually wound
>>>> up as the New Testament? Or was the whole thing deliberately invented by
>>>> one or more people?
>
>>> Your argument presents a false dichotomy. The Jesus story could easily have
>>> been written intentionally and knowingly as myth and then presented later as
>>> truth by someone other than the author(s), along with originally unrelated
>>> material.
>
>> That would qualify exactly under the category "deliberately
>> invented by one or more people".
>
>Only if everyone involved was deliberately constructing a myth.
>If most of those involved were simply repeating what they'd
>heard and trying to fit it into the rest of the local belief
>system, the end result would be "the whole thing is ACCIDENTALLY
>invented by one or more people".
>
genesis of the story. Either there was an original basis in reality in
some form, or it was made up by person or persons unknown.
>Look at urban legends -- there's usually some truth behind them,
>but sometimes there isn't. In all cases the legends are repeatedly
>re-told (and accidentally changed) by people who honestly
>believe they are true.
>
preserved above) which you described as a false dichotomy. "There's
usually some truth behind them, but sometimes there isn't" captures
exactly my point, with the additional comment that if there isn't any
truth behind it, then SOMEONE MUST HAVE MADE IT UP. Of course they may
not have made up exactly the story which is passed along, since tales
both true and false mutate in the telling. The question is whether the
origin of the tale was an actual event or an invention.
--
John Secker
Aaron Boyden
> Meanwhile, there is the claim floating about that
> the Christians were blamed for the burning of Rome in Nero's
> time -- which is around 60AD or so. And, what of some modest
> persecutions before 100 AD under both Nero and Domitian?
> Are you saying all of these bits of history
> survive only in Christian sources?
It is quite unclear that Nero's persecutions involved Christians; the
evidence is very sketchy. As with much of this stuff, it could easily
have involved similar names which got confused in later
Christian-influenced records.
Larry Loen
>
> The historical existence of Jesus, i.e., his humanity, is VERY important in
> Christian theology.
>
> The early church was torn with controversy over that very issue. There were
> several versions of docetism, the belief that Jesus, being completely
> without sin, could not have been a man, and thus was actually a spirit, an
> emanation of God, a man only in appearance, etc.
But, this is not the same thing at all as a denial of the
reality of someone who came to be named Jesus
that wandered around Galilee and
got killed at Jerusalem.
The argument was over what "form"
Jesus took, not whether he existed and whether there was a
"biography". I don't see, quite, how you maneuver this dispute
in your favor of the "urban legend". This is a theological and
spiritual dispute, at least as you've presented it and my
sources have it. It sheds no obvious light on whether there
was a historical Jesus or not; it even suggests to me that
most heretics thought there _was_, hardly a point in
your favor.
For instance, do you have evidence that the docetists rejected
the gospels? Marcion apparently accepted some form of Luke,
apparently "amended" in a way my sources don't make clear.
This is part and parcel of my readings
on this topic. However heretical things were, there
were apparently some boundaries -- and the gospels, for all
their problems, did seem to form a boundary for most
heresies, even if there were alternate gospels floating
around. I don't see any evidence from you or anyone else
that suggests lots of Christians rejected the gospel story
in toto; there always seemed to be at least one of the four
hanging about even the wildest of groups from pretty early
on.
On what basis can you refute the claim that the four gospels
achieved fame relatively quickly? I'm not sure who has
the burden of proof on this topic, but it is by no means
clear that the "victory" of the four gospels was a late
breaking event that only happened circa Nicea. To the
contrary, it seems they were a key and early limiting
factor, despite competitive texts.
>For a time, the
> Marcionites, whose theological predecessor was Paul, were a serious threat
> to what are now called orthodox beliefs. There were great (written)
> theological debates between him and his orthodox opponents, Ignatius and
> Justin Martyr.
>
OK, but where in those beliefs is the existence of Jesus as a something-
or-other wandering around Palestine in the first 3rd of the first
century
denied?
My sources on early Christian history are silent as to your point;
they suggest there was much controversy about the _nature_ of Jesus,
but not so much debate about the biography.
"The Triumph of the Meek" by Walsh, someone not obviously
friendly to orthodoxy, suggests that 2 Corinthians be
read as a defence of the reality of the Crucificion, which
is against how you read Paul. He places that book around
57 AD, just before Mark's likely authorship.
> In contrast to Paul and the gnostics, the synoptic gospels make it very
> clear that Jesus is to be thought of as a real man, an historical figure.
Yup. Despite the fact one can't trust the gospels very far as modern
history, they do create problems for a "there was no Jesus" thesis,
because we do have some idea of how well and early they were accepted.
And, interestingly, you seem very eager to avoid the subject of John
altogether. It is an added problem for you as it is an independent
tradition that affirms the reality of a man named Jesus, whatever his
special spiritual connections. True, it is even lousier as
modern history, but it also represents an independent
tradition against your view and in favor of a particular somebody
that was later god-ified.
> Unlike Paul, the synoptic authors even added historicity by creating a role
> for Pilate, a known historical figure. With the gospels' inclusion in the
> canon and the adoption of the Nicene Creed ("Jesus Christ... was incarnate
> of the Holy Ghost and of the Virgin Mary and was made man") in the fourth
> century, the matter was pretty well settled. But docetism kept resurfacing
> well into the 2nd millenium, the French Cathars (aka Albigensians) being a
> notorious example.
So what? That's a little late to bear on the topic in any case. I
don't see
how docetism denies a historical Jesus any more than the frequent
revivial of Unitarianism against the Trinity denies a historical Jesus.
>
> Whew! That's mostly from memory, but I'm pretty sure the basic facts are
> right. In any event, Christianity without belief in a historical, human
> Jesus would be a far different religion than it is today. It may not have
> even survived, given its otherworldly tenets.
>
Quite so. And, if there _had been_ a significant Christianity without
belief in a historical Jesus, it would help out your thesis
quite a bit. The fact that his life was _interpreted_ as a spiritual
event is a far cry from, say, denying that there _was_ a crucificion.
The docetists denied that Jesus really suffered, they didn't say that
it really didn't happen.
> I used the term "urban legend" because it refers to a kind of mythmaking
> resembling what took place in the eastern Mediterranean region during the
> first century. Attempts to trace urban legends back to real events have
> rarely been successful, and the mere existence of a legend does not
> guarantee that a similar event ever took place.
>
> The handwringing over the definition of "the historical Jesus" seems
> unnecessarily fastidious to me. If you reject supernatural events a priori,
> keep in mind that such events are the key elements in Jesus' biography. They
> drive the story. Same for all the talk about the Father, same for his
> "messiah-ship" and the crucifixion/resurrection. Leave those pieces out, and
> you don't end up with much of a tale. It would be like a biography of Lenin
> with no mention of the Russian Revolution.
>
There is a difference between rejecting supernatural events and
rejecting everything. There are plenty of scholars, many who, whether
formal atheists or not, do seem to profoundly doubt that any
supernatural
events took place in first century Palestine.
Yet, I read virtually all of them as deciding that
Jesus existed. Why? Because, even after you strip out the miracles,
you still have an interesting set of historical documents to study and
those documents, for all their many problems, do point toward some
poor misunderstood lay preacher at the bottom of all the fuss and
god-making.
> Nonetheless, the popular media tries to straddle the fence by presenting the
> case for a saintly Jesus whose supernatural acts are termed "unanswered
> questions" or "mysteries" or "sanctified traditions." Voice over: "Did Jesus
> exorcise evil spirits? Many think so, and there's nothing in the
> archeological record to contradict that belief. In fact, the historian
> Josephus said..". And so on, ad nauseum.
>
Well, who cares two figs for the popular media? The more
interesting question for you is why more scholars don't doubt
the existence of Jesus.
For instance, Robin Lane Fox is hardly a Christian; he states
outright in "The Unauthorized Version" that he is an atheist. He
doesn't believe in the supernaturual. But, he's highly suspicious
that the Gospel of John was written, shall we say, under the
direction of John, the brother of Jesus, which therefore implies
that there was a historical Jesus.
I am skeptical about John as a source of history and
more so that "John" actually wrote it. But, I'm bound to
say that even very supernaturally skeptical scholars of my
readings are concluding more and more often that John was
either written by John or by his community at his behest.
You also have to give some kind of answer to the "synoptic
problem." It is not enough to say "Mark wrote and the others
simply copied." It seems clear enough, even on casual inspection,
that the "synoptics" have not only significant agreement, but
significant "disagreement." In fact, "synoptic" is a nice
appologetic word for "three books that copied from each other
some and copied from other places a lot." They are not
identical and the differences are widely felt to be variations
in an underlying oral tradition.
You might perhaps argue that the variance is mere "urban legend"
variation, but it is just as possible that this is ordinary garbling
of oral history, something we know can also happen.
The point is not that the gospels prove anything, but
rather they do not provide an easy framework to _disprove_
Jesus' existence either. The evidence seems to me to cut
both ways. The testimony of the church itself seems to
be pretty universal -- there was some fellow wandering
around Palestine. If they made it up, they did a good
job of it.
Your argument is perliously close to saying that "since we
know Davy Crockett couldn't have killed a bear when he
was only three that he must be an urban legend."
If it was 2,000 years later, I wonder if we'd
be arguing about whether Davy Crockett existed, especially
if things like the Alamo and the Library of Congress had
disappeared down the gullet of history between times.
By your standards, we'd say, "no, he was an urban legend."
> Seems like non-believers ought to stand up and say, "Hey! That's rubbish.
> There's no evidence, so stop with all the equivocation."
>
The reason for the equivocation is that the facts are
not so clear cut. I don't unequivocally suggest Jesus
existed, but I don't think the evidence clearly shows
he did not, either.
I think that to say "because we don't have ironclad
proof, let's make it a point to say Jesus didn't exist"
has two errors:
1. Wastes time and energy because it uses the process
of history in an invalid way. We have "ironclad proof"
of darn near nothing in history.
2. Forces us to defend ground that even many atheist
scholars think is indefensible.
The additional problem is that it costs atheism
absolutely nothing to say that Jesus' may have
existed or that it is more probable than not that
he existed. It concedes nothing interesting.
--
Larry Loen
Larry Loen
> >> Roman point of view, the events - Jesus' great public miracles, the
> >> geophysical/supernatural events which supposedly took place at his execution
> >> at Roman hands, and the immediate reaction of his followers to those
> >> events - would surely have created a stir in the literate Roman ruling class
> >> and the Hellenized intelligencia. But we have no indication that the Romans
> >> were even aware of the Jesus story until well into the 2nd century.
> >>
>
> > from non-Bibilical sources such as Josephus, "miracle-workers" were
> > pretty commonplace in those days.
>
> "Miracle workers", yes. Miracles, no.
>
> When Jesus died, if we are to believe the Bible, there was an
> eclipse, an earthquakes, the temple curtain was torn in two, scads
> of people came back from the dead and wandered around downtown,
> after which there was a SECOND earthquake. And no educated citizen
> of Judea so much as made a note in his diary about it, so far
> as we can tell.
>
> > The earthquakes at the crucificion would have stood
> > out a little more, but does one have to take _those_ as
> > historical in order to have a historical Jesus?
>
> What one needs is some non-Church-affiliated source that
> indicates the man existed in any form at all. We don't
> have that, ergo it makes little sense to accept the existance
> of a historical Jesus; he ranks up there with a historical Zeus.
>
Well, that would be clear-cut. I'd welcome it. But,
I'm not holding my breath.
And, if we took your standard, we'd have to reject
about 99% of all ancient writing, Christian or not,
since it too was full of God-talk and other things that
the modern mind can clearly see as bunk.
Should we reject Herotodus, for instance, because
he sometimes attributes historical events to the
intervention of the gods? Or, should we reject
the god-talk and evaluate the rest as best we
can. And, if we do so for him, why not the bible?
Life is not like a mystery novel where you should
expect everything to fit together like a Chinese
puzzle and the "one mis-fit piece" refutes everything.
Life is messier than that.
And, the past is a lot like geology. Lots and
lots of it has "eroded" away and disappeared
for good. The clear-cut proof that might
have been available 2,000 years
ago was probably wadded up and used to stop
up a hole in someone's wall 1,300 years ago.
Bach's wife was reduced to selling some unknown
amount of great music we'll never hear in order
to eat. She sold it as scrap paper before
his rediscovery. History suffers from stuff
like this in a big way.
It is amazing that we know as much about
the ancient world as we do.
I can imagine, 2000 years later, having
my distant progeny arguing with yours and
Contrarius' about, say, the existence of
Daniel Boone. Imagine if, as is likely
on the history of things, that clear-cut
things like graves and the Library of
Congress disappears between now and then.
What proof would there be that someone
like Davy Crockett existed? A plaque might still
survive at the Alamo, but you might reject
that as a "partisan" source. Unfortunately,
you might find that the more "objective"
sources (such as the congressional record,
or at least the record for the years that
matter) had managed, to the last copy, to
vanish utterly from the face of the earth.
Now, you can conclude that the Davy Crocketts
of the world didn't exist (even though they
really did) or you can account for the fact
that history has lots of gaps and try a
"more likely than not" level of proof, which
may allow us to recover a few Davy Crocketts
at the risk of a Paul Bunyan or two. I
submit that the latter is what most
historians have decided to do.
By those standards, I find even
most atheist scholars who study the
matter end up concluding that Jesus'
existence is a bit more probable than
not.
--
Larry Loen
Richard
> The earthquakes at the crucificion would have stood
> out a little more, but does one have to take _those_ as
> historical in order to have a historical Jesus?
Earthquakes at the crucifixion are important because whenever
Something Important (usually a war) is Born, the people who
give birth to it always hear (hallucinate) a Loud Noise. IIRC,
Lincoln hallucinated thunder in the daytime when he started
the american civil war and Roosevelt delayed the USA's entry
into the world war against the wishes of the populace because
he was waiting for the Loud Noise. This suggests (and other
facts back it up) that the decision to enter into a war is
never a rational decision but a psychotic one, and also that
xianity is grounded in psychosis.
Robert Johnston
"Contrarius" <contr...@earthlink.net> wrote:
[snip]
> (George Wells wrote an excellent book called "Did Jesus Exist?" Is
> that an "incoherent" title? It's certainly not an incoherent book!)
Not at all an incoherent title, and a pretty easy question to answer.
Jesus did not, does not, and never will exist. The incoherence only
happens when poorly defined modifiers such as 'historical' or 'the man'-
-terms *extremely* poorly defined in the context of discussing a deity--
are appended to the term 'Jesus'.
> Contrarius
Robert Johnston, a.a. atheist #1760
--
"I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death
that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it
to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn
the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be
nothing. Only I will remain."--Bene Gesserit 'Litany against Fear'
Larry Loen
Well, this is a new one on me. I've never heard the Loud
Noise theory of warfare.
But, at least in Roosevelt's case, I take leave to doubt it.
One of the many things glossed over in US History classes
is how very hard it was to get the American People engaged
in WW II. Indeed, it took Pearl Harbor to finally settle
the matter.
There is still a lot of doubt and suspicion about how much
the US government knew, or should have known, about the
"sneak attack" and whether it was "deliberately allowed
to make us mad" but one obvious and embarassing fact that
is undeniable is that the Philipines were attacked,
erroneously, several hours before Pearl. That's right,
US forces were under attack BEFORE Pearl and we STILL
pretty much weren't ready for the attack when it came.
Can you spell "denial?" As a people and as a military,
we did not want that war.
I recently saw an interesting book by Dr Seus of editorial
cartoons he wrote in the late '30s. I had no idea he
had such a career, but he did. It also is very clear,
on reading them, that fascism and anti-semetism were
all too respectable and that many, whether anti-semitic
or not, were not at all inclined to get involved in
another European War.
In any case, while we were happy to smash
fascism, Hitler, and Tojo, a lot of the
moralizing, especially about the Holocaust,
was added after the fact. Whether we should have
known more or done more is an interesting argument.
That we didn't, as a public, know anything about the
scale of the death camps is a simple fact of history
that we often gloss over. And, it's important, here.
It's one of the reasons we stayed out of the war.
We didn't take enough trouble to find out how bad
it really was. Dr. Seuss wrote eloquently about
fascism and Nazism, but the world "Auschwitz"
never appears because he, like everyone else,
didn't yet know its significance.
Moreover, with the Lend Lease and other initiatives,
including the just-in-time revival of our
cryptographic capabilities (a major factor whose
decisiveness came only clear in the last 10
years of declassification and whose capabilities
only came on line just about to the day of 7 Dec 41)
makes it reasonably clear to me that
Roosevelt, however much he hesitated,
was pretty consistently _ahead_
of public opinion on the topic of the war.
In short, I see us as having entered WW II at
about the earliest moment public opinion would
have stood for it and Roosevelt doing what
he could to lead the people towards it.
I doubt if Loud Noises had a thing to do
with it.
--
Larry Loen
Moshe
wrote:
>Larry Loen wrote:
>> The earthquakes at the crucificion would have stood
>> out a little more, but does one have to take _those_ as
>> historical in order to have a historical Jesus?
>
>Earthquakes at the crucifixion are important because whenever
>Something Important (usually a war) is Born, the people who
>give birth to it always hear (hallucinate) a Loud Noise. IIRC,
>Lincoln hallucinated thunder in the daytime when he started
>the american civil war and Roosevelt delayed the USA's entry
>into the world war against the wishes of the populace because
>he was waiting for the Loud Noise. This suggests (and other
>facts back it up) that the decision to enter into a war is
>never a rational decision but a psychotic one, and also that
>xianity is grounded in psychosis.
I think people who say there were earthquakes at the crucifiction, or
thunder when the civil war started, are trying to add some divine
intervention to the whole thing. Back in the olde days, people
believed that meteors and astroids, for example, were signs of their
god(s). So, whenever something important happens, there *has* to be a
sign, and people - over time - add such signs to the story.
Personally, I do not think there were extraordinary earthquakes when
this Jesus guy was killed, and that they are simply "signs of god"
added later. (like the fact that jesus was declared 'son of god' about
3 centuries after he died...)
------------------------------------------------
Moshe Meekel
*I type, therefore I exist*
------------------------------------------------
gcmi...@my-deja.com
"Contrarius" <contr...@earthlink.net> wrote:
important in
> Christian theology.
>
> The early church was torn with controversy over that very issue. There
were
> several versions of docetism, the belief that Jesus, being completely
> without sin, could not have been a man, and thus was actually a
spirit, an
> emanation of God, a man only in appearance, etc.
We need to be extraordinarily careful in interpreting the
human/spiritual division as made by the ancients. We moderns tend to
make this division along more or less Cartesian mind-body lines. The
ancients did divide between flesh and spirit but I'm far from convinced
that they described that difference in the same way we describe it
today. I'm not sure that they would understand our current controveries
over what we call the "mind-body problem." It is a mistake in historical
thinking to read our modern understanding of such questions back into
their situation.
[...]
>
>If you reject supernatural events a
priori,
> keep in mind that such events are the key elements in Jesus'
biography. They
> drive the story.
Well, no, they don't. The narratives are more complex than your approach
admits. The miracle-claims generally drive the narrative of the divinity
of the Christ. No first century claims for divinity would have gotten
anywhere without some kind of miraculous attestation. (Note well that
first century Judaism did not deny miracle-working, but neither did they
rely on it for the kind of theological grounding that early Christianity
did.)
It would (for the time being) be a serious mistake to conflate arguments
about the divinity of Jesus the Christ with arguments about the
historicity of Jesus the Nazarene rabble-rouser. To put the matter too
succinctly, the former is theologically driven while the latter is not.
Many of the earlier Roman emperors were also held to be deities.
Suetonius reports that Vespasian restored the sight of a blind man by
fashioning a paste of mud and spit and applying it to the blind man's
eyes. But the historicity of the Emperor Vespasian is not determined by
the truth or falsehood of this account of a miracle he supposedly
performed.
Your argument "Because miracles are impossible, there was no Jesus" is a
non-sequitur...Gene
John Secker
Contrarius <contr...@earthlink.net> writes
>The historical existence of Jesus, i.e., his humanity, is VERY important in
>Christian theology.
>
atheists. I'm sure a lot of Christians are desperate to prove that
"Jesus" really exists, but that doesn't make them wrong (or right).
>I used the term "urban legend" because it refers to a kind of mythmaking
>resembling what took place in the eastern Mediterranean region during the
>first century. Attempts to trace urban legends back to real events have
>rarely been successful, and the mere existence of a legend does not
>guarantee that a similar event ever took place.
>
at the evidence (of which the legend itself is a major part) and decide
in as rational a way as we can which is more likely. It seems to me that
some people who wish to prove that Jesus could not have existed are
doing so from motives which are more emotional than rational.
>Nonetheless, the popular media tries to straddle the fence by presenting the
>case for a saintly Jesus whose supernatural acts are termed "unanswered
>questions" or "mysteries" or "sanctified traditions." Voice over: "Did Jesus
>exorcise evil spirits? Many think so, and there's nothing in the
>archeological record to contradict that belief. In fact, the historian
>Josephus said..". And so on, ad nauseum.
>
their agenda to validate the Christian stories. But again, this does not
decide the question either way.
>Seems like non-believers ought to stand up and say, "Hey! That's rubbish.
>There's no evidence, so stop with all the equivocation."
>
historical document, not as revealed truth) and the existence of the
Christian church in its historic form. All highly partisan, of course,
but even a distorting mirror can show you something of the true picture.
There are some scraps of other evidence about which arguments on both
sides are raised. Overall, as I have said before, we can look at what we
see and decide which is more likely. IMHO what we cannot do is be
dogmatic either way.
--
John Secker
John Secker
<dbon...@netcom.com> writes
>> Well, this is not as clear-cut as you think. Near as I can tell, even
>> from non-Bibilical sources such as Josephus, "miracle-workers" were
>> pretty commonplace in those days.
>
>"Miracle workers", yes. Miracles, no.
>
>When Jesus died, if we are to believe the Bible, there was an
>eclipse, an earthquakes, the temple curtain was torn in two, scads
>of people came back from the dead and wandered around downtown,
>after which there was a SECOND earthquake. And no educated citizen
>of Judea so much as made a note in his diary about it, so far
>as we can tell.
>
people who are convinced that there was no historical person behind the
Jesus myths. All the things you mention above are miracles, things
claimed by those who believe in the Biblical Jesus. They are not a
necessary part of a real figure hiding behind the supernatural myths,
any more than feeding the 5000 or water into wine is. Of COURSE nobody
in Judea made a note in their diary about any of these things, because
they didn't happen. This has no bearing at all on the question of
whether there was a real, non-miracle-working person at the root of the
myth.
--
John Secker
John Secker
<rmjohn...@my-deja.com> writes
>Not at all an incoherent title, and a pretty easy question to answer.
>Jesus did not, does not, and never will exist. The incoherence only
>happens when poorly defined modifiers such as 'historical' or 'the man'-
>-terms *extremely* poorly defined in the context of discussing a deity--
>are appended to the term 'Jesus'.
>
>
about the question "Did a historical Mohammed exist?"?
--
John Secker
Automort
>I do not think there were extraordinary earthquakes when
>this Jesus guy was killed, and that they are simply "signs of god"
>added later.
That's my take on it.
You don't doubt the existence of Davy Crockett because stories credit him with
single handedly putting down a Haitian slave revolt by spanking the rebels with
stalks of sugar cane. This was a contemporary racist embellishment added when
tales about him circulated in the 1800s. You don't have to be afraid it was
true.
gcmi...@my-deja.com
sop...@brown.edu wrote:
> It is quite unclear that Nero's persecutions involved Christians; the
> evidence is very sketchy. As with much of this stuff, it could easily
> have involved similar names which got confused in later
> Christian-influenced records.
>
> --
> Aaron Boyden
Do you have a citation for this lack of clarity? Although both Fox in
_Pagans and Christians_ and Ferguson in _Backgrounds of Early
Christianity_ mention the Tacitus accounts of Neronian
persecution of Christians, neither footnotes any controversies regarding
the reliability of those accounts...Gene
Don Teeter
: Earthquakes at the crucifixion are important because whenever
: Something Important (usually a war) is Born, the people who
: give birth to it always hear (hallucinate) a Loud Noise. IIRC,
: Lincoln hallucinated thunder in the daytime when he started
: the american civil war and Roosevelt delayed the USA's entry
: into the world war against the wishes of the populace because
: he was waiting for the Loud Noise. This suggests (and other
: facts back it up) that the decision to enter into a war is
: never a rational decision but a psychotic one, and also that
: xianity is grounded in psychosis.
You have an interesting take on things. The folk-tales surrounding
Christianity (Star of Bethlehem, earthquakes) are pretty standard
after-the-fact myths added on to make the story appealing. I wouldn't
call this a psychosis but will accept that it fits within your much
broader definition of the term.
However the decision to enter into a war is not psychotic just because
some leaders are alleged to have hallucinated beforehand. Lincoln
understood that America ("The last best hope for Mankind") could not
survive as a world power if split in two and that the slavery issue had
to be resolved. Otherwise America and her ideas would fade under the
heel of European hegemony. I'm not familiar with the thunder story but
would not be surprised if it was a sense of grim destiny that he most
effectively described as thunder rolling on a clear day. Lincoln had a
poetic sense about him.
I also don't know what Loud Noise Roosevelt was waiting for. He knew
America had to be woken out of her isolationism sooner rather than later
and was very fortunate the Japanese mishandled their attack (all
discussions of conspiracy set aside). Fortunate in that the country was
mobilized with a common purpose more effectively than by any unterseeboot.
Was the application of American wealth and materiel and lives in the fight
against Fascism really the result of a psychotic decision?
Or it may be that you have broadened the term to include not only Hitler's
(and all nationalist-socialists') undeniable psychosis but also any actions
necessary to combat it. Too broad a brush for me (and Webster) but if
that's what you mean then your statements make a little more sense.
d.r.t.
Richard
> I think people who say there were earthquakes at the crucifiction, or
> thunder when the civil war started, are trying to add some divine
> intervention to the whole thing. Back in the olde days, people
> believed that meteors and astroids, for example, were signs of their
> god(s). So, whenever something important happens, there *has* to be a
> sign, and people - over time - add such signs to the story.
This does not explain how people can *hallucinate* such things,
nor does it explain why certain events are chosen as signs of
greatness and others not. Why is a loud noise a sign of great-
ness and total quiet ominous? Why not hurricanes or tornadoes
instead of earthquakes? Why not spontaneous widespread forest
fires? What is going on in that grey mess of goo we call a
buman brain to make a loud noise so important?
> Personally, I do not think there were extraordinary earthquakes when
> this Jesus guy was killed, and that they are simply "signs of god"
> added later. (like the fact that jesus was declared 'son of god' about
> 3 centuries after he died...)
Of course there weren't. The question is why xians believe that.
JeffMo
>
>This does not explain how people can *hallucinate* such things,
>nor does it explain why certain events are chosen as signs of
>greatness and others not. Why is a loud noise a sign of great-
>ness and total quiet ominous?
Differences in S/N ratio?
JeffMo
"[...] any effort at safe sex is totally, utterly immoral from top to bottom."
-- Rev. James Reuter, Office of Mass Media, Catholic Church of the Philippines
Moshe
wrote:
>Moshe wrote:
>> I think people who say there were earthquakes at the crucifiction, or
>> thunder when the civil war started, are trying to add some divine
>> intervention to the whole thing. Back in the olde days, people
>> believed that meteors and astroids, for example, were signs of their
>> god(s). So, whenever something important happens, there *has* to be a
>> sign, and people - over time - add such signs to the story.
>
>This does not explain how people can *hallucinate* such things,
>nor does it explain why certain events are chosen as signs of
>greatness and others not. Why is a loud noise a sign of great-
>ness and total quiet ominous? Why not hurricanes or tornadoes
>instead of earthquakes? Why not spontaneous widespread forest
>fires? What is going on in that grey mess of goo we call a
>buman brain to make a loud noise so important?
I did not say they 'hallucinate' these things. I said they simply made
them up *afterwards*. The 'audience' demands divine intervention, so
they ad that to the story. Simple as that.
Of course, not *all* these stories have to be made up, but in case
they are not made up, people might have been in a trance (sort of
mass-hypnosis, can happen, does happen).
>> Personally, I do not think there were extraordinary earthquakes when
>> this Jesus guy was killed, and that they are simply "signs of god"
>> added later. (like the fact that jesus was declared 'son of god' about
>> 3 centuries after he died...)
>
>Of course there weren't. The question is why xians believe that.
Because they are told to believe it. Why do xians believe *anything*
in the bible? If you believe in a God, it's not that much of a stretch
to believe in earthquakes when jezus died. Simple.
Earle Jones
biff.spam_...@deathsdoor.com wrote:
> On Tue, 30 May 2000 18:54:59 GMT, Richard <3prom...@home.com>
> wrote:
>
> >Larry Loen wrote:
> >> The earthquakes at the crucificion would have stood
> >> out a little more, but does one have to take _those_ as
> >> historical in order to have a historical Jesus?
> >
> >Earthquakes at the crucifixion are important because whenever
> >Something Important (usually a war) is Born, the people who
> >give birth to it always hear (hallucinate) a Loud Noise. IIRC,
> >Lincoln hallucinated thunder in the daytime when he started
> >the american civil war and Roosevelt delayed the USA's entry
> >into the world war against the wishes of the populace because
> >he was waiting for the Loud Noise. This suggests (and other
> >facts back it up) that the decision to enter into a war is
> >never a rational decision but a psychotic one, and also that
> >xianity is grounded in psychosis.
>
> I think people who say there were earthquakes at the crucifiction, or
> thunder when the civil war started, are trying to add some divine
> intervention to the whole thing.
*
If you want a *real* example of divine intervention, I would suggest
that the World Series of 1989 is the best example. No crucifixions, no
wars -- this was important stuff! -- the fucking world series!!
Oakland won the first two games -- in Oakland. The teams took a day
off. The next game, scheduled for San Francisco, was to begin at six
PM. As the crowd was settling in at Candlestick Park for the third
game, a monstrous earthquake hit San Francisco -- the biggest since 1906.
Much damage was done. Many people were killed. The game was cancelled.
Fires all over the place. A section of the Bay Bridge collapsed. Big
goddam earthqake!
The game was later replayed and Oakland won. Then Oakland won the final
game, taking the series four games to zip!
Now Oakland beating San Francisco four games in a row is prima facie
evidence of God's (or maybe Satan's) fucking around with us ordinary
human beings.
Hey! Stay the hell out of our business, for Christ's sake!
Go screw around with Los Angeles or St. Louis or Pittsburgh, for
Christ's sake.
earle
*
Aaron Boyden
> In article <393312CA...@home.com>,
> sop...@brown.edu wrote:
>
> > It is quite unclear that Nero's persecutions involved Christians; the
> > evidence is very sketchy. As with much of this stuff, it could easily
> > have involved similar names which got confused in later
> > Christian-influenced records.
>
> Do you have a citation for this lack of clarity? Although both Fox in
> _Pagans and Christians_ and Ferguson in _Backgrounds of Early
> Christianity_ mention the Tacitus accounts of Neronian
> persecution of Christians, neither footnotes any controversies regarding
> the reliability of those accounts...Gene
Michael Martin discusses most of the controversial sources, including
Tacitus, in _The Case Against Christianity_. He's not original; most of
his argument against the historical Jesus comes from Wells, but I
haven't read Wells, and don't recall the title of his book off hand.
Somebody else mentioned it in this thread, I believe.
Dan Bongard
>In article <8gtat4$m7r$1...@slb1.atl.mindspring.net>, Dan Bongard
><dbon...@netcom.com> writes
>>> Well, this is not as clear-cut as you think. Near as I can tell, even
>>> from non-Bibilical sources such as Josephus, "miracle-workers" were
>>> pretty commonplace in those days.
>>
>>"Miracle workers", yes. Miracles, no.
>>
>>When Jesus died, if we are to believe the Bible, there was an
>>eclipse, an earthquakes, the temple curtain was torn in two, scads
>>of people came back from the dead and wandered around downtown,
>>after which there was a SECOND earthquake. And no educated citizen
>>of Judea so much as made a note in his diary about it, so far
>>as we can tell.
> This is exactly the sort of argument I keep finding put forward
> by people who are convinced that there was no historical person
> behind the Jesus myths.
Nice little straw man you've constructed there, John, but I
am not "convinced" of any such thing. I don't believe Jesus existed
for the same reason I don't believe gods exist -- because there
isn't a lick of evidence for it.
Show me a reason to believe he existed, and maybe I'll believe it.
-- Dan
Dan Bongard
>In article <393312CA...@home.com>,
> sop...@brown.edu wrote:
>> It is quite unclear that Nero's persecutions involved Christians; the
>> evidence is very sketchy. As with much of this stuff, it could easily
>> have involved similar names which got confused in later
>> Christian-influenced records.
> Do you have a citation for this lack of clarity?
How the hell can a person provide a citation for a lack of clarity?
Provide links do books that fail to extablish the persecution of
Christians? That's the entire library. :)
-- Dan
Paul Murray
news:20000601041048...@ng-cf1.aol.com...
> From: Moshe
>
> You don't doubt the existence of Davy Crockett because stories credit him
with
> single handedly putting down a Haitian slave revolt by spanking the rebels
with
> stalks of sugar cane.
If the Davy Crocket in whom you believe is that man who did those things,
then in an imortant sense the DC that you believe in never existed. Some
other DC did, sure; but he is beside the point when we are discussing the
validity of your DC belief.
--------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.users.bigpond.com/pmurray
ICQ: 26066755
Paul Murray
>
> We need to be extraordinarily careful in interpreting the
> human/spiritual division as made by the ancients. We moderns tend to
> make this division along more or less Cartesian mind-body lines. The
> ancients did divide between flesh and spirit but I'm far from convinced
> that they described that difference in the same way we describe it
> today.
I'm quite convinced that in Rom 7 Paul dichotomises himself into mind/body,
and attributes all his negative feelings to his "body" part. It's quite
fascinating: for Paul, the body has a mind of it's own. Perhaps he thinks of
the mind/body as being like a horse and rider.
Salvation, for Paul, specifically consists not so much in avoiding hell and
getting to heaven; but in being made free of this "body of death" and
getting a new, incorruptible body.
Contrarius
some time on Christian newsgroups, it's fun and refreshing to get such a
modulated perspective. You make some excellent points. Not that I agree with
you, of course!
"Larry Loen" <lwl...@vnet.ibm.com> wrote in message
news:3933F0BF...@rchland.ibm.com...
> Contrarius wrote:
> >
> > The historical existence of Jesus, i.e., his humanity, is VERY important
in
> > Christian theology.
> >
> > The early church was torn with controversy over that very issue. There
were
> > several versions of docetism, the belief that Jesus, being completely
> > without sin, could not have been a man, and thus was actually a spirit,
an
> > emanation of God, a man only in appearance, etc.
>
> But, this is not the same thing at all as a denial of the
> reality of someone who came to be named Jesus
> that wandered around Galilee and
> got killed at Jerusalem.
Back to docetism in a second, but meanwhile, let me try to sketch the
defining historical elements of Jesus' life, just to be sure we're on common
ground:
Jesus was one man.
1. He lived primarily in Galilee during the first 1/3 of the first century.
He wandered from town to town with several disciples, preaching certain
ethical and spiritual principles (Mark, GThomas, Q) that departed from
traditional Hebraic teachings. Some of those teachings advocated defiance of
Hebraic law and suggested that he himself had a divine nature.
2. He journeyed to Jerusalem with his companions. There, he staged a minor
disruption of the Temple.
3. The local Jewish authorities heard about his actions and got wind of his
teachings. They asked Pilate, the Roman prefect of Judea, to execute him.
4. Pilate complied with the request, and crucified him.
I'm submitting these with no inference of additional details or specifics.
If you leave out one of those elements in his life, or attribute them to
multiple individuals, you don't have Jesus. I might be willing to substitute
"a Roman official" for Pilate, otherwise I think this constitutes an
irreducible core.
It's my sense that the most historically likely scenario is Jesus/1. There's
certainty that SOMEONE was spreading the teachings and sayings we find in
the Galilean portions of the gospels. Whether that someone was an individual
or a merry band of iconoclasts we may never know, but it's quite possible
that there was one leading figure. But Jesus/1 by himself is only a fragment
of the Jesus of the gospels - he never even gets to Jerusalem - and as such
doesn't constitute the historical Jesus.
Although the passion account does contain the single best historical
touchstone in the NT - Pilate - it is also replete with "lifts" from
scripture. Although Pilate or other Roman rulers apparently crucified many
religious zealots, those zealots were anti-Roman, not anti-Pharisee. There's
no support for the notion that they executed religious dissidents on
request, routinely or otherwise. I think Jesus/2-4 is entirely mythical.
> and whether there was a
> "biography". I don't see, quite, how you maneuver this dispute
> in your favor of the "urban legend". This is a theological and
> spiritual dispute, at least as you've presented it and my
> sources have it. It sheds no obvious light on whether there
> was a historical Jesus or not; it even suggests to me that
> most heretics thought there _was_, hardly a point in
> your favor.
Your points are causing me to rethink my view regarding the degree to which
the docetist view supports my position regarding Jesus' historicity. I think
I've been projecting too much from the Pauline Silences, wrongly thinking
that his heretical progeny also shared Paul's a-historical view of Jesus. As
you suggest, Jesus' nature was their concern, and they seem to have largely
accepted the gospel accounts as historical.
> Marcion apparently accepted some form of Luke,
> apparently "amended" in a way my sources don't make clear.
Marcion left out Luke's first two chapters, i.e., the birth story and the
child Jesus at the temple story, because he held that Jesus descended to
earth in adult form, as he could have done in Mark's version. Those Lukan
chapters helped support the belief that Jesus fully embodied both divinity
and humanity, a view that was rejected by the heretics. Wells thinks that
Luke included the chapters to counter the heretics' belief that Jesus was a
spiritual emanation in human form.
In addition, my sources indicate that Marcion's version of Luke was
"de-Judaized." I don't have CV, but Marcion's position was that the OT god
was a despicable and unreliable tyrant, a very separate entity from the god
represented by Jesus. So I would assume that some scriptural references were
also deleted in the Marcionite version.
> I don't see any evidence from you or anyone else
> that suggests lots of Christians rejected the gospel story
> in toto; there always seemed to be at least one of the four
> hanging about even the wildest of groups from pretty early
> on.
> On what basis can you refute the claim that the four gospels
> achieved fame relatively quickly?
Depends on what you mean by "relatively quickly."
> I'm not sure who has
> the burden of proof on this topic, but it is by no means
> clear that the "victory" of the four gospels was a late
> breaking event that only happened circa Nicea.
No, I don't think it took THAT long. But, aside from the gospels themselves
(and Josephus/Tacitus, of course), there isn't much indication of historical
acceptance until well into the 2nd century, when we start seeing more
manuscripts as well as attestations by the church fathers.
> To the
> contrary, it seems they were a key and early limiting
> factor, despite competitive texts.
I'd certainly take "competitive texts" - apocrypha - into account in
considering historicity.
It's not a question of rejection, but of how early the gospels were known
and accepted by Christians. The data on this is admittedly sketchy, since
the writing or copying of a work is only partially indicative of widespread
acceptance of its content, and - in turn - the likelihood of contradiction.
Paul, of course, gave us nothing historical to go on. Barely a hint that
Jesus lived on earth. If we put aside the highly problematic Gospel of
Peter, Mark contains the first biographical material about Jesus. It wasn't
written until at least 70. After that, we have to wait until the very
dependent Matthew to see clues that the historicity idea was catching on.
Mack puts Mt. in the mid 90s; most scholars have it at least a decade before
that. In any case, it's a pretty long haul - and a very dry one - between
the "events in question" and anyone writing about them in historical terms.
Of course, there was an intervening war that destroyed records and scattered
possible witnesses.
The contemporaneous Q and Thomas traditions consist mainly of sayings. They
lack any biographical material or passion account, but they do suggest the
existence of such a person by repeating the phrase "Jesus said..." before
many of the sayings. This, IMHO, is very small potatoes.
Josephus' passage written in 95 (sans interpolations), is the first clue
that the historical tradition had finally seeped into the non-Christian
world. And then, in 120, we have Tacitus echoing Christian beliefs regarding
the historicity of the crucifixion.
> "The Triumph of the Meek" by Walsh, someone not obviously
> friendly to orthodoxy, suggests that 2 Corinthians be
> read as a defence of the reality of the Crucificion, which
> is against how you read Paul.
Depends on which "reality" you're talking about! From Paul's perspective,
reality and historicity are not necessarily the same thing. I don't think
there's much question that he believed that the crucifixion "really" took
place - in the realm of the spirit. If he wanted us to think that it took
place in earthly history - as Mark obviously did - he could surely could
have supplied some names and places. Even back then, there was no substitute
for facts!
I'll have to take a look a Walsh.
> And, interestingly, you seem very eager to avoid the subject of John
> altogether. It is an added problem for you as it is an independent
> tradition that affirms the reality of a man named Jesus, whatever his
> special spiritual connections. True, it is even lousier as
> modern history, but it also represents an independent
> tradition against your view and in favor of a particular somebody
> that was later god-ified.
I'm not "eager to avoid John." It's just harder to analyze because it comes
from more sources. And it has Jesus visiting Jerusalem three times, whereas
in the synoptics he only comes to the big city on one fatal occasion. I
don't see how that helps the case for or against historicity.
You're quite right that it does represent an independent tradition. But
there were several such "historical" traditions represented in non-canonical
literature. The Gospel of Peter, for example, presented the passion account
as history, but has Herod, not Pilate, condemning and executing Jesus. I
don't dispute that Christians came to believe in the historicity of Jesus.
But I don't think Christianity began with that belief.
> Quite so. And, if there _had been_ a significant Christianity without
> belief in a historical Jesus, it would help out your thesis
> quite a bit.
Well, I think there was. And it consisted of Paul's congregations.
For believers, the story is in the story itself, not in the Galilean
sayings. When you strip the religious motivations and elements - ORIGINAL
SIN, SUFFERING, REBIRTH, REDEMPTION, SALVATION, A NEW COVENANT WITH GOD,
etc. - from the "historical Jesus," you end up with a revered teacher who
fails to rise to the level of Confucius.
Take a look at the passion story without the supernatural and religious
elements:
A dissident preacher comes to town with some rag-tag followers. He goes the
Temple. To show his contempt for the Jewish religious leaders and their
practices, he upsets some tables used by traders who take foreign currency
(not acceptable for donations) in exchange for local money. Later, a
disloyal follower "gives him up" (as though he were wearing a disguise) to
the Jewish priests and scribes. Absurdly angered by his claims of a special
relationship with God, the city fathers treat this annoyance like a capital
crime and a major threat to civil order. Instead of merely banishing this
nutcase from the city, these bloodthirsty Jews demand that the Roman rulers
execute him. Acting completely out of character, the suddenly compliant
Romans comply with their ridiculous demand. End of anti-Semitic story.
Not only does it not make sense, it isn't much of a story. And the
connection with the wandering sage of Galilee is tenuous at best.
> Well, who cares two figs for the popular media?
Christianity is the result of "popular media." That's how it's been
propagated. The popular media helps to lay the foundation for superstition
and makes it acceptable.
> The more
> interesting question for you is why more scholars don't doubt
> the existence of Jesus.
I would add that to my original question. More below.
> You also have to give some kind of answer to the "synoptic
> problem." It is not enough to say "Mark wrote and the others
> simply copied." It seems clear enough, even on casual inspection,
> that the "synoptics" have not only significant agreement, but
> significant "disagreement." In fact, "synoptic" is a nice
> appologetic word for "three books that copied from each other
> some and copied from other places a lot." They are not
> identical and the differences are widely felt to be variations
> in an underlying oral tradition.
And written "traditions" as well, e.g., GThomas and Q. What you say is true,
but I don't see how the variations in the gospels affect my position one way
or the other.
> You might perhaps argue that the variance is mere "urban legend"
> variation, but it is just as possible that this is ordinary garbling
> of oral history, something we know can also happen.
I don't understand the difference.
Written history can be garbled too, given the human propensity for making
notes on the margin, "improving" wording, editing for relevance, and so on.
Clearly, there was a great deal of redaction from one strata to the next
between 70 AD and acceptance of the canon.
> The point is not that the gospels prove anything, but
> rather they do not provide an easy framework to _disprove_
> Jesus' existence either.
I agree. If it were that easy, we'd all be practicing Mithraism or
something.
> The evidence seems to me to cut
> both ways. The testimony of the church itself seems to
> be pretty universal -- there was some fellow wandering
> around Palestine. If they made it up, they did a good
> job of it.
They certainly did. They melded two traditions - the Galilean Kingdom of God
tradition and the urban Mythic Christ tradition - both grounded in Judaism,
the most complex and literate religious belief system the world had ever
seen - and may ever see. And, to enrich the mixture, they added in some
Greek philosophy. Powerful ingredients = powerful medicine.
(I have to reiterate: "Some fellow wandering around Palestine" is not enough
to constitute Jesus Christ.)
> Your argument is perliously close to saying that "since we
> know Davy Crockett couldn't have killed a bear when he
> was only three that he must be an urban legend."
Cheap shot! I did not suggest that the existence of myth obviates the
possibility of a historical basis.
But it's equally perilous to assume that the only foundations for legends
are historical events.
> > Seems like non-believers ought to stand up and say, "Hey! That's
rubbish.
> > There's no evidence, so stop with all the equivocation."
>
> The reason for the equivocation is that the facts are
> not so clear cut. I don't unequivocally suggest Jesus
> existed, but I don't think the evidence clearly shows
> he did not, either.
If you define him as I have in the first part of this message, I think
there's a serious problem of missing and inconclusive evidence. If you
extract only Jesus/1 from the gospels, you have an excellent case for
historicity. Then again, you don't have an "historical Jesus."
> I think that to say "because we don't have ironclad
> proof, let's make it a point to say Jesus didn't exist"
> has two errors:
>
> 1. Wastes time and energy because it uses the process
> of history in an invalid way.
How so?
> We have "ironclad proof"
> of darn near nothing in history.
Of course, but that doesn't invalidate an attempt to show that a widely
believed and profoundly influential story is mythical rather than
historical.
> The additional problem is that it costs atheism
> absolutely nothing to say that Jesus' may have
> existed or that it is more probable than not that
> he existed. It concedes nothing interesting.
Way too cynical for me! (And I DO think the question of historicity is
interesting. Each to his own.)
--
Contrarius
contr...@hotmail.com
Larry Loen
>
> "Automort" <auto...@aol.com> wrote in message
> news:20000601041048...@ng-cf1.aol.com...
> > From: Moshe
> >
> > You don't doubt the existence of Davy Crockett because stories credit him
> with
> > single handedly putting down a Haitian slave revolt by spanking the rebels
> with
> > stalks of sugar cane.
>
> If the Davy Crocket in whom you believe is that man who did those things,
> then in an imortant sense the DC that you believe in never existed. Some
> other DC did, sure; but he is beside the point when we are discussing the
> validity of your DC belief.
>
But, at least relative to the discussion about
the so-called "historical Jesus" this is entirely beside
the point.
The point of the "historical" Jesus is to see, independent of
all the god-talk, whether one can reconstruct a credible story
about an ordinary mortal from the very partisan and confusing
evidence.
Thus, the analogy is a good one, for if we're talking about
the "historical" Davy Crockett, then we should also disregard
the obvious pseudo-divine tall tales surrounding him, too.
--
Larry Loen
gcmi...@my-deja.com
Earle Jones <ejon...@concentric.net> wrote:
> Now Oakland beating San Francisco four games in a row is prima facie
> evidence of God's (or maybe Satan's) fucking around with us ordinary
> human beings.
A better argument for divine intervention would be the Mets steamrolling
the Orioles in the 1969 Series. I believe that was the year the Orioles
had four 20 game winners on their pitching staff and had won more than
100 games in the regular season--and lost to an expansion team
that had been playing for less than a decade....Gene
SkyEyes
Richard <3prom...@home.com> wrote:
<Big snip>
> > sign, and people - over time - add such signs to the story.
>
> This does not explain how people can *hallucinate* such things,
> nor does it explain why certain events are chosen as signs of
> greatness and others not. Why is a loud noise a sign of great-
> ness and total quiet ominous?
I think the "total quiet=ominous" thing is hard-wired. Out in the
wild, if things are going good and normally, there's generally quite a
bit of noise; a wide variety of it, although it might not be especially
loud. However, (for instance) before a storm or when a predator is
detected, those normal noises cease. (Most little critters [i.e.,
those what aren't mountain lions or tigers or bears, oh my!] tend to
freeze for at least several moments.) Therefore, the sudden cessation
of normal sound automatically signals "Oh, shit!" We two-footed folk
have translated that instinctual urge to quiet into A Sign From Heaven,
or other such silliness, i.e., "Holy Shit!" Makes a spiffy literary
device, too.
Brenda "I'm Just Waiting for the Monsoon" Nelson, A.A. #34
Automort
>Why is a loud noise a sign of great-
>>ness and total quiet ominous?
>
>Differences in S/N ratio?
Loud noise is either you scaring everything else or something else that is
visible scaring you. Silence is something sneaking up on you.
Automort
>I did not say they 'hallucinate' these things. I said they simply made
>them up *afterwards*.
Or they could have combined memories of different events. That happens.
gcmi...@my-deja.com
dbon...@netcom.com (Dan Bongard) wrote:
> gcmi...@my-deja.com writes:
>
> >In article <393312CA...@home.com>,
> > sop...@brown.edu wrote:
>
> >> It is quite unclear that Nero's persecutions involved Christians;
the
> >> evidence is very sketchy. As with much of this stuff, it could
easily
> >> have involved similar names which got confused in later
> >> Christian-influenced records.
>
> > Do you have a citation for this lack of clarity?
>
> How the hell can a person provide a citation for a lack of clarity?
Where there are reasonable controversies--"lack of clarity"--over a
question, scholarship requires that one at the very least acknowledge
them in passing. Neither Fox nor Ferguson--both well-regarded historians
of the field--mention such controversy over the Tacitus accounts of
Neronian persecution of Christians.
Aaron Boyden mentions Michael Martin, rightly noting that Martin's work
is second-hand (Martin is a philosopher not a historian). I suspect that
there may indeed be room for some controversy over Tacitus's account of
the origins of Christianity, as Tacitus will have had to rely on the
accounts of others regarding events removed from him in time and place.
Less so for his accounts of life under Nero, for he was there...Gene
William C Waterhouse
Larry Loen <lwl...@vnet.ibm.com> writes:
>...
> There is still a lot of doubt and suspicion about how much
> the US government knew, or should have known, about the
> "sneak attack" and whether it was "deliberately allowed
> to make us mad" but one obvious and embarassing fact that
> is undeniable is that the Philipines were attacked,
> erroneously, several hours before Pearl. That's right,
> US forces were under attack BEFORE Pearl and we STILL
> pretty much weren't ready for the attack when it came.
> Can you spell "denial?" As a people and as a military,
> we did not want that war.
This must be either a mistaken memory or a mistake in calculation
of times. Here they are worked out:
1)The Japanese statement breaking off negotiations was meant
to be delivered (but wasn't) at 1 PM Dec. 7, Washington time.
2) The attack on Pearl Harbor started aroung 8 AM Dec. 7,
Honolulu time. That was a little later, somewhere around 1:30 PM
Washington time. [This is from Kahn, Codebreakers, which is the
source that ccame to hand first; I don't think it is in doubt.]
3) Washington is 5 hours west of Greenwich, so the attack began
at about 6:30 PM Dec 7, GMT.
4) Manila is 8 hours east of Greenwich, so the attact on Pearl
Harbor began about 2:30 AM Dec 8, Manila time.
5) But the attacks on the Philippines, Singapore, etc.
began in the morning of Dec 8, local time.
So perhaps the original idea, which would be correct, was just
the other way around: the attack on the Philippines was 4 hours
after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
William C. Waterhouse
Penn State
Richard
> I did not say they 'hallucinate' these things. I said they simply made
> they ad that to the story. Simple as that.
You're mistaking the level of explanation I require. Obviously the
xians wanted to put *some* sign in order to show that an Important
Event had occured. Buw why did they pick /that/ as a sign and not
some other thing? Why earthquakes and not tornadoes or forest fires?
> Of course, not *all* these stories have to be made up, but in case
> they are not made up, people might have been in a trance (sort of
> mass-hypnosis, can happen, does happen).
But calling it mass hypnosis (group-trance is more accurate -- and it
not only does happen, it happens /all/ the time) is a very superficial
explanation. Why are earthquakes an important symbol in a trance state?
Why do people enter trance states in the first place?
> >Of course there weren't. The question is why xians believe that.
>
> Because they are told to believe it. Why do xians believe *anything*
Not only is this incredibly simplistic, but it is flat wrong.
> in the bible? If you believe in a God, it's not that much of a stretch
> to believe in earthquakes when jezus died. Simple.
*Not* simple. Everything in the Bible is there for a reason. Not a
/rational/ reason, but a compelling reason nonetheless. "I say this
because I was told to say it and they told me because they were told
to say it and the person who told *them* to say it only did so because
they were themselves ordered to say it" is sheer nonsense. Social
behaviour /must/ be explained by independent facts and not reified
onto yet more social behaviour. Even sociologists and historians know
this when they admit that sociology and history can explain nothing.
Contrarius
> Contrarius wrote:
> >
> [snip]
> > While it's true that Judea may have been something of a backwater from
the
> > Roman point of view, the events - Jesus' great public miracles, the
> > geophysical/supernatural events which supposedly took place at his
execution
> > at Roman hands, and the immediate reaction of his followers to those
> > events - would surely have created a stir in the literate Roman ruling
class
> > and the Hellenized intelligencia. But we have no indication that the
Romans
> > were even aware of the Jesus story until well into the 2nd century.
> >
>
> Well, this is not as clear-cut as you think. Near as I can tell, even
> from non-Bibilical sources such as Josephus, "miracle-workers" were
> pretty
> commonplace in those days.
>
> cleanse lepers, it doesn't seem you had much credibility
> as a healer. The standards were a bit different back then ;-).
>
> The earthquakes at the crucificion would have stood
> out a little more, but does one have to take _those_ as
> historical in order to have a historical Jesus?
No, but I think you need a crucified Galilean preacher. Aside from the
heavily-scripturalized Passion account, we have no evidence that such a
crucifixion took place.
> There's a bit of a false dichotomy here -- its like
> you're arguing that it is either all true or else Jesus
> is made up in toto. Whatever the truth is here,
> I don't think it is quite so either-or. History, especially
> ancient history, is seldom so clear-cut.
>
> Meanwhile, there is the claim floating about that
> the Christians were blamed for the burning of Rome in Nero's
> time -- which is around 60AD or so. And, what of some modest
> persecutions before 100 AD under both Nero and Domitian?
> Are you saying all of these bits of history
> survive only in Christian sources?
No. There were "Christians" as early as 40 AD. And there was Pharisaic
persecution during that period. But in the absence of a clear indication in
Paul's epistles, we don't know whether the earliest Christians believed that
Jesus was an historical figure.
I find it helpful to keep in mind that religious beliefs at that time did
not demand that there be a human founder. The realm of the gods had a life
of its own, and elaborate histories were written of events in the domain of
the heavens.
> Moreover, there is the destruction of Jerusalem in
> 70 AD, something the Romans certainly did (the column
> describing it survives). While there
> may not be clear-cut records on what the Romans did
> to the Christians at that time, the subsequent history
> makes two things clear: There were Christians and
> right about then, they were treated differently by
> nearly everyone. They ceased being treated as a Jewish
> sect right about then however they were treated before.
>
A pivotal fact. But Christian-Jewish relations were lousy long before the
Desolation. Paul attests to that. In fact, they eventually became lousy
enough to cause Mark to accuse the Jews of fomenting the crucifixion.
> So, I think your claim that the Roman authorities
> knew nothing about Christianity before, say, 200 AD,
> is a bit too strong for the facts to support. The
> facts just as readily support a small, pretty much
> powerless group that the Roman intermittently
> persecuted and probably largely ignored.
No, I said 2nd CENTURY, and I was referring only to the awareness of gospel
accounts of Jesus as a man in historical time and place. There had been
Christians since (possibly) before 40 AD, but they were of the mystical
Pauline variety. Keep in mind that Paul never mentioned any of Jesus'
teaching (except the eucharist injunction, and that only briefly) or
anything about the Passion, including Pilate, or anything about Jesus'
origins or life in Galilee. It's probable that he regarded Jesus as a purely
spiritual figure, not a historical one.
> If you're trying to argue that Christianity arose
> after 150 AD and that there is no prologue at all --
> or at least that the Christianity of Paul and
> the Gospels (however separate) was entirely eliminated and
> replaced at some magical point circa (say) 150 AD,
> then I think your thesis reaches too far and
> mis-understands the normal way the historical
> sources of those days are customarily used.
And you would be right. No, my timeframes are pretty much the standard ones.
I do harbor a suspicion that the beginnings of messianic Christianity, i.e.,
belief in a crucified and resurrected Christ, were earlier than commonly
thought, perhaps even in the twenties or teens BC. And I think that the
Markan gospel came later than it's usually dated. Like Burton Mack, I put it
at 75 at the earliest.
> Moreover, if you accept Paul as being
> at all historical, and I read you as doing
> so, then I don't see how you
> can avoid the fact that Christians were
> widely scattered in the Empire from the start.
I do accept Paul as historical. Of course, I think the "scattering" is
accounted for by the fact that the beginnings were well before Paul.
(Perhaps even before Jesus!) I cannot support that position, however, except
by noting how rapidly it supposedly grew. Christians attribute that to the
"power of the gospel," of course; I attribute it to earlier beginnings.
> Before you can eliminate a "historical" Jesus,
> you have to not only stare down the Gospels,
> but also a lot of ancient tradition. It may
> all be bunk, but you just can't wave if off
> as easily given you accept the existence of
> Paul.
Tradition = legend, especially in early Christianity. But I don't casually
dismiss any of it. It's a BIG story, and plenty of smart people believe it.
> Now, I admit you can always say "case not
> proved" but that's a long way from saying
> "case _dis_ proved".
I'm in the former category. But that's a statement of non-belief that's
pretty strong in itself.
--
Contrarius
contr...@hotmail.com
Contrarius
title "Did Jesus Exist?" Actually, a more readable book that takes a similar
mythicist position is Earl Doherty's "The Jesus Puzzle." Doherty also has an
interesting and informative website,
http://www.magi.com/~oblio/jesus/home.htm
--
Contrarius
contr...@hotmail.com
"Aaron Boyden" <boy...@home.com> wrote in message
news:3937C31...@home.com...
> gcmi...@my-deja.com wrote:
>
> > In article <393312CA...@home.com>,
> > sop...@brown.edu wrote:
> >
> > > It is quite unclear that Nero's persecutions involved Christians; the
> > > evidence is very sketchy. As with much of this stuff, it could easily
> > > have involved similar names which got confused in later
> > > Christian-influenced records.
> >
Contrarius
> "Contrarius" <contr...@earthlink.net> wrote:
> >If you reject supernatural events a
> priori,
> > keep in mind that such events are the key elements in Jesus'
> biography. They
> > drive the story.
>
> admits.
How so?
> The miracle-claims generally drive the narrative of the divinity
> of the Christ.
I don't see much difference between that and my statement that the story is
driven by supernatural events.
> No first century claims for divinity would have gotten
> anywhere without some kind of miraculous attestation. (Note well that
> first century Judaism did not deny miracle-working, but neither did they
> rely on it for the kind of theological grounding that early Christianity
> did.)
Without Jesus' claims of divinity, attested to by the miracles and the
resurrection, you have a wandering sage who wanders into Jerusalem and is
then executed for a minor disruption of the Temple. Is that close enough to
the gospel accounts for you to acknowledge that Jesus existed?
Isn't there some point where you can say that Jesus probably didn't exist?
Suppose the crucified Temple disrupter was a potter from Damascus? Can you
say that Jesus existed just because we have several archeological finds that
include many sayings attributed to him, but contain no biographical material
at all?
Some social liberals and revolutionaries have long taken the position that
Jesus was one of their ideological ancestors. But a careful reading of the
NT doesn't provide much support for that view.
> It would (for the time being) be a serious mistake to conflate arguments
> about the divinity of Jesus the Christ with arguments about the
> historicity of Jesus the Nazarene rabble-rouser. To put the matter too
> succinctly, the former is theologically driven while the latter is not.
I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "conflate arguments," but you seem to
think that you can easily extract the secular aspects of the gospel story
from the whole. There are people who believe that a viable narrative will
remain if you simply delete the miracles and the resurrection. Those people
have not given the bible a very informed reading, in fact I'd venture to say
that many of them have not read the NT period. IMHO, the synoptic gospels
cannot withstand that kind of treatment and stand up as a plausible
biography.
> Many of the earlier Roman emperors were also held to be deities.
> Suetonius reports that Vespasian restored the sight of a blind man by
> fashioning a paste of mud and spit and applying it to the blind man's
> eyes. But the historicity of the Emperor Vespasian is not determined by
> the truth or falsehood of this account of a miracle he supposedly
> performed.
Not analogous. The cornerstone of Vaspasian's life was s not his divinity,
nor was it his power to magically heal the sick.
> Your argument "Because miracles are impossible, there was no Jesus" is a
> non-sequitur
That's not my argument. But you're close.
Of course, it's possible to keep pulling farther and farther back from the
gospel narrative and still insist on the historicity of Jesus.
Take your pick:
There were several hundred wandering preachers in Galilee during the first
century. None of them performed miracles, but all preached a message that
closely approximated the CST and the GThomas/Markan/Q/synoptic texts. Would
that scenario alone (if proven) be sufficient to justify the statement that
"Jesus existed"?
A homeless person pointlessly disrupted activities at the Temple in
Jerusalem and was crucified for his trouble. Would that scenario alone (if
proven) be sufficient to justify the statement that "Jesus existed"?
Seems like there's a need to settle on a core, irreducible definition of
"Jesus," with the variables eliminated. I attempted this in a recent post;
take a look and see what you think.
--
Contrarius
contr...@hotmail.com
Automort
>The point of the "historical" Jesus is to see, independent of
>all the god-talk, whether one can reconstruct a credible story
>about an ordinary mortal from the very partisan and confusing
>evidence.
It appears to me that such is possible, although it would always remain largely
speculation because most evidence about Jesus is conveyed in religious and
specifically anti-Christian writings.
What astonishes me is the vehemence with which some individuals deny that an
actual person could have existed as a starting point for jesus stories. That's
a phenomenon in itself. Do they, somehow, think that if a Jesus who was a
preacher existed then all the supernatural stuff must be true? And for what
purpose would a bunch of cynical manipulators have gotten together and made up
this tale and duped people into believing it? Certainly they could not have
looked cenuiries into the future to see that it would become the state
religion.
Automort
> Why earthquakes and not tornadoes or forest fires?
Because earthquakes are fairly common there, whereas most of the area by then
was deforested and tornados are rare in those parts.
Moshe
wrote:
<snip>
>You're mistaking the level of explanation I require. Obviously the
>xians wanted to put *some* sign in order to show that an Important
>Event had occured. Buw why did they pick /that/ as a sign and not
>some other thing? Why earthquakes and not tornadoes or forest fires?
tornadoes and forest fires are for *ordinary* people. This is the son
of God, the king of the jews, the founding father of the only true
religion, etc. (by the time these stories about the earthquakes were
being told, I imagine these 'facts' about jesus to be widely known...)
So, of course there's an earthquake! It's the *level* of divine
intervention that matters. When something as important as this
happens, an important natural disaster *must* accompany it!
And, as another person already pointed out, the earthquake didn't have
to be at the exact moment of his death: within a few years or even
decades should be enough for memories and stories to get mixed up.
>> Of course, not *all* these stories have to be made up, but in case
>> they are not made up, people might have been in a trance (sort of
>> mass-hypnosis, can happen, does happen).
>
>But calling it mass hypnosis (group-trance is more accurate -- and it
>not only does happen, it happens /all/ the time) is a very superficial
>explanation. Why are earthquakes an important symbol in a trance state?
Put yourself in the mind of someone living in the 6th century or
something. (obviously imagined, and very much distorted by modern
knowledge) You heard stories of jesus' death, and other stories of
tornadoes, forest fires, and even an earthquake around the same time.
Which of these would be a better example of divine intervention?
Right, the earthquake - It's something that doesn't occur very often,
and cannot be explained by scientific reasoning. Forest fires and
tornadoes are, well, more common... (depending on the question if
tornadoes actually occur in that part of the world. Earthquakes do
anyway...)
>Why do people enter trance states in the first place?
I have no idea, I'm not a psychologist. I just have a big imagination.
:)
>> >Of course there weren't. The question is why xians believe that.
>>
>> Because they are told to believe it. Why do xians believe *anything*
>
>Not only is this incredibly simplistic, but it is flat wrong.
Not if you put it in the proper timeframe... In the days I imagine
this story reaching the general population, people believed a lot of
things we now consider stupid and backward.
Why would an earthquake not be considered stupid and backward? Simply
because it is something that *does* happen, and can be seen.
Werewolves and all sorts of mythical creatures cannot be seen and/or
proven, therefore they are myths. An earthquake at the moment of
jesus' death *may* have happened, and as such is not as easily
dismissed.
>> in the bible? If you believe in a God, it's not that much of a stretch
>> to believe in earthquakes when jezus died. Simple.
>
>*Not* simple. Everything in the Bible is there for a reason. Not a
>/rational/ reason, but a compelling reason nonetheless. "I say this
>because I was told to say it and they told me because they were told
>to say it and the person who told *them* to say it only did so because
>they were themselves ordered to say it" is sheer nonsense. Social
>behaviour /must/ be explained by independent facts and not reified
>onto yet more social behaviour. Even sociologists and historians know
>this when they admit that sociology and history can explain nothing.
I am not an expert on the bible, but is this earthquake stuff actually
in there, or is it a story belonging to xian mythology surrounding the
bible??? The reason I aslk is simple: if it is in the bible, that's
the reason xians believe it, if it's not, well, my theory might
explain it. :)
JeffMo
>Moshe wrote:
>> I did not say they 'hallucinate' these things. I said they simply made
>> them up *afterwards*. The 'audience' demands divine intervention, so
>> they ad that to the story. Simple as that.
>
>You're mistaking the level of explanation I require. Obviously the
>xians wanted to put *some* sign in order to show that an Important
>Event had occured. Buw why did they pick /that/ as a sign and not
>some other thing? Why earthquakes and not tornadoes or forest fires?
Hmmmm, maybe earthquakes strike at the very foundation, as it were.
We also talk about things being of "earth-shattering" importance.
gcmi...@my-deja.com
> > It would (for the time being) be a serious mistake to conflate
arguments
> > about the divinity of Jesus the Christ with arguments about the
> > historicity of Jesus the Nazarene rabble-rouser. To put the matter
too
> > succinctly, the former is theologically driven while the latter is
not.
Contrarius replied:
> I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "conflate arguments," but you
seem to
> think that you can easily extract the secular aspects of the gospel
story
> from the whole.
The narrative of Jesus of Nazareth is separable (not necessarily
"easily") from the narrative of Jesus the Christ, the Son of God.
Conflating the arguments here means arguing as if the question of Jesus'
residence in Nazareth is indistinguishable in principle from the
question of the claims to divinity made about him.
Surely the whole question of historicity revolves around what we can
establish based on the evidence. That pursuit is typically thought of as
a "secular" question.
>There are people who believe that a viable narrative
will
> remain if you simply delete the miracles and the resurrection.
Depends what you mean by "viable" here.
> Those
people
> have not given the bible a very informed reading, in fact I'd venture
to say
> that many of them have not read the NT period.
I would agree that the NT cannot be stripped of supernaturalism and
remain the same document.
Nevertheless, it is critical to note that supernaturalism, per se, was
not necessarily what was distinctive about Jesus. There were plenty of
other miracle-workers around Palestine. As I've pointed out, even the
Roman emperors worked the occasional miracle. (Pliny's _Natural
Histories_ are also full of apparent miracles that have nothing
whatsoever to do with Christian claims.) Likewise, Jesus was not the
only person about whom the claim was raised that he had been resurrected
from the dead.
However, in our modern era, the issue of supernaturalism is critical to
our understanding of the world. Under the tutelage of Hume, we discard
any account that seems to rely on miracle because our modern models have
no room for supernaturalism. It makes understanding old texts difficult
because they presume a quite different metaphysic of substance, among
other things.
> IMHO, the synoptic
gospels
> cannot withstand that kind of treatment and stand up as a plausible
> biography.
But they weren't intended as biography in any modern sense, i.e., in the
sense of relating the factual history based on sources that are in
principle publically available. That genre was only recently invented,
and it is a mistake to expect older sources to hew to modern criteria.
Frankly, it is remarkable how shaky the evidence is for a lot of ancient
history. We're fumbling around in the dark here.
You are also implicitly arguing from incredulity here by using the word
"plausibly," which implies "I can't bring myself to believe it, so it
must be false." I suppose there are times when this argument can win the
day, but I'm far from convinced that this is one of them.
> > Many of the earlier Roman emperors were also held to be deities.
> > Suetonius reports that Vespasian restored the sight of a blind man
by
> > fashioning a paste of mud and spit and applying it to the blind
man's
> > eyes. But the historicity of the Emperor Vespasian is not determined
by
> > the truth or falsehood of this account of a miracle he supposedly
> > performed.
>
> Not analogous. The cornerstone of Vaspasian's life was s not his
divinity,
> nor was it his power to magically heal the sick.
Oh but it is analogous. Both Vespasian and Jesus were men about whom
claims of divinity have been made. (Anyone who can do one miracle can
surely do more, no?) The historical question is "What do we know about
them as men?" Exactly the same question for both.
[...]
> Seems like there's a need to settle on a core, irreducible definition
of
> "Jesus," with the variables eliminated.
I think Larry Loen picked up on the confusion quite admirably: you claim
to be arguing *against* a historical Jesus, but end up making a good
case *for* a historical Jesus, all the while denying you are doing so.
Some five-finger exercises for you:
(1) Make the case for a historical Socrates. What kind of person was he?
(2) Assess the state of the direct historical evidence for Alexander the
Great. Why do we believe he existed?
(3) In Pliny's _Natural Histories_, Pliny talks about instances of
people who were seen walking around after they had died. He declines,
however, to discuss resurrections on the grounds that he is writing a
natural history rather than a supernatural one. What is Pliny talking
about? Why does it matter?
(4) What do questions 1-3 have to do with the quest for the historical
Jesus?
I'm happy to let you have the last word...Gene
jesse l nowells
On Fri, 2 Jun 2000, Moshe wrote:
>>> I think people who say there were earthquakes at the crucifiction, or
>>> thunder when the civil war started, are trying to add some divine
>>> intervention to the whole thing. Back in the olde days, people
>>> believed that meteors and astroids, for example, were signs of their
>>> god(s). So, whenever something important happens, there *has* to be a
>>> sign, and people - over time - add such signs to the story.
>>This does not explain how people can *hallucinate* such things,
>>nor does it explain why certain events are chosen as signs of
>>greatness and others not. Why is a loud noise a sign of great-
>>ness and total quiet ominous? Why not hurricanes or tornadoes
>>instead of earthquakes? Why not spontaneous widespread forest
>>fires? What is going on in that grey mess of goo we call a
>>buman brain to make a loud noise so important?
it's a bookmark. take any peak personal experience you may have had. all
the particulars of a given moment become important. one may later assign
some arbitrary meaning to some aspect of that moment & call it fate
rather than just deal with it as being purely circumstantial.
> I did not say they 'hallucinate' these things. I said they simply made
> them up *afterwards*. The 'audience' demands divine intervention, so
> they ad that to the story. Simple as that. Of course, not *all* these
> stories have to be made up, but in case they are not made up, people
> might have been in a trance (sort of mass-hypnosis, can happen, does
> happen).
perhaps it can be a mass-hysteria that is a reflection of the times where
certain underlying current issues are coming to play.
>>> Personally, I do not think there were extraordinary earthquakes when
>>> this Jesus guy was killed, and that they are simply "signs of god"
>>> added later. (like the fact that jesus was declared 'son of god' about
>>> 3 centuries after he died...)
>>Of course there weren't. The question is why xians believe that.
> Because they are told to believe it. Why do xians believe *anything*
> in the bible? If you believe in a God, it's not that much of a stretch
> to believe in earthquakes when jezus died. Simple.
yeah, what's an earthquake compared the notion that an infinite being up &
decides to be human to alleviate the human condition that it designed
in the first place?
jaro...@my-deja.com
Jesus: The Great Debate [book & video] (Frontier Research Publications,
1999)
by Grant R. Jeffrey
http://www.grantjeffrey.com/article/debate.htm
The Case for Christ: A Journalist's Personal Investigation of the
Evidence for Jesus (Zondervan, 1998) by Lee Strobel [book & video]
http://www.crossroads.ca/transcripts/leestrobel.htm
"An airtight case for the Christ of the Bible" (BC Christian News, May
1999)
http://www.bcchristiannews.org/may99/airtight.html
In the Fullness of Time: A Historian Looks at Christmas, Easter, and the
Early Church (Kregel Publications, 1998) by Paul L. Maier
Dr. Paul L. Maier, Professor of Ancient History at Western Michigan
University, is considered the world's leading leading historian on the
first century. Maier rigorously documents archaeological evidence not
only for the historicity of Jesus, but of Pontius Pilate, Caiaphas,
biblical sites, etc. http://www.tobiascomm.com
On December 16, 1999 Maier was interviewed on the Canadian television
program "100 Huntley Street" <http://www.crossroads.ca/transcripts/
991216.htm> and again April 17 - May 5. Daily program transcripts are
available at <http://www.crossroads.ca/transcripts/transcripts.htm>
*
Friday, June 9th on _Focus on the Family_ radio:
"Jesus Can't Be the Messiah -- or Can He?"
Ever ask yourself this? Stan Telchin did -- as an Orthodox Jew.
To find radio stations in your area that carry the broadcast, or hear
the broadcast online, go to:
http://www.family.org/station
In Canada,
---
David Buckna
Proverbs 30:4
Larry Loen
>
> jaro...@my-deja.com writes:
>
> >Dr. Paul L. Maier, Professor of Ancient History at Western Michigan
> >University, is considered the world's leading leading historian on the
> >first century. Maier rigorously documents archaeological evidence not
> >only for the historicity of Jesus, but of Pontius Pilate, Caiaphas,
> >biblical sites, etc. http://www.tobiascomm.com
>
> leading leading [sic] historian on the first century"... by whom?
> And why is the world's leading historian on what is arguably
> the most important century in human history teaching at "Western
> Michigan University"? Oxford decided to settle on the second-best
> historian? :)
>
> -- Dan
I wonder if there is a bit of conflation of two
different persons going on. I happen to
know a little bit of the fellow at Western Michigan
University, because he is a personal acquaintance of my
own parents. He is reasonably well regarded, near as I can
tell, but I don't think he's quite a leading person
in the field. And, (foggy memory deserts me) I'm not
sure his name is spelled that way, though it well could be.
There _is_, however, a John P Meier, who wrote a book
I have called "A Marginal Jew" and he works out of
Washington DC (Catholic University of America).
I don't know who is more emminent, in fact, but the
Meier whose _book_ I have has no citations for my
parent's good friend under any spelling.
And, this is in a book with
copious notes (it even conveniently has an
"author index") and from one who frequently quotes
folks like Brown and Crossan who _do_ seem to
be pre-eminent in their field, at least.
It is just possible that my book's Meier is
mostly concerned with theology, but the topic
of the book is about the "historical Jesus"
and he does things like discuss Josephus at
some length. So, perhaps the absence of mention
of Western's Meier is an accident.
Or, perhaps it is significant. I can't tell,
but it makes for an interesting working
hypothesis that the two were somehow
conflated.
PS, the link given in the original is,
for me at least, regrettably broken.
--
Larry Loen
Dan Bongard
> And your point is? I'm not clear which way you are intending
> to argue, but for me you make the case for a historical Jesus.
Let me make this simple for you:
If you want to say "some person, somewhere, way back in history,
inspired something that caused something that influenced
something, yadda yadda yadda, that led to people writing about
a man named Jesus", and call THAT guy "the historical Jesus",
fine. There's no way to prove or disprove your claim, nor is
there any reason to care.
If, however, you want to name a specific act, or statement,
that Jesus supposedly made, and then claim that there was a
specific person responsible for that act, and that THAT
person is "the historical Jesus", you'll have to do the
following:
(1): List the specific act.
(2): Cite evidence supporting the claim that one person was
responsible for it.
-- Dan
Dan Bongard
> Incidentally, back then there was none of the supernatural
> stuff. "Engrams" were supposed to be caused by painful
> experiences in one's past.
Since the "engrams" were supposed to be remembered at the
cellular level, however -- even a fertilized egg gets
engrams -- it is accurate to call engrams "supernatural".
There is no physical way they could possibly exist, given
all that we know. If that's not "supernatural", what is?
-- Dan
Anthony Campbell
suppose that there was no historical Jesus at all is the reported words
from the cross: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"
This utterance has been remarkably difficult for Christians to explain
and it's hard to suppose that anyone would have made if up who wished to
invent a god-like figure from scratch.
I would be more inclined to suppose that there was a historical
personage, around whom a large body of legend has accumulated.
Anthony
--
Anthony Campbell - running Linux Debian 2.1 (Windows-free zone)
Book Reviews: http://www.pentelikon.freeserve.co.uk/bookreviews/
Skeptical articles: http://www.freethinker.uklinux.net/
"To be forced by desire into any unwarrantable belief is a calamity."
I.A. Richards
Anthony Campbell
> So far, Hubbard is not divine, not quite. But give Scientology a few
> more generations and Hubbard will have performed miracles.
As a side issue to this, has anyone ever commented on the strange
resemblance between the ideas of Scientology (from what little I know of
them) and Gnostic Christianity? Scientology, I believe, postulates that
we are Thetans who got somehow caught in the material world. Gnostic
Christianity, likewise, considered that human beings contained a divine
spark that had become enmeshed in the toils of the material world, and
it was the job of religion to bring about liberation from this state of
affairs. This was a very potent idea with many ramifications throughout
the Middle Ages (the Cathars, the Ismailis within Islam, for example).
Did Hubbard get his ideas from Gnosticism, or was it a case of
convergent evolution? Anyone know?
Just curious.
Steven Carr
Campbell) wrote:
>One piece of evidence which I think it makes it rather implausible to
>suppose that there was no historical Jesus at all is the reported words
>from the cross: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"
>This utterance has been remarkably difficult for Christians to explain
>and it's hard to suppose that anyone would have made if up who wished to
>invent a god-like figure from scratch.
Intriguingly, your other post mentions Gnostic Christians who supposed
that there was a divine spark in all human beings, including Jesus.
It is a little contradictory to say that 'My God, my God why have you
forsaken me' is remarkably difficult for Christians to explain and
also say that there were Christians who believed that the divine spark
forsook Jesus at the crucifxion - hence his cry that he had been
forsaken.
Steven Carr
ste...@bowness.demon.co.uk
http://www.bowness.demon.co.uk/
Automort
> would be more inclined to suppose that there was a historical
>personage, around whom a large body of legend has accumulated.
>
Makes sense to me.
P. Skidoo
>Tony Griffin <tgri...@pipeline.com> writes:
>
>> Incidentally, back then there was none of the supernatural
>> stuff. "Engrams" were supposed to be caused by painful
>> experiences in one's past.
>
>Since the "engrams" were supposed to be remembered at the
>cellular level, however -- even a fertilized egg gets
>engrams -- it is accurate to call engrams "supernatural".
No it's not. It occurs in nature, therefore it's natural.
>There is no physical way they could possibly exist, given
>all that we know. If that's not "supernatural", what is?
The key phrase is "given all we know".
(Could you please cite your source as to fertilized eggs engrammizing?
As far as I know, it takes neural tissue to record the persistence of
a memory, or at least a chemical reaction to encode the information,
which requires a pretty sophisticated data-collection device...)
-----
Pope Skidoo
"Sheep go to heaven, goats go to hell."
--Cake
Brad Wilson
Anthony Campbell wrote:
> One piece of evidence which I think it makes it rather implausible to
> suppose that there was no historical Jesus at all is the reported words
> from the cross: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"
>
> This utterance has been remarkably difficult for Christians to explain
> and it's hard to suppose that anyone would have made if up who wished to
> invent a god-like figure from scratch.
I don't understand what you are saying.
This phrase supposedly uttered by Jesus (My God, ...) is lifted from
Psalms 22:1. This chapter goes on to talk about the author's hands
and feet being pierced, and of people casting lots for his clothing.
If someone made up the entire Jesus thing, they could easily put these
words in Jesus' mouth to make it appear that Jesus is the fulfillment of
some vague prophecy in the old testament.
And of course, even if Jesus were based on some actual person
from that period, adding this to his supposed crucifixion would help
boost the myth.
I guess what I'm saying is, given it's source in the old testament,
this saying neither hurts nor helps a theory on the existence of
a historical Jesus, in my opinion. Who ever said it (or incorporated
it into the myth) just wasn't being original.
And it certainly never was a mystery to the Christians I knew. Everyone
took it as a fulfillment of Psalms 22:1 and other old testament prophecies.
Christopher Latta
>One piece of evidence which I think it makes it rather implausible to
>suppose that there was no historical Jesus at all is the reported words
>from the cross: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"
As far as I recall, this is also the only phrase in the NT in the original
Hebrew that Jesus would have spoken, rather than the Greek of the rest
of the gospels. This, to me, makes it more likely to be a direct quote.
Christopher Latta http://www.ozemail.com.au/~clatta
The intensity of a religious belief is inversely proportional
to its correlation with reality. - 4nogod
John Secker
<dbon...@netcom.com> writes
>> And your point is? I'm not clear which way you are intending
>> to argue, but for me you make the case for a historical Jesus.
>
>Let me make this simple for you:
>
>If you want to say "some person, somewhere, way back in history,
>inspired something that caused something that influenced
>something, yadda yadda yadda, that led to people writing about
>a man named Jesus", and call THAT guy "the historical Jesus",
>fine. There's no way to prove or disprove your claim, nor is
>there any reason to care.
>
is very likely. The odd thing is that so many people do seem to care,
passionately, that there CANNOT, MUST not have been anything like a
historical Jesus.
>If, however, you want to name a specific act, or statement,
>that Jesus supposedly made, and then claim that there was a
>specific person responsible for that act, and that THAT
>person is "the historical Jesus", you'll have to do the
>following:
>
>(1): List the specific act.
>(2): Cite evidence supporting the claim that one person was
>responsible for it.
>
this can be proved, simply that in my opinion the balance of
probabilities goes that way. That's all.
--
John Secker
Larry W Loen
>
> One piece of evidence which I think it makes it rather implausible to
> suppose that there was no historical Jesus at all is the reported words
> from the cross: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"
>
> and it's hard to suppose that anyone would have made if up who wished to
> invent a god-like figure from scratch.
>
> personage, around whom a large body of legend has accumulated.
This evidence used to impress me a great deal, especially
as I first heard it from a (public school) teacher I much
admired.
However, I later read that this was a pretty direct
quote from one of the Psalms (25? forget which). Apparently,
a lot of the "last words" (which vary by the gospel) are
pretty straight "lifts" from the Psalms. Thus, it is suggested
that this embarassing line is actually intended as some
sort of theological reference to the Psalm, or maybe a shorthand
way of incorporating the entire thing, with all its nuances,
into the Passion.
However, overall, many scholars agree with your concept if
not your particular example. There is something called
"The Criterion of Embarassment" that is given reasonable weight
by people trying to sort out what happened and what was made up.
Even given that religions are good at making the weird look
normal and the shameful holy, the very fact that religions,
especially Christianity, have gone to so much trouble suggests
to many that there is a historical core for some of the
really embarassing stuff.
In particular, Jesus' Crucifixion _is_ an embarassment,
something it is now somewhat hard for us to recapture,
after 2,000 years of excuses and imaginative apologetics.
Imagine, for instance, if someone began to make claims
of divinity for someone who died of a lethal injection
in Texas (even if he was said to be formally innocent
of the crime). It takes time and imagination to turn
someone who has been killed by the state into a sympathetic
figure. It has been done, but it takes work. And,
manifestly, the Christians felt a strong need to do this.
Some people suggest that the Crucifixion is therefore
a real event and that there was one fellow, Jesus, who
authored most of Q and Thomas, and then managed to
get in over his head and get killed. It is not
dispostive -- the evidence is such that _no_ argument
is likely to ever be disposative. But it is certainly
not impossible.
I personally think it more likely than
not, but the gospel accounts of the crucifixion are
of such poor quality and contradict on so many essentials
(it is clear the synoptics and John do not agree on
the _year_ of the event, even if they do approximately
agree on the _week_), that unless you accept evidence
such as Josephus making a partial reference to Jesus
that was expanded by Christians (instead of
rejecting it all outright), it is rather weak
evidence indeed.
Larry Loen
Paul Filseth
> gcmi...@my-deja.com wrote:
> > (1) Make the case for a historical Socrates. What kind of person was he?
>
> years) from Jesus to the man called Shakespeare.
>
> Or maybe it was Shaksper, or maybe it was Francis Bacon. Or maybe it
> was someone else. Or maybe "Shakespeare" refers, not to a man, but to a
> body of work, as some scholars believe.
> Now describe the "historical" Shakespeare.
Good example. It's a piece of cake to describe the historical
Shakespeare/Shaksper; he was this actor, who left a paper trail of
exactly the sort Jesus didn't. For instance, he performed for the
Queen, he was paid, and the English government kept records of that
kind of thing. He wasn't Bacon; Bacon was a different guy who left
his own paper trail. And "maybe it was Shaksper" is an anachronism.
At the time he lived, English spelling hadn't been standardized yet.
He spelled his own name differently at different times because it
was normal to.
"Shakespeare" _also_ refers to a body of work. But that's not an
alternative hypothesis, just a second usage of the word. Sort of like
saying you're listening to Beethoven even though it isn't him at the
keyboard. Whether Shakespeare the actor actually personally wrote the
plays in "Shakespeare" the corpus, or they were ghostwritten by someone
with his own reasons for staying anonymous, is a separate question.
But the same question could be raised about any author. It doesn't
make describing the historical Shakespeare a problem.
Incidentally, the Atlantic Monthly ran an article a few years
ago about a computer analysis of the text of the plays, pointing
to the conclusion that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare. They looked
for patterns they expected would result from a playwright acting in
his own plays, determined which parts the author appeared to have
played, and got a positive match on most of the roles tradition says
Shakespeare performed. Now it's one thing to imagine Bacon secretly
passing a manuscript to his front-man Shakespeare; but another thing
altogether to suppose Bacon could have _acted_ in the plays without
getting caught.
--
Paul Filseth To email, delete the x.
Do not flatter your benefactor. - Buddha
Automort
>Jesus at the crucifxion - hence his cry that he had been
>forsaken.
It is odd that if this happened it was not edited out. Likely it reflected
something that did not prove a contradiction to people in the 100s, 200s.
It does seem to support the notion that Jesus himself thought he was going to
be rescued by God.
Anthony Campbell
<ste...@bowness.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>
> It is a little contradictory to say that 'My God, my God why have you
>forsaken me' is remarkably difficult for Christians to explain and
>also say that there were Christians who believed that the divine spark
>forsaken.
They were different Christians. I meant that modern Christians find it
difficult to explain the cry from the cross. The Gnostics lived a long
time ago. I have no idea how, or even if, they tried to explain this
cry. In fact, there were many different schools of Gnostics, holding
different ideas about the nature of Christ.
Anthony Campbell
>
> This phrase supposedly uttered by Jesus (My God, ...) is lifted from
>Psalms 22:1. This chapter goes on to talk about the author's hands
>and feet being pierced, and of people casting lots for his clothing.
>
Yes, I know this, but I don't think it alters the position.
> If someone made up the entire Jesus thing, they could easily put these
>words in Jesus' mouth to make it appear that Jesus is the fulfillment of
>some vague prophecy in the old testament.
>
> And of course, even if Jesus were based on some actual person
>from that period, adding this to his supposed crucifixion would help
>boost the myth.
>
> I guess what I'm saying is, given it's source in the old testament,
>this saying neither hurts nor helps a theory on the existence of
>a historical Jesus, in my opinion. Who ever said it (or incorporated
>it into the myth) just wasn't being original.
>
> And it certainly never was a mystery to the Christians I knew. Everyone
>took it as a fulfillment of Psalms 22:1 and other old testament prophecies.
>
Well, I can't agree with you about this. I was raised as a Roman
Catholic myself, and it certainly puzzled me as a boy. I was given these
explanations about the quotation from the OT but I didn't find them
entirely persuasive. If I were making up a legend about a non-existent
figure who claimed to be divine or semi-divine, I'd avoid putting in
quotations that implied he thought that God had abandoned him. What
would be the point? Asking for trouble, surely.
I know the NT contains plenty of rather implausible attempts to show
that Jesus was fulfilling prophecies from the OT but I find it hard to
believe that this was one of them.
Dan Bongard
> Dan Bongard writes
>>> And your point is? I'm not clear which way you are intending
>>> to argue, but for me you make the case for a historical Jesus.
>> Let me make this simple for you:
>> If you want to say "some person, somewhere, way back in history,
>> inspired something that caused something that influenced
>> something, yadda yadda yadda, that led to people writing about
>> a man named Jesus", and call THAT guy "the historical Jesus",
>> fine. There's no way to prove or disprove your claim, nor is
>> there any reason to care.
> Good. That is exactly what I do say, or at least I say that I think this
> is very likely. The odd thing is that so many people do seem to care,
> passionately, that there CANNOT, MUST not have been anything like a
> historical Jesus.
That is because you have (thus far) steadfastly refused to
define your "historical Jesus". When most people say "historical
Jesus" they mean "one man who did many of the key things
attributed to the Biblical Jesus". You, on the flip side, define
"historical Jesus" so broadly that it covers basically everyone
from "a man who did everything the Bible says Jesus did" to
"a guy who once told a bar joke about throwing stones at a
hooker, inspiring the 'he who is without sin shall cast the
first stone' story generations later".
A better question: who gives a shit? Your "historical Jesus"
is a meaningless figure, akin to the butterfly which accidentally
starts a typhoon in Japan by flapping its wings in Hawaii. Why
are you so obsessed with insisting that the no doubt hundreds
of different people whose actions and stories went into the
"Jesus" myth qualify as "historical Jesuses"?
>> If, however, you want to name a specific act, or statement,
>> that Jesus supposedly made, and then claim that there was a
>> specific person responsible for that act, and that THAT
>> person is "the historical Jesus", you'll have to do the
>> following:
>> (1): List the specific act.
>> (2): Cite evidence supporting the claim that one person was
>> responsible for it.
> No, I don't make any such specific claim. I do not claim that
> any of this can be proved, simply that in my opinion the
> balance of probabilities goes that way. That's all.
On the one hand we have a complete lack of evidence that any
of Jesus's actions were ever performed, or any of his sermons
given. Similarly, we have thousands of examples of urban legends
that sprang from no detectable origin point, with no seeming
basis in reality -- all excellent parallels for the Jesus
myth.
On the other hand, we have your opinion that the probabilities
favor a historical Jesus. Ok, whatever. There's a historical
Jesus, a historical Zeus, a historical Willie Wonka, you name
it. All fictional characters have some ultimate inspiration
in the real world; that's how storytelling works.
-- Dan
Dan Bongard
> I'd avoid putting in quotations that implied he thought that
> God had abandoned him. What would be the point? Asking for
> trouble, surely.
How is it asking for trouble? Jesus was supposed to be human;
the occasional human weakness adds verisimilitude to the
character.
And the "Psalms" tie-in makes for a nice spurious fulfillment
of prophecy, too.
-- Dan
William C Waterhouse
In article <3942FE65...@rchland.ibm.com>,
Larry Loen <lwl...@vnet.ibm.com> writes:
>...
> > jaro...@my-deja.com writes:
> >
> > >Dr. Paul L. Maier, Professor of Ancient History at Western Michigan
> > >University, is considered the world's leading leading historian on the
> > >first century. Maier rigorously documents archaeological evidence not
> > >only for the historicity of Jesus, but of Pontius Pilate, Caiaphas,
> > >biblical sites, etc. http://www.tobiascomm.com
> I wonder if there is a bit of conflation of two
> different persons going on. I happen to
> know a little bit of the fellow at Western Michigan
> University, because he is a personal acquaintance of my
> own parents. He is reasonably well regarded, near as I can
> tell, but I don't think he's quite a leading person
> in the field. And, (foggy memory deserts me) I'm not
> sure his name is spelled that way, though it well could be.
>
> There _is_, however, a John P Meier, who wrote a book
> I have called "A Marginal Jew" and he works out of
> Washington DC (Catholic University of America).
>
The original reference to Paul L. Maier also gave a net address
for transcripts of some broadcasts; I read one of them, and
it is indeed Paul L. Maier in it, and he is indeed introduced
as "the number one expert on the history of the first century."
Of course, he is not necessarly responsible for what people say
about him.
As a historian, he does not have the eminence of John P. Meier
(a younger man). In 1959 he published a monograph (presumably his
thesis) called
Caspar Schwenckfeld on the person and work of Christ;
a study of Schwenckfeldian theology at its core.
In 1968 he published a fictionalized biography of Pontius Pilate,
and between 1968 and 1971 he published three journal articles
on topics in the life of Pilate. No other articles of his are
listed in _L'Annee Philologique_. He has published two other
"Christian" novels and a new translation of Josephus.
He was on the program (a Christian talk show) because of a
popularized book he wrote called
In the fullness of time : a historian looks at Christmas, Easter,
and the early church.
The three parts of it were originally written and published
separately, and the hosts were urging people to buy the one
about Christmas (it was Dec. 16).
It's hard to judge him by the show, since the hosts obviously did
not want to deal with anything complicated. Maier did say a few strange
things, e.g. that the people at Jesus' time didn't know which day the
winter solstice came, but that might have been temporary confusion.
I have looked at a bit of that popularized book now, and it's much
more a Christian apologetic work than a work of scholarly judgement.
For instance, Maier tries to maintain that, just because Herod
was a "client king" of Rome, he would actually be collecting
Roman taxes. He does point out that Censorinus does not seem to have
been in Syria at the right time for Jesus' birth, but then he
suggests various different (and generally discredited) ways in which
this could be explained away. The work is vastly below the level of
someone like Raymond Brown.
And now I'll leave you with the words used by the host at the end
of the interview:
"Have your credit card ready. Get a package of CDs. Get a
package of audio cassettes -- on the, well, extra-biblical
sources of knowledge about Christmas, about Jesus. Because
here's a man who has read all these in the original languages.
As-- having a doctorate from Harvard in languages, along with
many other credentials -- that is, I think he's -- he's --
he's one of the most amazing men I've ever met: Dr. Paul Maier.
So, there it is. Well, here's an amazing person as well. And
his name is Craig Hiscock and he's got an amazing voice. He'll
sing "Oh, Bethlehem Town."
[Amazingly, only Maier's MA is from Harvard.]
William C. Waterhouse
Penn State
John Secker
<br...@vrcc.wustl.edu> writes
> If someone made up the entire Jesus thing, they could easily put these
>words in Jesus' mouth to make it appear that Jesus is the fulfillment of
>some vague prophecy in the old testament.
>
> And of course, even if Jesus were based on some actual person
>from that period, adding this to his supposed crucifixion would help
>boost the myth.
>
even to me as g teenager, was obviously put in just so that they could
say "Ta Ra! Thus was fulfilled the prophecy of Levizichal 2 Chapter 5"
(or whatever). This stuff is obviously subsequent addition, so it
doesn't tell us whether there was a real original, or if it's all
fiction.
--
John Secker
Larry Loen
[snip]
> "Shakespeare" _also_ refers to a body of work. But that's not an
> alternative hypothesis, just a second usage of the word. Sort of like
> saying you're listening to Beethoven even though it isn't him at the
> keyboard. Whether Shakespeare the actor actually personally wrote the
> plays in "Shakespeare" the corpus, or they were ghostwritten by someone
> with his own reasons for staying anonymous, is a separate question.
> But the same question could be raised about any author. It doesn't
> make describing the historical Shakespeare a problem.
>
But, this is where the example goes the other direction.
It is true that, though it is more shadowy than most people
suspect, there is some trail for Shakespeare. What is by no means
as clear is that the author of the works _attributed_ to Shakespeare
is this same fellow from Stratford who was an actor, married Ann
Hathaway,
etc. I think you can make a reasoned judgement that it was (my
Yale Shakespeare notes, among other things, that one can reasonably
infer that Shakespeare bought a noble title for his dad, which
is evidence that Wm really wrote the stuff or else he blackmailed
the real author for manuscripts and kept all the money from the
plays. Or maybe all it proves is that then, as now, the real
money is in acting, not writing). The point is, we know a lot
by inference, very little by documented fact.
The issue at hand is that some people who are discussing the
"historical Jesus" problem are suggesting that we can definitively
know these things and that the proper standard is that of, roughly,
a Nero Wolfe or Hercule Poirot novel, where the One Small Fact
that Does Not Fit invalidates the whole. Or, perhaps, that we
should expect to find birth certificates for everyone who ever
lived or else we should say we don't regard them as real
persons until we do. Shakespeare's birth date is not known,
even if we do know some facts of his life. And, those facts
are surprisingly few for a figure who was apparently acclaimed
in his lifetime.
By this level of standard, it is possible to doubt Shakespeare,
especially as being the proven author of his works.
It would be nearly impossible to "prove" nearly any fact of
biography, at least in terms of deeds as opposed to
birth and death dates, (and even those we don't always
have) by the standards set by some
in this discussion.
Larry Loen
Paul Murray
news:1GT15.16024$N4.5...@ozemail.com.au...
> Anthony Campbell wrote in message ...
> >suppose that there was no historical Jesus at all is the reported words
> >from the cross: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"
>
> Hebrew that Jesus would have spoken, rather than the Greek of the rest
> of the gospels. This, to me, makes it more likely to be a direct quote.
It's a quote from Psalm 22. If Jesus existed, I'll bet he was not the first
(or the last) Jew to quote that particular verse while being executed by the
authorities. Pilate would have heard it, and so too would Hitler and the
Catholic inquisitors.
--
--------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.users.bigpond.com/pmurray
ICQ: 26066755
Contrarius
"John Secker" <jo...@secker.demon.co.uk> wrote in message
news:fHB$yaAVnX...@secker.demon.co.uk...
> In article <vBv%4.3775$bj.2...@newsread1.prod.itd.earthlink.net>,
> Contrarius <kell...@earthlink.net> writes
> >Take your pick:
> >
> >There were several hundred wandering preachers in Galilee during the
first
> >century. None of them performed miracles, but all preached a message that
> >closely approximated the CST and the GThomas/Markan/Q/synoptic texts.
Would
> >that scenario alone (if proven) be sufficient to justify the statement
that
> >"Jesus existed"?
> >
> Yes, if in addition it was proven that the stories which eventually
> became the Gospels were wholly or partly based on this person.
What person? There was no mention of a particular individual, only of a body
of work. The question is whether the existence of that corpus, BY ITSELF,
would constitute an historical Jesus. That may seem like a strange question;
an anonymous collection of teachings would not prove the existence of an
individual unless the material were subjected to severe textual analysis.
Alas, in the case of Jesus, textual analysis leads us only to the gospel
authors, not to the oral source.
But it's an important question: prior to the Markan gospel, there's no
historical record of Jesus' life on earth EXCEPT for the Galilean teachings.
To reiterate: do the teachings THEMSELVES provide sufficient evidence that
Jesus existed? If so, it's probably reasonable to assert that there was an
historical Jesus. If not, we have expand our core requirements to include
things like the nativity and various encounters with Pharisees, as well as
the miracles and the crucifixion.
> >A homeless person pointlessly disrupted activities at the Temple in
> >Jerusalem and was crucified for his trouble. Would that scenario alone
(if
> >proven) be sufficient to justify the statement that "Jesus existed"?
> >
> Yes, if in addition it was proven that the stories which eventually
> became the Gospels were wholly or partly based on this person.
> >Seems like there's a need to settle on a core, irreducible definition of
> >"Jesus," with the variables eliminated. I attempted this in a recent
post;
> >take a look and see what you think.
> >
> The point is that we are not simply looking at everyone who lived in the
> Middle East between 10BC and 50AD, and seeing who has the greatest
> number of similarities to the Jesus of the Gospels. We are asking "were
> the stories derived from the life and doings of a single real person, or
> not?". This is a question about the derivation of the stories, not about
> their (possibly coincidental) matching to a random persons' biography.
Fair enough, except you still have the same problem. What if only a tiny
fraction of the gospel account were based on that "single real person"? As I
recall, there was a heretic named Jesus (or something similar) who was
crucified by Alexander Janneus in 100 BC for misleading the people. Aside
from the hereticism and the crucifixion, this guy was only a small kernel of
the "ultimate" Jesus.
Of course, if you start with the teachings, add descendent/ascendent prophet
material from the Wisdom stories, blend in the virgin birth and some other
Mithraic legends, add a little material from Amenhotep, as well as Osiris
and Isis, top it off with Paul's supernatural Risen Christ, cook for the 175
years or so... VOILA! you've got the Markan biography, freshly historicized
with Pilate and some hateful Jews, replete with miracles, the first gospel
and the only independent account of the life story of Jesus.
Given that scenario, and assuming that the gospel was derived from the story
of that heretic in 100 BC, would it be reasonable to say that there was a
historical Jesus? I don't think the two figures have enough in common to
enable us to make such a statement. But others may disagree. So, in the
absence of a very obvious parallel, your methodology won't work in the
absence of an agreed-upon core definition.
> In order to answer the question for sure you would have to have a time
> machine and the ability to trace the tales back step by step to their
> origins - either some real person's life and actions, or invention by
> one or more authors.
Such a machine would solve many historical problems! And create many more.
But until you invent it, we're stuck with a sketchy picture that fails to
support the belief that there was a man behind the myth.
If we look behind Mark, ca 70 AD, we can see only a brick wall. Christian
scholars have been trying for 2000 years to find something substantial in
earlier writings, but they've been unsuccessful. (And, should the question
be raised, there's no attestation in later writings that such early writings
existed.) Keep in mind that while Q and GThomas MAY have been prior to
Mark, they contain no biographical material.
So, prior to 70, there's a complete blank with regard to evidence of a
historical Jesus. In that absence, Christians generally trot out two
assertions, both of which they present as strong evidence for Jesus: (1)
Christianity wouldn't have grown so fast and Christians wouldn't have been
so fervent if there were no historical basis, and (2) there are stories in
the gospels that surely would have been embarrassing to the early church; if
they weren't true, they would have been omitted early on. (Christian spin
doctors aka bible scholars go to great interpretive lengths to assure us
that these would have been embarrassing; your mileage may vary. Mine
certainly does.)
--
Contrarius
contr...@hotmail.com
Contrarius
news:slrn8khbrm.7...@pentelikon.freeserve.co.uk...
> > This phrase supposedly uttered by Jesus (My God, ...) is lifted from
> >Psalms 22:1. This chapter goes on to talk about the author's hands
> >and feet being pierced, and of people casting lots for his clothing.
(snip)
> > And it certainly never was a mystery to the Christians I knew.
Everyone
> >took it as a fulfillment of Psalms 22:1 and other old testament
prophecies.
Fulfillment? Christians often neglect to consider that the gospels may have
been purposely written to give EXACTLY THAT IMPRESSION. Even after it became
a gentile religion, early Christianity relied heavily on its Jewish origins
to give it weight and credibility. (Much as Mithraism cited its origins in
ancient Egypt.) Although the Jews were not very compliant Roman citizens (to
say the least), the Jewish faith was widely admired among Hellenized Romans
and Greeks. Even today, the OT remains a bedrock foundation of the faith.
> Well, I can't agree with you about this. I was raised as a Roman
> Catholic myself, and it certainly puzzled me as a boy. I was given these
> explanations about the quotation from the OT but I didn't find them
> entirely persuasive. If I were making up a legend about a non-existent
> figure who claimed to be divine or semi-divine, I'd avoid putting in
> quotations that implied he thought that God had abandoned him. What
> would be the point? Asking for trouble, surely.
Well, what sort of human sacrifice would it be if he was fully aware of his
divinity and ultimate glory at the right hand of the Father?
The question underscores Jesus' humanity, a matter of great contention in
the early church. Most modern Christian theology puts Jesus' fully divine
nature in the background for the duration of his life as a man, whereas the
Gnostics took the position that he was pure spirit, a man in appearance
only. They even believed that he first appeared on earth as an adult. But
orthodoxy won out, and the gnostic version of Christianity went underground.
It was important for the writers of the later gospels for him to be fully
human as well as fully divine. Therefore, he had to possess fully human
characteristics. Hey, they even gave him a mother!
Contrarius
contr...@hotmail.com
Contrarius
news:20000607041353...@ng-fw1.aol.com...
> It appears to me that such is possible, although it would always remain
largely
> speculation because most evidence about Jesus is conveyed in religious and
> specifically anti-Christian writings.
Baloney. Citations, please.
> What astonishes me is the vehemence with which some individuals deny that
an
> actual person could have existed as a starting point for jesus stories.
That's
> a phenomenon in itself.
What's so "phenomenal" about a finding of insufficient evidence? That's a
common finding with regard to many assertions.
> Do they, somehow, think that if a Jesus who was a
> preacher existed then all the supernatural stuff must be true?
Who made such a ridiculous statement? Sounds like you're deep in straw man
territory here.
> And for what
> purpose would a bunch of cynical manipulators have gotten together and
made up
> this tale and duped people into believing it?
More straw man stuff. I don't think that happened, nor do most of us who
don't accept the historicity of Jesus.
> Certainly they could not have
> looked cenuiries into the future to see that it would become the state
> religion.
Which is relevant to exactly what?
--
Contrarius
contr...@hotmail.com
Earle Jones
(Dan Bongard) wrote:
> John Secker <jo...@secker.demon.co.uk> writes:
> > Dan Bongard writes
>
> >>> And your point is? I'm not clear which way you are intending
> >>> to argue, but for me you make the case for a historical Jesus.
>
> >> Let me make this simple for you:
>
> >> If you want to say "some person, somewhere, way back in history,
> >> inspired something that caused something that influenced
> >> something, yadda yadda yadda, that led to people writing about
> >> a man named Jesus", and call THAT guy "the historical Jesus",
> >> fine. There's no way to prove or disprove your claim, nor is
> >> there any reason to care.
>
> > Good. That is exactly what I do say, or at least I say that I think this
> > is very likely. The odd thing is that so many people do seem to care,
> > passionately, that there CANNOT, MUST not have been anything like a
> > historical Jesus.
*
Based on my personal experience, there was a historical Jesus -- Jesus
Alou.
He played for the San Francisco Giants. His father, Felipe Alou also
played here and is now managing the Toronto Blue Jays.
Jesus' brother Mateo (Matty) was also a pretty good ball player.
I must conclude that the original Jesus was Puerto Rican, or perhaps
from the Dominican Republic, as was Orlando Cepeda and Juan Marichal.
Oh, I worshipped those guys in the 1950s and '60s and '70s.
Jesus, please send us more people like your predecessors. We need a
left-handed relief pitcher and a wide-ranging 2nd baseman. Then we could
move Kent to first, and then, well.... that's outside of your domain,
right?
earle
*
Automort
>It would be nearly impossible to "prove" nearly any fact of
>biography,
One of my father's brothers died in 1918 at age 12. He had no birth or death
certificate and his family lived on a farm in east Texas. The only record of
him is in a Bible and in a noteboks kept by a family historian and the
recollections of now deceased persons whom I met. He is bried at Brushy Creek,
Texas in a churchyard, but his wooden marker is gone; nobody knows exactly
where his grave is there, so if the bones of a kid are found their identity
will be unknown unless one of these skimpy records plus a DNA test shows who he
was.
I have no doubt that this potential uncle of mine existed, but I can only point
to some musty records kept by non-official persons and some notes I made. And
his life was only about a century ago.
Larry Loen
>
[snip]
> > I don't know who is more eminent...
>
> The original reference to Paul L. Maier also gave a net address
> for transcripts of some broadcasts; I read one of them, and
> it is indeed Paul L. Maier in it, and he is indeed introduced
> as "the number one expert on the history of the first century."
> Of course, he is not necessarly responsible for what people say
> about him.
>
> As a historian, he does not have the eminence of John P. Meier
> (a younger man). In 1959 he published a monograph (presumably his
> thesis) called
> Caspar Schwenckfeld on the person and work of Christ;
> a study of Schwenckfeldian theology at its core.
> In 1968 he published a fictionalized biography of Pontius Pilate,
> and between 1968 and 1971 he published three journal articles
> on topics in the life of Pilate. No other articles of his are
> listed in _L'Annee Philologique_. He has published two other
> "Christian" novels and a new translation of Josephus.
>
Thanks for clearing this up.
[snip]
>
> It's hard to judge him by the show, since the hosts obviously did
> not want to deal with anything complicated. Maier did say a few strange
> things, e.g. that the people at Jesus' time didn't know which day the
> winter solstice came, but that might have been temporary confusion.
>
As you say, the show was trying to simplify. It may have been
confusion or, in the heat of presumably "live" or "one take" radio,
a misstatement.
In my Britannica, it notes that the Gregorian calendar was needed
because the Julian calendar (the calendar of Rome at Jesus' time,
was it not?) was in error by about _one day per century_. Thus,
even _if_ the Julian calendar was accurate circa 44 BC and did not
already reflect earlier errors, it would be
"off" by almost a day by circa 30 AD when Jesus is thought to have
died. However, insofar as I know, despite what astronomy would have
showed, people used the traditional dates, 3/25, 6/25, 9/25 and 12/25
for the solstices and equinoxes until the Gregorian reform, long
after the inaccuracy must have been fairly obvious to at least
some farmers.
So, you could certainly argue that there was some kind of confusion
between the official solstices and the astronomically observed ones
that _were not settled_ for some many centuries, perhaps because
they didn't or politically couldn't deal with the error (e.g. during
the dark ages, at least, when there wasn't enough unity to manage it).
Larry Loen
Automort
>Baloney. Citations, please.
>
Most information about Jesus comes from the accepted Gospels and the stories
about him that have not been accepted into religious cannon. But you are right
in that not all such information about him is anti- Jesus. Josephus mentioned
him noncommittally.
>What's so "phenomenal" about a finding of insufficient evidence?
Well, true, the evidence is not direct enough, I suppose, but most people
cannot be proven to have existed. Can you prove Alexander the Great existed?
>> Do they, somehow, think that if a Jesus who was a
>> preacher existed then all the supernatural stuff must be true?
>
>Who made such a ridiculous statement? Sounds like you're deep in straw man
>territory here.
I asked a question. I did not state that such people feel this way. It is
speculation. Looks like the straw man needs a brain.
> I don't think that happened, nor do most of us who
>don't accept the historicity of Jesus.
Neither do I. People centered their needs on the stories about this person. It
was Paul who seems to have identified Jesus with the widespread belief in a
sacrificed savior.
>they could not have
>> looked cenuiries into the future to see that it would become the state
>> religion.
>
>Which is relevant to exactly what?
If there were a conspiracy it would have to have a goal, wouldn't it?
Anthony Campbell
>(snip)
>
>The question underscores Jesus' humanity, a matter of great contention in
>the early church. Most modern Christian theology puts Jesus' fully divine
>nature in the background for the duration of his life as a man, whereas the
>Gnostics took the position that he was pure spirit, a man in appearance
>only. They even believed that he first appeared on earth as an adult. But
>orthodoxy won out, and the gnostic version of Christianity went underground.
>
>It was important for the writers of the later gospels for him to be fully
>human as well as fully divine. Therefore, he had to possess fully human
>characteristics. Hey, they even gave him a mother!
>
This implies that the writers of the synoptic Gospels believed that
Jesus was divine. This seems unlikely, given that it was an alien idea
in Judaism. I find it more probable that notions of divinity were later
grafted on a Jewish teacher who never made claims of that kind.
This theory, of course, still leaves the problem of explaining why these
later writers didn't simply eliminate Jesus's words on the cross.
Perhaps they were already too well known, or perhaps, as you suggest,
they wished to counter the view that Jesus was not human at all
(Docetism).
Dan Bongard
From: Larry Loen
The reason there is no documentation on your uncle is that he did
nothing of consequence during his lifetime. The same cannot be said
of the "Jesus" character.
Here's a better parallel: suppose Martin Luther King's birth and
death certificates were lost, and his body vanished. Would there
be any doubt as to his existance, centuries from now? Answer: no,
because a wealth of OTHER records were kept by people who knew
him, or who took an interest in him while he was alive.
On the flip side, there is no documentation anywhere written by
anybody who ever met Jesus, nor is there any mention of him in
anything written by anyone alive at the time. None of the events
described in his 'biography' happened when that biography says
they happened; in most cases, they don't appear to have happened
at all. Much of his life story bears a striking resemblance to
(a) events and characters in the Old Testament and (b) other
popular Roman cults, such as Mithraism.
When the ONLY evidence that a person EVER existed is an
obviously heavily-plagiarized biography, it is downright
silly to believe that person ever existed.
-- Dan
John Secker
<dbon...@netcom.com> writes
>> Good. That is exactly what I do say, or at least I say that I think this
>> is very likely. The odd thing is that so many people do seem to care,
>> passionately, that there CANNOT, MUST not have been anything like a
>> historical Jesus.
>
>A better question: who gives a shit? Your "historical Jesus"
>is a meaningless figure, akin to the butterfly which accidentally
>starts a typhoon in Japan by flapping its wings in Hawaii. Why
>are you so obsessed with insisting that the no doubt hundreds
>of different people whose actions and stories went into the
>"Jesus" myth qualify as "historical Jesuses"?
>
equate this with being "obsessed with insisting.."? As I said, some
people seem to take against the very idea that there may have been a
historical model with an excessive degree of zeal. This actually
interests me more than the (undecideable) question of whether such a
model existed.
--
John Secker
Paul Filseth
> The odd thing is that so many people do seem to care, passionately,
> that there CANNOT, MUST not have been anything like a historical Jesus.
Which people?
Dan Bongard
John Secker <jo...@secker.demon.co.uk> writes:
> Dan Bongard writes
>>> Good. That is exactly what I do say, or at least I say that I think this
>>> is very likely. The odd thing is that so many people do seem to care,
>>> passionately, that there CANNOT, MUST not have been anything like a
>>> historical Jesus.
>> A better question: who gives a shit? Your "historical Jesus"
>> is a meaningless figure, akin to the butterfly which accidentally
>> starts a typhoon in Japan by flapping its wings in Hawaii. Why
>> are you so obsessed with insisting that the no doubt hundreds
>> of different people whose actions and stories went into the
>> "Jesus" myth qualify as "historical Jesuses"?
> I wrote clearly enough that "I think this is very likely...". How do you
> equate this with being "obsessed with insisting.."?
Because you keep repeatedly pushing the idea, despite the fact
that its potential truth is neither provable nor, if provable,
remotely interesting. Like I pointed out, under your standards
of what constitutes a "historical personage", there is a historical
Willie Wonka. You have trivialized the notion of "historical
personage" to the point where virtually anything qualifies. Why
are you bothering to do this,
> As I said, some people seem to take against the very idea that
> there may have been a historical model with an excessive degree
> of zeal.
As I explained already in the text you snipped and ignored,
people's "zeal" is due to the fact that you are playing the
definition game. You are, in essence, attempting to take
the phrase "Jesus existed" -- which usually means "Jesus
existed", to most people -- and use it to mean "there were
people living in the middle east circa 0AD". This is
akin to defending the statement "all men are evil" by
saying that "all men" is supposed to mean "rapists and
murderers, not men in general". :)
Like I pointed out, one wonders why you're bothering. My guess
is that you're looking for a stepping stone -- once people
admit that your (incredibly overgeneralized) statement that
"there was a historical Jesus" is true, you can change the
definition back to the traditional "Jesus really did exist"
and claim that people have agreed you are right.
-- Dan