I can’t make any sense of your objection, though. As I responded earlier to this line of questioning, if Jesus was a totally unremarkable and utterly anonymous person who did not one of the things our Jesus is alleged to have done, what distinguishes this non-entity from Augustus’ bathroom slave number 47’s mother’s next-door neighbor’s childhood’s friend’s drunk brother in law? Saying Jesus was unremarkable is exactly the same thing has saying no relevant historical Jesus existed. It’s just the mythicist position in deliberately confusing language. It makes no sense whatsoever other than simply restating the mythicist position.
Aargh! This is extremely disappointing and annoying! Hundreds of posts later and so many people still imagine I said nothing but that one-phrase portion of a one sentence conclusion in my first post in this thread!
This happened to me once many years before and drove me to distraction and years later my butt still hurts over this kind of ridiculous thing. Libertarian had asked me to define a particular philosophical position and I did it the way I always did, in conventional English usage as “A “z-ist” is one who holds that…”. For scores and scores of posts later, everyone’s response focused on the fact that I had used the word “one” there, which, they argued, meant that my definition was flawed in some totally inexplicable way. Nothing I could do could shake them out of that ridiculously stupid rut of basing counter-arguments entirely on a casual statement!
Even if I had a mod change the wording of that post, the cheap and easy trick is to pretend I’d never said ANYTHING else other than that one phrase! Why do you and others persist in that cheap word game?
What I was doing in the post to which you insisted on playing this churlish game is laying out the structure that the debate MUST follow based on 2400 years of logic and debate! Stop playing word games and follow the rules of debate, please.
Aargh! This is extremely disappointing and annoying! Hundreds of posts later and so many people still imagine I said nothing but that one-phrase portion of a one sentence conclusion in my first post in this thread!
This happened to me once many years before and drove me to distraction and years later my butt still hurts over this kind of ridiculous thing. Libertarian had asked me to define a particular philosophical position and I did it the way I always did, in conventional English usage as “A “z-ist” is one who holds that…”. For scores and scores of posts later, everyone’s response focused on the fact that I had used the word “one” there, which, they argued, meant that my definition was flawed in some totally inexplicable way. Nothing I could do could shake them out of that ridiculously stupid rut of basing counter-arguments entirely on a casual statement!
Even if I had a mod change the wording of that post, the cheap and easy trick is to pretend I’d never said ANYTHING else other than that one phrase! Why do you and others persist in that cheap word game?
What I was doing in the post to which you insisted on playing this churlish game is laying out the structure that the debate MUST follow based on 2400 years of logic and debate! Stop playing word games and follow the rules of debate, please.
Aargh! This is extremely disappointing and annoying! Hundreds of posts later and so many people still imagine I said nothing but that one-phrase portion of a one sentence conclusion in my first post in this thread!
This happened to me once many years before and drove me to distraction and years later my butt still hurts over this kind of ridiculous thing. Libertarian had asked me to define a particular philosophical position and I did it the way I always did, in conventional English usage as “A “z-ist” is one who holds that…”. For scores and scores of posts later, everyone’s response focused on the fact that I had used the word “one” there, which, they argued, meant that my definition was flawed in some totally inexplicable way. Nothing I could do could shake them out of that ridiculously stupid rut of basing counter-arguments entirely on a casual statement!
Even if I had a mod change the wording of that post, the cheap and easy trick is to pretend I’d never said ANYTHING else other than that one phrase! Why do you and others persist in that cheap word game?
What I was doing in the post to which you insisted on playing this churlish game is laying out the structure that the debate MUST follow based on 2400 years of logic and debate! Stop playing word games and follow the rules of debate, please.
And you continuously avoid the details of my posts with is kind of dismissal. Is that an argument? I think not.
I know, I know, I’m not worthy. How utterly boring.
By all means, feel free to ignore my comment. With respect, I’ve set aside quite a few of yours – I don’t think you’re getting much traction in this thread.
For the benefit of others, I cited The Historical Jesus: A Comprehensive Guide. Gerd Theissen is Professor of New Testament at the University of Heidelberg, Germany; Annette Merz is an Assistant Professor at the same University, according to the jacket. Most of what they’re doing in the (translated) text is sifting through the research of others. A preview at google books is here. If there is evidence that they apply shoddy scholarship, I and the internet should like to know. Here is a sympathetic review by Mark Goodacre, Associate Professor of Religion, Duke University.
It seems you missed the fact that the portion of my post you quoted did not refer to your original post. Here’s another of your repeated false assumptions about my posts. I accepted your early explanation that your conclusion was just to get things started and you recognized you couldn’t prove it. The only reason I kept coming back to it was to point out your false idea that I was somehow a Christian apologist and trying to argue for a historic Jesus. I never was, and every time you made the gross mistake and implied I was and the burden of proof was my responsibility I had to remind you that I had made no assertion, you had. It was your repeated mistakes that made those reminders necessary. I accepted that your argument was the evidence makes no historical Jesus much more likely than not and addressed your arguments and Doherty’s with that in mind. This crap, that I and/or others thought that’s all you said is utter nonsense and does not reflect the reality of the posts.
regardless of your excuses and whining the posts reflect that I did no such thing. I attempted to deal with your arguments specifically in good faith. It’s difficult when instead of responding to the details you simply mock my post in general and continue to make egregious mistakes about my position.
It didn’t happen. Why did you persist in misrepresenting my position and ignoring the details of my posts?
Right. I’ll leave it for the readers to read our respective posts and decide who the grown up is. I’ll acknowledge that I haven’t done the research that you have done on this particular subject but we could have saved a lot of time if you had gotten there much sooner and not wasted so much bandwidth on ridicule.
You said yourself that the subject is too deep to present effectively on a message board like this. I agree. All I could do was respond to the arguments made here, not the information we didn’t have time to explore. It’s not my fault you prefer to swagger and mock rather than offer more information, or that you decide to let pages go by before you acknowledge the real difficulty of the subject.
I’m sorry I missed the chapter in the rules of debate that includes the use of “grow the fuck up.” If I hadn’t, we could have gotten to this point much sooner.
You’re the one that came into this thread spouting off your existential negative, then getting all defensive and antagonistic when people, including cosmosdan, called you out on it.
Meanwhile, yes, we all understand your restated position that the historical Jesus camp has failed to provide evidence for his physical existence. You’ve laid out your argument for that position pretty clearly and I think it’s an interesting - but not entirely compelling - position. (For the record, the major flaw I find in your position is that you rely on certain statements from Paul as necessarily referring to a spiritual Jesus to the exclusion of the possibility of a physical Jesus. I simply don’t see the ironclad interpretation there that you and Doherty seem to see.)
Your major problem in this thread, as I see it, is that, after getting called out on your existential negative, you started putting the burden on others to support the existential positive (i.e., “the historical Jesus existed”), when I don’t recall anyone actually saying that. Certainly cosmosdan hasn’t. I’m not convinced there was an actual historical Jesus, either. Most of us here seem to accept that the evidence is inconclusive either way.
So, on one side, we’ve got people who think the evidence is insufficient to draw a conclusion either way, and, on the other side, we’ve got you apparently believing the absence of evidence is conclusive. So, if you want any of us to move off of the “inconclusive” camp, which Igather is your mission here, the burden is still on you to persuade the undecided that your position is correct.
Frankly, I can’t imagine why you have converted us all by now. Must be your charming debating style.
Alright so, first go to a book store and find the new age and self-help sections. In it you’ll find the works of individual people who are preaching a particular set of wisdom. They’re quite likely doing this part-time while still running their hair parlor, bong-fashioning shop, or whatever to make ends meet. Where they live, out in some ex-hippie village in the middle of nowhere, they probably get together with other weird spiritualist types once a week and hold rather silly and laughable ceremonies. They aren’t wealthy, they aren’t particularly intelligent, almost nobody knows their names, and yet they still have possibly a good half dozen serious followers. I can guarantee you that within just the US, there are thousands of people like this.
None of these groups are technically any different from David Koresh’s cult, Heaven’s Gate, the Manson Family, etc. beyond that they haven’t done anything news worthy. If Charles Manson hadn’t sent his minions out to kill people, he’d have remained as just one of the thousands of unknown spiritual leaders of the nation. L. Ron Hubbard, Muhammad, and Joseph Smith, Jr., on the other hand, are known because they were able to spread their group of followers past what most of the wacko hair dressers and hippie yogis could accomplish. If their level of charisma, politics, organization, and promotion had been worse, again, they would simply have been one among the thousands of wacky, unknown spiritual leaders that exist at any given point in time on the face of the planet.
Asserting that if a person is a spiritual leader with a dozen or a half a dozen followers, then he must be well known is entirely fallacious in just the modern world where we have the internet, mass media, and the printing press. Trying to make that assertion extend to a time period before the internet, mass media, and printing press is ludicrous. You only ever become famous if you do something atrocious or you succeed at building up the ranks of your followers and establishing a stable core that can continue recruitment after your death. Religions, like anything, are subject to the rule of survival of the fittest. Most fail without ever gaining any sort of significant following.
That Paul was the person who had the talent to start the religion as something which could succeed and persist is certain. The success of Christianity as a religion is certainly entirely thanks to him. Giving Jesus any due at all is, quite probably, incorrect. The existence of Jesus and what he actually taught is, no matter how you cut it, probably wholly irrelevant since it’s Paul’s church and it’s teachings that are the ones that cut the mustard for success.
But, there is no particular reason to doubt that Paul more-or-less took over a failing cult, turned it around, and made it work. He claims that this is what happens, it doesn’t strain credibility in the slightest, and–more importantly–if you discount it, then you’re introducing hundreds of lies on Paul’s part that he had no reason to make up.
Why create the existence of a person who lived in a town just a donkey ride away?If that person lived hundreds of years earlier, then sure, that’s something that would be difficult to verify one way or another. But Jesus, at most, died only two years before Paul began preaching. Anyone could simply have hopped on a camel, gone over to Jerusalem, and found the local cult.
If there was no Jesus then do Peter, John, James, Judas, Thomas, etc. all exist? If not, then Paul was claiming the existence of a group of people who would all still alive, a donkey ride away where anyone could go and verify this.
If they did exist, what relation did they have to Paul if Paul wasn’t part of their cult? That would be like me picking a random group across the street who I don’t know, telling everyone that those people across the street believed in the Great Barbagaga, then I cross the street, convince those people that they have always believed in the Great Barbagaga, and bringing them back to tell everyone that not only do they believe, but they believed in Barbagagaism before they ever even met me. How does someone accomplish such a feat as that?
If Paul was just a member (i.e. not the founder) of the Christian cult and the character of “Jesus” existed before his membership, then who did start the cult? Peter, John, James, Judas, Thomas, etc. were all part of a cult in Jerusalem. Someone had to have formed it and led it. Groups of people don’t all come together and believe in the same thing for no reason.
Certainly it is entirely possible that the Christian cult existed for decades or centuries before Paul joined up and turned it into the McDonald’s of religion. The character of the Son of God might have been something that was always accepted as spiritual until Paul rewrote it all as being more real than that. Yes, that is true, and it is the only real plausible alternative outside of assuming there to have been a real Jesus who founded the original Christian cult in Jerusalem circa 1 CE.
But, that requires tossing out everything and simply making shit up. We have documents saying what happened. Yes, it’s obvious that tons of that documentation is just stuff that people made up. But, where there’s nothing that strains credibility, there’s also no reason to toss it out beyond a simple desire to rile people up. It’s as good a document about the time as we are liable to ever have. Assuming even the plausible parts to be fallacious is more likely to keep you from finding archaeological or whatever other evidence, than presuming everything to be simple hogwash. There’s no purpose in examining anything that the NT points to if none of it is talking about reality.
“John and Jesus speak the same message. Perhaps they are the same person.”
Apparently the mythicists believe that Paul (and presumably Peter et al) thought that Jesus was a spiritual being. In the presentation here Jesus’ incarnation, death and resurrection were all believed to have happened in heaven. Since Paul doesn’t say all that much about Jesus, this hypothesis can’t be ruled out on its face. The link also shows arguments that don’t depend upon absence of evidence, a particularly lame construction in this context.
So sometime between 33CE and 70CE, Jesus ceased to be an entity in heaven and became a flesh and blood historical actor, according to the mythicists. DtC points out that the authors of the gospels wrote in an environment that was linguistically, temporally, culturally and geographically removed from the Jewish community that Peter, James et al lived in. I confess that I am dubious about this hypothesis, but the example of the mythic John Frum gives me pause.
Ok, let’s take this for example. How common is it that a prefect from Judea goes unregistered on Roman records? Are there any lists of Roman prefects per province? Are there enough gaps in those records that you can insert a Pilate without historians crying BS over it? Are (were) prefects unimportant enough that they got assigned without it being recorded in Rome? Or is it just that those records didn’t make it to us? Is the fact that Pilate is not on record reason to be suspicious or just par for the course?
There aren’t any Roman records of the sort you seem to be alluding. We have records, of sorts, of some provincial prefects and governors, not from some ancient Roman file cabinet, but from mentions by historians and from some archaeological evidence via inscriptions. There are plenty of gaps.
Historians do know Pilate existed. Aside from his mention by at least three ancient historians (outside Christian literature) that I know of, his tenure as a Prefect in Judea has been categorically confirmed by an inscription found in Caesaria. If you understood me to be suggesting that this evidence is scanty, you misunderstood me. This much evidence is actually better than average. We don’t have stacks of official government records from any of them. Usually we just have names and dates.
I’ll respond to other rational arguments regarding this lengthy set of responses which may come up, but primarily I need to thrash this through with Diogenes in detail. Please interact with me directly, Dio.
Though Dio has posted these arguments here in this thread already, they also reflect his position precisely as of a few years ago when he and I (with Tom and a few others) covered this topic previously. His position seems not to have changed at all since then (though given Dio’s statement about “wavering back and forth”, it would appear he moved from this position and then returned).
In any case, they are the kind of arguments I’ve been hoping for and I am delighted and eager to address them, so although he’s stated them before, I’m going to provide extensive rebuttals again (actually, I hold them to be complete refutations of Dio’s arguments, leaving no room for “debatable”).
One thing, though: I am very obviously tired and extremely exasperated with all those who take a few phrases or sentences out of a much larger argument and, instead of addressing the argument as a whole, take potshots at tiny portions of it as if that’s some kind of valid response.
It’s not. Not at all. And this is and other word games have frustrated me no end, as the record clearly shows.
PLEASE, ALL OF YOU: ADDRESS THE WHOLE ARGUMENT, DON’T JUST TAKE POTSHOTS AT EXCERPTS AND FRACTIONS!
Thank you.
I will, however, break up this reply to address one of your arguments here, Dio at a time, because otherwise a single post would contain too many words/characters for this forum…
RESPONSE PART “A”:
Although you’ve stated that this is debatable, I don’t understand why these arguments – particularly that last one – impresses you in the tiniest bit, Dio! In the earliest copies we have of Paul’s writings, he frequently uses the Greek word “adelphos”, just as he’s done in this case. The question is whether Paul’s use of the word “adelphos” here is a reference to a biological sibling, which is absolutely necessary if your agnostic position is going to hold any water at all. I reject utterly that this is the case; I hold that your position is facile and/or non-credible. As Josh McDowell puts it, the historicist position/argument is one that demands a verdict: Either there exists credible compelling evidence for the existence of a historical Jesus or there doesn’t. Even the term “agnostic” is unacceptable, since it actually means that one cannot have knowledge of the transcendent. Yet this is not a question of transcendent or supernatural knowledge: It is a question of ordinary empirical knowledge. One cannot argue, as some weak debaters have done in this thread, that one is agnostic on the historical existence of Jesus for exactly the same reason one cannot be agnostic on the historical existence of Santa Claus or Sherlock Holmes or Zeus or even President Wilson: There is either historical evidence of their existence or there isn’t. It’s that black and white.
Paul used the term “adelphos”every time he referred to any member of any Christian group! So, while Paul in Galatians refers to James as the Lord’s “adelphos”, only in English translation can Paul’s personal usage of this 1’st century Greek term be conflated with a biological sibling, and only then if one is also lazy and fails to employ critical thinking.
One of Paul’s many goals (in the ahistoricist, or mythicist, view) was to synthesize the various Jesus stories that arose from Q, conflations of fables and parables and sayings of Cynic and Stoic philosophers and sages and other itinerant preachers and teachers, Jewish Wisdom literature, the accretion of myth and stories retrospectively force-fit onto the name Yeshua/Jesus, and the so-called “Mystery Cults” (the Gnostics and so on) of the day, who had long already adopted the term “adelphos” to refer to initiates of those gnostic and other mystery cults. Paul brought that meaning of the word into his writings as well as the mere courteous TITLE “adelphos”.
In 1 Corinthians 1:1, Sosthenes is called adelphos, and in Colossians 1:1, so is Timothy. And in Corinthians 15:6, 500 adelphos receive a spiritual vision of the Christ. Are they biological siblings of Jesus? Of course not!
That alone makes it quite impossible for James to have been a biological sibling of Jesus, for if he had been, Paul would have used a different description to distinguish James from Sosthenes, Timothy, and 500 other people (no doubt many women among them), NONE OF WHOM COULD BE JESUS’ SIBLINGS!
So when we encounter the English phrase “James, the brother of the Lord” (not “James, the brother of Jesus”!) in Galatians 1:19 and recognize that Paul once again used the term “adelphos”, it is foolish to contend that Paul meant that James was Jesus’ biological sibling.
Some will object: “Paul does put special emphasis on James and his relationship to the Lord. How do you explain that?”
Like this: James was the head of one particular Christian group in Jerusalem which focused exclusively on the spiritual Christ, as opposed to Jesus the alleged human teacher or minister (that also makes it tremendously unlikely that James would be Jesus’ sibling). This group called themselves the “Adelphos of (or “in”) the Lord”. The leader of this group, whomever he or she was at any specific time (early Christians saw no problem with women leaders, to their great credit), was given the official title that was translated into English as “The brother of the Lord”. It was an honorary title, not a description of a biological sibling relationship to Jesus the man!
That last is also made clear by the references to “brother of the Lord” rather than to “Jesus”.
But what of the writings of others beside Paul? What are we to make of their references to James?
Let’s look at epistle named for him. While no knowledgeable biblical scholar still believes that this is a genuine Pauline – or even written by this James – epistle, it is instructive to look at the opening line, which reads in English: “James, a Servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ…” If James was thought by the author to be in fact the biological brother of Jesus the man, why is he referred to there as the Lord Jesus Christ’s “servant” and not even his brother or adelphos at all?
And then let’s look at the epistle of Jude. That opens by describing Jude as “a servant of Jesus Christ, and a brother of James”. While the Gospel of Mark 6:3 identifies Jude (and others) as the adelphos of James (implying that both Jude and James are the biological siblings of Jesus), had they been thought to be so in Paul’s day 20 years or so before Mark was written, they would have been described as such, but they were not so described until the fictional Gospels!.
There were a great many frustrating and polarizing differences in the beliefs and teachings of the church among the early Christian communities (as Paul’s genuine epistles abundantly documents), and there would be no better way to bring more order to all the massive disorder than for a true biological sibling of Jesus the man to be clearly identified as a primary authority. The Jews thought bloodlines and family trees were extremely important. For just one example, who qualified for the priesthood was considered to have enormous importance, and since the priesthood was purely inherited from family members, had a member of Jesus’ biological family have come forward, he or she would have had enormous power to unite the highly fractious and angry bunch of wildly different beliefs and tenets and theologies all over the place. Those communities would have rejoiced to have had a member of Jesus’ family leading them. The Jews, of that age at least, were highly authoritarian and would have loved nothing more than an authority figure based on the most fundamental basis: birth and bloodline. But they could find no one like that at all!
No relative is ever identified by anyone in the early, pre-Gospel Christian world. Even if such a person were to have been reluctant to exert any authority or even to receive some minor recognition, he or she would have been identified anyway, since someone else would claim authority by proxy by dint of his friendship with Jesus or with one or more of Jesus’ biological siblings.
But no relative of Jesus was ever identified or claimed prior to the Gospels!
This is one of the many things we would see if Jesus were ever a historical, biological figure. The fact that we don’t is totally compelling evidence that Jesus either never existed or had no living family of any generation.
James was not Jesus’ biological sibling. Q.E.D.
Which bring us to references to Peter/Cephas. Again, we must turn to Paul, for Paul is the single earliest New Testament writer, predating by two decades even the first Gospel to be written, which the largest scholarly consensus identifies as Mark and dates to ~ 72 AD.
Paul refers to Cephas as an “apostle” (though only once), as do the canonical Gospels. But the Gospel’s “apostles” are a group of twelve men, and that Cephas/Peter was one of them. How does Paul refer to the “apostle” Cephas?
He refers in 1 Corinthians 15:5-7 to a group who had a vision of The Christ (not Jesus the man), and writes that “… he was seen by Cephas, and afterward by the Twelve … then he was seen by James and afterward by all the apostles”.
This tells us that although the vision was reportedly seen by Cephas, he was not one of “the Twelve”, and further that there were more “apostles” than just “the Twelve”. Bottom line, Cephas was not one of a group of twelve apostles but was instead just one of a large group of many apostles. Thus, to paraphrase Douglas Adams, “Cephas was just this guy, you know?” There’s no credible reason at all to think that Cephas ever knew Jesus the alleged man. So the fact that Cephas is, at least 30 years later, referred to in the Gospel of Matthew as the “rock” upon which Christ will build “His Church”, it’s abundantly clear that either this Cephas is fictional (as is Jesus) or Matthew’s Peter and Paul’s Cehphas are just not the same guy.
This is further revealed by all the bitter disputes between Paul and Cephus and many of the rest of the “apostles”, including “the Twelve”, the title given to a more “special” group of the many “apostles” (note that Paul insists that he was an apostle, too, though he never knew Jesus either). Both the title “apostle” and the title “the Twelve” are, again, honorary titles rather than descriptive ones (think of them in light of the special group of twelve Mormon “apostles”, for example). Because if “the Twelve” were actually the direct followers of a biological Jesus (as a literal reading of the Gospels would have it), who would dare argue with such holy personages and criticize them as forcefully as Paul so often did?
Suffice to say that if any of the apostles or “the Twelve” were the direct followers of a biological man, we’d have strong evidence of their biological/biographical existence, too. And we don’t.
Conclusion to Part A: References to James or to Peter/Cephas provide no evidentiary support for the existence of a historical, biological Jesus!
Diogenes and other historicists: How can you believe the lousy historicist arguments on this point? I want an answer, please. Why do you credit it at all?
I REPEAT: PLEASE, ALL OF YOU: ADDRESS THE WHOLE ARGUMENT, DON’T JUST TAKE POTSHOTS AT EXCERPTS AND FRACTIONS!
Thank you.
First, the two so-called “references” are laughably non-credible and reek foully of two of the most ludicrous examples of empty arguments in my experience. I’ve never seen an even marginally credible argument for so irrationally and arbitrarily stripping out just the blatant Christian elements of the second reference and leaving the rest! Dio, I’ve read at least a dozen that would get laughed out of a 5’th grade classroom debate, but not one that’s even slightly persuasive.
As a kind of comparison of the ridiculousness of assertion that just the blatant Christian parts are forgeries (interpolations), it’d be like reading a medieval scroll and at the very end discovering in different handwriting and in dayglo orange highlighter the text: “The Beatles are bigger than Jesus!” and arguing that only the reference to Jesus is a forgery but the rest was in the original. “Of course, Josephus clearly meant that The Beatles are bigger than Apollo or Zeus, obviously. The Christian bit is an interpolation, but the rest is solid”.
It’s that absurd an argument!
Let’s look at these two so-called “references” in a more structured way, starting at the beginning with some background…
The “the brother of Jesus, the [so]-called Christ” reference and the Testimonium are alleged to have been written by Josephus, but are in his Antiquities of the Jews, written sometime roughly around 94 CE.
Right from the start, since we see nothing until this rather late date after the war of 70 CE and the destruction of the Temple, we have compelling reason to doubt Josephus ever referenced any reputed historical Jesus. If Josephus had known of such a figure, he would have written of him in his earlier work, The Jewish War dated about 75 CE that covered that incredibly important war and all that led up to it! Since he did not, that’s a powerful reason alone to believe that both so-called “references” are entirely Christian forgeries.
(To show how foolish it is to not have a reference to a historical Jesus in Jewish War, some scribe understood that so well and worried about it so much he copied the entire Testimonium, verbatim, into one much newer Greek copy of that work! It is known as the “Codex Vossianus”.)
Josephus had a huge personal interest in all of the “messiahs” and other rebels and critics of Rome and Roman rule. Although he was a Jew, his loyalty was to Rome and his Roman patron Flavius Titus (from whose family name Josephus took his own), who was such a powerful figure he eventually went on to become Emperor. He asked people for tips and news about these types of people and was constantly on the lookout for them and the “messiahs” such as the alleged historical Jesus. Not that he admired them, far from it! He relished making fun of them and tearing them down for his patrons and the rest of the Roman Empire.
Josephus blames the Jewish War in large part on these people and so was meticulous about tracking them down and writing all he knew of them in a critical fashion. He called them “over-zealous fanatics” who led the Jews away from their traditional practice of accepting the region’s temporal authorities (in this case those of Rome and the Emperor) within their own faith’s standard doctrines. Nothing riled him like those who deviated in any significant way from at least the normal range of variations acceptable within Diaspora Judaism, particularly when it came to politics. Thus, the fact that we find no reference to this particular ostensible messiah in The Jewish War is a real strike against those two unwisely alleged references much later in Antiquities of the Jews.
The so-called “Testimonium Flavianum” is a preposterous ruse that shouldn’t fool anyone, let alone someone as sharp as Diogenes. In Book 18, Chapter 3, Paragraph 3 of the Antiquities of the Jews, one weird, markedly out of place paragraph immediately and bizarrely follows an account of some setbacks faced by Judean Jews at the hands of Pontius Pilate and a talk about Jewish anger at taking their money to pay for aqueducts. Aqueducts mixed with talk of Jesus! Crazy! It reads:
But since Josephus was a steadfast Jew, all those still far-too-credulous historicist apologist dupes that Dio credits at least acknowledge that the parts in bold couldn’t have been authentic and thus they admit there’s some blatant forgery going on. But instead of wisely examining how weird the whole paragraph is and how utterly foreign a place it’s forced into – smack in the middle of two otherwise continuous paragraphs – and tossing the whole thing out as a blatant forgery entire, they stupidly strip out just the parts in bold and mindlessly assert the rest is genuine! Reason: “Just because”.
Oh, they weren’t always that stupid and gullible, oh no. In the first half of the 20’th century, everyone laughed at such a cheap con job and rejected the entire thing, as all rational people would. But some fundamentalist Christian apologists quite arbitrarily asserted on no evidence whatsoever that the rest just had to be authentic to defend against the mythicists, and lo, stupidity returned to the bandwagon! They knew that if a historical Jesus existed Josephus simply had to have written about him for the reasons I’ve already laid out, so they turned off their brains, closed their eyes, and went for it in full bullshit bluster mode. The alternative was to admit that since no pre-Gospel writer such as Paul knew of any historical Jesus, if their bacon wasn’t saved by the obvious forgeries in Josephus, the historicist position was doomed utterly. That, they could not abide.
So they pretend it’s authentic because they simply have no alternative.
The best “argument” they can put forward is that the language kinda sorta looks like it might have been Josephan. Here’s what Doherty has to say on that point:
Now, let’s talk aqueducts and Jesus and see how ridiculous and absurd it is to imagine any of that laughable “Testimonium” is authentic. The previous paragraph speaks of Pilate’s abuse of Temple funds for new aqueducts and the riots which result in a “calamity” in which many Jewish protesters are killed. Then comes this nonsense about wise ol’ Jesus. And them come the words: “About the same time another sad calamity put the Jews into disorder.”
Anyone who believes that actually makes sense: I have an aqueduct to sell you!
Now, some gullible dupes argue that the Testimonium is but “a digression”. They correctly note that since footnotes hadn’t been invented yet, digressional material had to be put in somewhere. That’s fine as far as it goes, but then they’re left with the hilarious “argument” that all that excited praise about this “doer of wonderful works”, this “teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure” and all that “winning over many Jews and many of the Greeks” high praise deserved nothing but the equivalent to a footnote!
The one and only “messiah” that Josephus admires and sings his praises of rather than despises, and the guy merits just a footnote! The brevity is quite a strike against it’s authenticity on its own.
And then there’s the total crazy inconceivability of this astonishingly apologetic Testimonium (even sans the blatant Christian elements) being totally ignored by centuries worth of urgent apologetics, only to be first “discovered” by Eusebius in the 4’th century.
I’ll continue on with how utterly non-credible the two alleged Josephan references to Jesus are in the future, but for now I have to call it a night…
Eventually, my question will be: Diogenes and other historicists: How can you believe this ludicrous tripe? I want an answer, please. Why do you credit it at all?
There’s the phrase, “Missing the forest for all the trees.” You can always try and get people lost in debating minutiae and hope that they miss all the honking big salient points.
Say that I have 10 items of evidence that Bob murdered Alice. If I look at each individual item of evidence, I can think of 3 alternate reasons for such an item of evidence to exist. So, there’s only a 1 in 4 chance that any item of evidence actually indicates that Bob murdered Alice. But what are the odds that all 10 items for a murder would exist if he didn’t do it? It’s insanely small. Even though no one item of evidence is convincing, practically speaking, it’s almost certain that Bob did it based just on these speculative items of evidence.
Denialists, conspiracy theorists, and lawyers take advantage of this rule of minutiae though. If you can get people to lose sight of the salient point that you don’t get all of this evidence together unless it happened and instead just focus on the individual items as individual items, you get them to think in those terms and come to the conclusion that you have to toss everything out. More importantly, in that befuddled state, people feel like they are being more skeptical and reasonable. Doing the actual math of probabilities, they’re simply ludicrous though.
This is a good point and I appreciate you explaining it this way. It’s something to consider. I was thinking that if individual points could have viable alternative, especially key points, then the whole argument becomes shaky and less than convincing. If I understand your point, you’re saying the sheer volume of circumstantial evidence makes the conclusion very likely even though any single, or even two or three pieces of circumstantial evidence is unconvincing.
Let me say that it does depend on the strength of the circumstantial arguments.
It’s one thing in a criminal case to establish facts as circumstantial evidence.
We found threads on Bibs clothes that fit Alice’s clothes.
We know Bob’s bought the gun that was used to murder Alice,
We know Bob was at the location in the right time frame
We know Bob had recently taken out a large insurance policy on Alice with himself as beneficiary.
If all can be established as factual ,or almost certainly so, it makes for a strong case even without direct evidence.
Interpretations of scriptural passages isn’t nearly as factual. Making strong suggestions about what people must have been thinking 2000 years ago isn’t either.
Still, I appreciate your point and will look at the arguments again with that in mind.
I am not trying to pin any opinion on you for or against anything. I am just trying to get a feel of what is it that we have to work with and I appreciate your efforts to clarify the matter.
The strength of the evidence is just the odds you give it when you do your math. The question isn’t the quality of the evidence but rather whether there’s a second possibility that also explains all of the evidence, and then the relative probabilities of the two.
There is the possibility that Jesus existed and hence there is stuff written about him in a way that portrays him as a physical person. There is also the possibility that he was originally written about as a spiritual being but later people missed that point and added information which slowly evolved him into a physical person. Both of these do fully explain the reality we see. But it really does come down to which seems more likely. Is it more likely that people would ascribe mystical powers to a real person, or is it more likely that people would add physical foibles to a fictional character. Historically, which has happened more often?
The legend of King Arthur, including all the fiddly stuff about adultery and other non-heroic acts, we are fairly certain are details that were added on after the fact to make a (likely) fictional character seem more real. We know that the realifying of a story can and does happen in the real world, so we can’t discount it.
So we do have two hypotheses that explain the evidence we have examined. But, the evidence we have examined is only for the case of there being a physical Jesus.
If we look at the case of King Arthur, though, we note that most of the fiddly and human portions were added over the centuries. Jesus had a trial in a legal court for inciting unrest. That’s a non-heroic and non-flattering presentation. But it’s there in the earliest of all documentation that we have. It doesn’t seem like something which was added in as the tale grew to humanize it, since it’s there right from the start. There are plenty of other things like that.
If we look at the first anti-Christian (Celsus), there is no mention of any possibility that Christians had based their religion on someone who didn’t exist.
If we look at Mandaeanism, which tracks its history back to John the Baptist and was never part of the Christian fold, their history also portrays Jesus as having been a real person who stole away some of their earliest followers.
Individually, none of these is particularly conclusive. Celsus might have had no idea what he was talking about, and thought Jesus was real because the Christians of his time thought he was. It’s possible that the Mandaeans added in anti-Jesus stuff into their lore when they were persecuted by the early Christian church as heretics, and again, they thought that he was real because the Christians did. It may be that it just happened to be that the humanization of Jesus didn’t take all that much time. But, what is the odds that you would have all three of these items together? What are the odds that people, listening to Paul and reading his letters, would get the impression that there was a real person that this was all based on? Are people really that poor at understanding? After all, the only case I can think of where we are fairly certain that a fictional character became confused for real is King Arthur. I can’t think of any other cases of this happening in all of history.
It’s not the individual pieces of evidence nor their individual strength that matters, it’s the strength of the overall argument.
I’m not Dio and I apologize in advance if I seem to be focusing on one part of the argument. I’m not trying to poke holes or take potshots, just trying at assess the credibility of some of your more interesting points. I’ll admit up fron that even if all of my objections are valid, it doesn’t necessarily demolish your argument, but I haven’t been participating as thoroughly as Dio and others and I’d like to start here.
Is this fact or speculation? How do we know these things about the group that James belonged to? I admit up front that if these statements are true, that it does indeed make a very strong piece of evidence in favor of the mythicist position. But only if they are true. If they are not true, the reference to James is a strong piece of evidence in favor of historicity. In neither case is it definitive, but as I said, I’d like to start somewhere and these are very interesting points that I hadn’t heard previously.
As part of your overall argument, these are good supporting pieces, but I think you overstate how certain it is that we would have clear evidence of such a relative. And if the statements about James and his cult are inaccurate then we arguably have such a record. The lack of attestation from the later epistles makes this less likely, but without the alternative explanation of James’ relationship with Jesus, they aren’t enough to go on.
I agree that most or all of the stories of the Twelve from the Gospels are fictional, but ti doesn’t follow that Jesus is fictional. Cephas was obviously more than “just this guy” or Paul wouldn’t have bothered to make special mention of him. At the very least, he seems to have been the first person to claim to see the risen Christ. That doesn’t mean he knew a living Jesus, but it doesn’t mean he didn’t, either. All of the people Paul mentions in this passage were clearly important members of the Christian community at the time, and regarded as holy personages, whether or not any of them met Jesus in the flesh. And of course, Paul still argued with them. These passages are much weaker evidence for historicity than might be supposed, but your argument here is confusing and speculative. We don’t know that Paul, specifically, would have refrained from arguing with holy personages. I suspect he’d have argued with Jesus himself! If his faction won out due simply to the fall of Jerusalem, it wouldn’t be unlikely that writings by or about Jesus’s family and immediate followers would be suppressed unless it toed the Pauline line. In fact, this is exactly what happened.
And what about the end of the passage, where Paul says that Christ appeared to him last of all? The NRSV (an orthodox, historicist translation if ever there was one, I admit) translates the word ektroma as “one untimely born” with the implication that he was converted too late to have known the living Jesus. Other commentators have suggested that it means he lacked the full term of knowing Jesus in the flesh. Again, weak support for historicism, but I don’t see how mythicism interprets that line.
