I find the notion that Jesus did not exist preposterous. But I think I could be persuaded that it is merely improbable. So help me out.
There were those who alleged that Jesus was the illegitimate son of a Roman soldier. But there are no ancient accounts that say that Xtians made the whole thing up.
There are plenty of cases where followers have exaggerated the virtues of their leader: Dear Leader in N Korea has his sycophants and Parson Weems fabricated a number of stories about George Washington. But I am unaware of a person being invented out of whole cloth within a couple of decades of his purported death. Ludicrous.[1] Now I can believe that Abraham and even Moses are legends, as accounts of them date centuries after their lifetimes. And I might even buy it if there was reason to believe that Paul dreamed the whole thing up. But he didn’t: his tracts are full of a very human frustration with other believers in Jesus who wouldn’t see things in Paul’s particular way.
[1] …but I would be delighted to be proven wrong on this.
There are no ancient accounts saying Hercules was made up either.
There are no contemporary records of Jesus at all, and nothing much about about him from non-Christians until generations after he allegedly lived. The “Pantera” story is centuries later and was a Jewish a defense to Christian attacks. Why would you expect them to say he never existed if they had no idea themselves? How could you expect anyone to KNOW whether or not some obscure preacher had ever lived in a now destroyed city a hundred or two hundred years before you were born? How would you go about proving he didn’t?
I think what you’re missing here is that for the first 50 years or so after the alleged crucifixion, Christianity was an extremely obscure and little known movement. Even in Jerusalem (before it was destroyed in 70 CE), the vast majority of people would have never heard of him, much less had any basis to claim he never existed.
You’re assuming that Jesus was always seen as historical even by Paul. I’m not advocating for the position, but mythicists argue that Paul saw Jesus as an otherworldly figure who “died and rose” on a spiritual plane, not on earth. Jesus isn’t clearly historicized in Christian literature until Mark. The date of the crucifixion doesn’t mean anything if it never happened, by the way, and that dating originates with Mark.
Diogenes, I agree with what you’re saying – which makes it hard to take absolute statements like “Jesus didn’t really exist” seriously. The best you can say is that maybe he didn’t exist, and if you’re feeling particularly cocky you can say he probably didn’t exist. But he was the leader of a small Jewish sect in the outskirts of the Empire and his followers were concentrated in a city that was destroyed within a generation – we wouldn’t expect to have much record of his life. It’s frankly surprising that we have as much as we do, from several different sources, even they are second and third hand accounts written up to a hundred years later.
I like the point about Hercules, but he didn’t really have organized detractors, did he? And Christians did during the first century, though the point is well taken that they weren’t prominant enough to merit a determined attack. (The detractors that I’m thinking of include one proto-skeptic and one graffiti writer.)
I take it as given that Christianity was an obscure cult/Jewish sect before the fall of the Temple. I also believe that Jesus of Nazarath did not merit notice during his lifetime, which would explain the lack of contemporaneous accounts. My problem I guess lies with burden of proof: I find it unlikely that Paul and those who came before him would follow somebody nonexistant. After all, prophets were a dime a dozen: why make one up out of whole cloth? And if you did, wouldn’t you invent somebody from the distant past? Paul may have never met Jesus of Nazarath [1], but he knew plenty of people who lived during the time that Jesus lived.
Again, I’d like an example of a mythical human who ostensibly lived within 20 years of the original account. In another thread, somebody proposed Philip Nolan, “The Man Without A Country”. But even in that case, the story was penned in 1863 and Nolan allegedly died in 1817, if I have skimmed the story properly. That’s 46 years. And nobody worshiped Philip Nolan. (The story also contains lots of excuses as to why nobody had heard of the story of his life. There’s nothing like that in Christian writings-- and the gospels are full of Ex Tempore rhetoric.) More generally, I find it implausible that a religion would spring up around somebody who allegedly died a few years ago, but in fact never existed. I find it entirely plausible that a cult could spring up around a rural faith healer who either escaped the wrath of the Roman State or simply suffered from it.
[1]…though even this claim isn’t clear to me: there’s the possibility that JC successfully survived a Roman execution.
Both Mack and Price have moved from their previously more agnostic positions to the mythicist position, although they’re both understandably reluctant to openly state in short declarative sentences that they’ve pushed their beads all the way to the end (in Sagan’s metaphor). Mack noted his move into the mythicist position in his The Christian Myth: Origins, Logic, and Legacy, where he demonstrates that there’s no reliable Jesus “history” anywhere. So while there’s no short straightforward statement of “I am now a mythicist”, it clearly follows from his own research and arguments. To say so explicitly would be redundant and an insult to his readers’ intelligence.
Price has steadily moved from his previous historicist position on through considerable skepticism in his Incredible Shrinking Son of Man of 2003 and now finally to essentially full historical skepticism with his 2007 book, Jesus Is Dead.
But the standard bearer is now Doherty’s new book, Jesus: Neither God Nor Man, which considerably expands and tightens his earlier The Jesus Puzzle. I just received it and haven’t finished it yet, but this new book – at 800 pages – is even more rigorous and thorough than the high levels of both he’d already achieved with Puzzle. For example, I’ve already learned of my earlier error in my understanding of Justin’s debate “partner” Trypho, who I’d believed was either a particular Jewish critic of Christianity, a composite representative of several, or perhaps just a somewhat fictional critic like Galileo’s Simplicio. But Doherty set me straight on that point: Trypho was, in fact, just a fictional strawman/foil whose words in that dialogue were completely fabricated by Justin in order to solicit the responses Justin wanted to put forward. As such, I made a fool of myself just a few months ago here when I put Trypho forward as a more or less historical figure.
PBear42, I’d try to meet your request to quote Price and Mack directly, but I’ve been burned badly here at SDMB by quoting just 0.5% of a single chapter and having it then be 98% deleted by a mod. I’m not going to waste all that work again, as I’m sure you’ll understand.
I missed something: the crucifixion date is derived from Mark, which was written in perhaps in 70 CE, about 40 years after the purported death of Jesus. Paul’s conversion was in about 33. According to the mythicists (if I understand this correctly), sometime between Paul’s death in Rome in 63? and 70, it was decided that JC would die in about 30. That’s a very odd date to pick, it’s simply not that distant.
Really? That’s all? That’s your response? I find your attempted rebuttalmind-bogglingly unconvincing!
You would have us believe that Paul – a writer almost as verbose as myself – wouldn’t write down even a single sentence about personally visiting God’s place of death? God’s place of resurrection? Nothing about Gethsamane, where God struggled with his fate? Not a single sentence about Calvary, center of earthquakes and a three-hour eclipse when God died? Nothing at all about visiting the Tomb of God or the Mother of God?
This is your rebuttal?
Seriously?
Even though Paul wastes all sorts of paper and ink on such things as petty internal squabbles and lengthy erudition about why Christians shouldn’t insist on clipping foreskins?
Seriously?
If you read all of the genuine Pauline epistles, you have to come away with the overriding desperation of Paul to assert his authority in his vehement theological struggles with the Jerusalem “Pillars” as well as the membership of his own churches, desperation that would be completely vanquished and resolved by even one reference to the historical Jesus. Yet Paul never even hints that he can do so, let alone actually does it! It would have solved pretty much all of his problems if he could have done so, yet he never does.
The alternative – that Paul didn’t know of any historical Jesus and so didn’t even know to try to visit God’s place of resurrection – makes several million times more logical sense.
As for your point (2), I’ve never, ever read anything suggesting that we do not have every one of Paul’s writings. Where does your belief come from? What evidence is brought forth of currently non-existing writings of Paul? I’d like to read more.
The reality in all other cases is quite the reverse: Anything that even hinted at a possible historical reference to Jesus was retained and often exaggerated endlessly by the Church! Look how desperately the Church sought to retain the obvious Christian interpolation (i.e., pious fakery) in Josephus, and look how desperately orthodoxy and the Church sought to convert Tacitus’ and other Gentile historicans’ obvious regurgitation of Christian beliefs into an ostensible “historical” reference. The notion that some historical reference was destroyed or censored is completely beyond belief!
It might be a “weak argument” if, as you did, you look at it standing alone by itself, but that’s a thoroughly bogus way of treating it. It should be considered in the totality of the whole set of arguments combined with all the obvious lack of historical evidence. And Paul clearly does not posit his apostleship based on your weak argument of his conversion experience! Here’s the key to Paul’s insistence on his apostlehood, and it rejects the idea that the other apostles knew a historical Jesus either:
Here, Paul’s telling us that none of the other apostles “filled him in” on anything! They didn’t know anything about a historical Jesus either.
Now, I admit that that’s not 100% unambiguous, but that is clearly the most logical and probable interpretation. We know he was the very first to write anything about an intermediate Son salvific figure of a purely spiritual Christ, but we also now see that he insisted that he’d heard not a word of any of it from any other human being but only from the same spiritual Christ.
Nonsense! Opinion is a gut personal feeling based on no or inadequate evidence. As such Christianity and historicism are mere opinion. But mythicism is simply a name for skepticism of Jesus’ historicity, and that’s not opinion. It might not be correct, but existential skepticism is the one position that never holds the burden of proof! As I wrote earlier, all you have to do to refute it is to provide solid, credible historical evidence that we skeptics cannot throw reasonable doubt upon.
Maybe, maybe not. You’re assuming that Paul thought of Jesus as a historical person himself, and that the people he called the “Pillars” in Jerusalem (Peter, James and John). If Paul and the people in the Jerusalem cult thought of Jesus as cosmic figure, not a historical por earthly one, then this point goes out the window.
It’s 40 years (Jesus wasn’t clearly historicized until Mark), and the fact that this historicization occured outside of its alleged georgraphical location makes it even more remote.
This is not a valid objection in any case because all religious movements have unique components to them. It’s no proof of validity.
Why would Christian writings contain responses to objections that no one would have been expected to make. The ahistoricity of the founder is simply not anything critics would have found important. It’s also possible (not that I’m advocating for it) that the original movement arose from visonary experiences of one or more people of what they orginally perceived as a non-earthly figure (like Mohammed and Joseph Smith talking to angels), who wa later historized as a literal and earthly figure a generation later by people who were personally removed from the original claimants not only temporally, but geographically, culturally and lingusitically.
So do I (well not the escaping part). I think it’s not only plausible, but more probable that Jesus represents the accretion of legend and myth around a real historical figure, however, we still can’t say his historicity is beyond all question.
One point that should be raised with regard to the HJ vs. MJ question is what are the minimum requirements for a historical person to be fairly considered “THE Jesus.” If he said all of the things attributed to him, and was crucified, but did not perform miracles or rise from the dead, is he still Jesus? what if he only said some of things attributed to him? What if his name wasn’t Jesus? What if the chracter of the Gospels is a composite of more than one historical personage?
I think that it’s more likely than not that there was some kind of a real Jesus, but I think the odds are that he was not anything like the Jesus Christ of religion and myth. I often use the comparison of the historical St. Nicholaus and Santa Claus. There was probably a Yeshua from Galilee, but he wasn’t really Santa Claus.
Ambushed, Paul’s lack of mention of any empty tomb could very well simply reflect the lack of that tradition being invented yet. I’m sure you’re aware of the thesis that original disposition of Jesus’ remains were simply unknown (as they would have either been left on the cross or buried in a communal, unmarked criminals’ grave), and that the empty tomb was a fiction created by Mark. The empty grave is not mentioned by Paul, Q or Thomas, but neither is a bodily resurrection. This does not have to indicate total lack of historicity for Jesus, but only for the empty tomb.
It’s actually not an argument from incredulity because if those things had happened historically, you would expect Paul to mention them. It actually is a decent argument against the empty tomb (and the supernatural embellishments associated in the synpotics with the crucifixion, it goes without saying, are fictional accretions), and it indicates that those elements of the Jesus mythos post-date Paul, but they don’t actually indicate that Jesus didn’t exist at all, only that particular components of the familiar story in the Gospels hadn’t been accreted yet.
Hypothetically, if Jesus’s followers fled back to Galilee after he was arrested, and if Jesus was crucified, then either left on the cross or dumped in a communal grave, then there would have been a historical crucifixion of a historical Jesus, but no tomb, or story of a tomb while Paul was active. The final disposition of Jesus’ remains would have been unknown. Paul does not say anything about Jesus literally crawling out of a tomb, only that he “appeared” to people. Paul says that Jesus died, then “appeared” to Cephas (Peter), then James and John, then “the twelve” (which shows a lack of awareness of the Judas story), then “the five hundred” (an enigmatic reference mentioned only by Paul, and not mentioned at all by the Gospels) then to Paul himself. Paul draws no distinction between the nature of the appearance to the original apostles or to himself, and never says that Jesus was physically resurrected or appeared in a physical body (in fact, paul actually denies that physical resurrections are possible). This leaves alive the hypothesis that Jesus could have been real, that one or more people had visionary experiences of him after his death, came to believe he would return in glory as the “Son of Man,” and that this was the paradigm followed by the Jerusalem cult and was adopted by Paul, with the literalization of a physical resurrection and empty tomb story being added by Mark (or Mark’s community) a generation later. This is pretty much the hypothesis where I’ve come to lean myself.
Noise and nonsense. A minor but still glaring problem is that you’ve committed the fallacy of assuming what is to be proved. You can’t just write of the Mark’s Gospel that “the earliest written within 35-40 years of his lifetime” without first establishing that Jesus even had a lifetime. That’s why scholars give absolute dates rather than the kind of unwise dating you’ve chosen.
Second, there were many more than just four canonical Gospels, with three of them being synoptic. The early Church rejected those that didn’t fit with their prejudices because the many others were radically different and often portrayed their redeeming intermediary Son as a purely mystical or mythical or supernatural entity who never walked on earth, just like Paul’s gospel does (if read carefully). If the Church bigots had permitted all of them to be retained in the New Testament, the notion of a purely spiritual Jesus/Christ would be quite unremarkable.
Third, none of the gospels are anything even approaching “biographies”! How absurd! They are deliberately modified, goal-driven faith stories, not biographies. Historians working with psychologists and sociologists and the like have established that the wild inconsistencies of even the three synoptic Gospels cannot be explained away as normal variations in the relating of events. The enormous variability between even just those three closest Gospels can only be explained as variations on first having read Mark and some set of Q levels and then crafting their reassembly in terms of what was most important for the later two authors personally and for their own Christian sects. The faith story that they were written by men named “Mark”, “Matthew”, “Luke”, and “John” is all hogwash. No one knows which individuals wrote the New Testament, expect that we know it wasn’t the “Mark”, “Matthew”, “Luke”, and “John” of New Testament fables.
You ask: “So here’s a simple question: can you name any person from the ancient world for whom we have such a huge collection of different writings from different writers all dedicated to that one person and written within their lifetime?”
Well, nothing about Jesus was ever written in his lifetime, even in the orthodox view! What are you talking about? The very earliest writings are by Paul, who didn’t start writing anything until at least 15 years after Jesus’ alleged death!
For the rest of your question, we have such a teeny, tiny little bit relating to Christianity in ancient times that choosing just a few answers to your questions among millions of better choices is rather daunting! How about Siddhartha Gautama (possibly fictional), Confucius (though he is more and more looking like an entirely mythical person such as Jesus surely is), Cyrus the Great, Darius the Great, Xerxes, Plato, Aristotle, Alexander the Great, Epicurus, Zeno, Julius Ceaser, Pompey the Great, Augustus, Tiberius, Pontius Pilate, the various Herods, Claudius, Titus… Can I stop now?
While below in the quote box is the sum total of all historical knowledge of Jesus:
You remark: “The mythicist position depends on making up a completely arbitrary approach for Jesus that has nothing in common with the techniques that real ancient historians use.”
You’ve got that entirely backwards! What exists is mere personal Christian believers desperately trying to defend their own dubious beliefs under the guise of pseudo-history. The Church deliberately put the epistles at the end of the NT in order to get people to read the fiction first and produce effective Gospel-colored glasses to wear when reading Paul. If one would read Paul all alone without any knowledge of the Gospel fictions, one would see that Jesus was a purely spiritual being who never lived on earth. What you espouse is but rotten, preempted pseudo-scholarship which seeks to defend the idea of a historical Jesus at all costs, including intellectual dishonesty and even plain lies.
That’s a remarkably specious argument. We can’t criticize one quasi-historical story without criticizing ALL history?? Seriously? Sheesh!
We have many original documents for other historical figures, even a stone carving by Alexander the Great himself. But what he have in the case of Christianity is the deliberate destruction of or fraudulent insertions into documents which would have made it clear that Jesus was not historical! We know that happened because still-existing documents refer to vitally important documents to the mythicist position which no longer exist, and we know for certain that most or all of this destruction was at the hands of the Church.
So, you think an anti-Mormon fundamentalist apologetics site is a scholarly and reliable source of information? Or are you just pulling my leg?
Your views absolutely do not reflect the current scholarly consensus. It is noise and nonsense. You also completely misunderstand my arguments! You cherry-picked the few segments of that post that you could throw crap at and hope it would stick. My arguments have nothing to do with the date of existing documents, they have to do with the fact that none of them provide the tiniest bit of credible evidence for a historical Jesus. And also that nothing was written down at all until about 52 CE and show no knowledge of a historical Jesus and that the Gospels are not “biographies” and show no credible knowledge of a historical Jesus (due to what I’ve written previously). And also that not one of the historians certain to have known of a historical Jesus, such as Josephus and others, related even the tiniest scrap of evidence of such a person.
Again: Show us solid, credible evidence for a historical Jesus and I’ll admit my error and openly give you credit. Just be warned, not the best historians and/or apologists have been able to come up with one either!
You read both myself and Erhman poorly, it would seem. His book related all the many apologetic changes to Christian texts in order to either delete damning evidence or create new fraudulent entries where the Church dearly wished they would be found, such as the blatant fraud of the Christian interpolations in Josephus over the centuries. That’s all I said he wrote and that is entirely correct.
It’s hard to take you seriously when you don’t even know what “canonical” means. Plus, referring to those who codified the canon as “Church bigots” does not create the impression of you being an objective scholar of church history.
So far, you’ve provided **no evidence **that Jesus didn’t exist. You have managed to prove that:
– Paul didn’t talk about Jesus’ physical resurrection
– You’ve suggested an alternate interpretation to the title of “James, the Lord’s brother” (although I noted while reading that passage yesterday that Paul did not refer to the other apostles as “the Lord’s brothers”).
– You seem to have some kind of chip on your shoulder regarding the church
Yet you’ve made the huge logical leap that because the sources for all the writings we have about Jesus were written a few decades after his death, that he must be a completely mythical figure. I hope you’re wearing good running shoes.
The bottom line is that there is no proof that Jesus existed. There is also no proof that he didn’t. Yet the preponderance of evidence suggests that somebody name Jesus lived around that time and inspired some people to keep talking about him after he was gone.
Sure we have many original documents for a handful of historical figures. How many original documents do we have, though, that specifically name individual end-times rabbis from the Levant in the first few decades of the first century? That, and not mentions of Alexander the Great or Julius Caesar is what is more relevant.
I made no such attempt. I know full well that the lack of original manuscripts or autographs doesn’t magically make the claims invalid! I’m not quite the idiot you paint me as being.
My point of raising Misquoting Jesus was not to present him as a mythicist or to argue that the lack of original documents was a salient point in this debate, but rather to emphasize that we can’t trust the extant documents as having never been fraudulently modified for apologetic reasons. Thus, if we see something in them that looks like a historical reference for Jesus, it might well be just another of the many fraudulent changes made by the Church or other Christians to cover up the fact that there were no such references in the originals.
One especially clear case of this are the totally fraudulent Christian interpolations in Josephus.
yes, Ehrman’s point (and the salient “skeptical” position in general) is not that the lack or autographs for the books of the NT is evidence against Jesus, only evidence that we don’t know what they originally said.
I always felt that Paul was a misogynistic homophobe and his teachings reflect that. A modern-day example of Pauline Christianity would be the Roman Catholic Church. Is this a hijack? Well when I hear Fundamentalist Christians focus on the sin of “the gays” and exclude every other sin in the Old Testament, then yes it is a hijack. My favorite was when a woman said that I really didn’t go to Church because my pastor was a woman and Paul said “I let no woman speak for me.” (Romans) The conversation ended pretty quickly when I pointed out that according to Paul in Corinthians, she was a common street-walking whore because she wasn’t wearing a hat outdoors.
It’s a very difficult bit of forensics, but I’m okay with that. If it were easy to defend, I wouldn’t have to echo so many scholar’s vast works and arguments.
The two non-Christian writers who almost certainly had to have known of a historical Jesus – Josephus and Seneca – failed to even mention him! (Pay no attention to the blatant Christian insertions in Josephus -or- Constantine’s forgery that fraudulently made Seneca look like a Christian).
Josephus lists 21 men named Yeshua/Jesus in one of his works (I can’t recall which one), but one of them is highly atypical and quite revealing: “Jesus the Christ”. That one stands out as not fitting the same pattern Josephus used with the others, such as not including a “bar” (father) reference as well as missing other standard Josephus treatments. It’s clearly one of those apologetic Christian forgeries that I referred to when I mentioned Misquoting Jesus. But the forgers would have been better off not changing the text, because now that “Josephus” allegedly “mentions” Jesus as “The Messiah”, the fact that he didn’t write about such a world-changing figure beyond just mentioning the name speaks volumes. The main thing it speaks of is that Josephus never knew of or wrote about any historical figure named Yeshua bar Joseph -or- any Jesus the Christ figure!
Yet, if he had lived, Josephus would have written of him.
Agreed.
Nonsense. I have no burden of proof because I am not asserting that Jesus absolutely never lived. I cannot prove an existential negative. I can’t prove that flying elephants never existed, either. All I’m saying is that the default position – the null hypothesis – is that, like flying elephants, we should not assume the existence of something or someone for which there is no credible positive evidence. Your belief in a historical Jesus is an opinion / assumption based on no credible evidence at all. As such, you historicists bear the full burden of proof.
What I’m doing in this thread is revealing all the fatal flaws in the positive historical evidence that has been brought out. That’s all a skeptic such as myself can do and has to do.
No, that’s not what I’ve done. I’ve demonstrated that it is ridiculous to think that Paul’s reference to James as “the brother of the lord” meant that James was a biological sibling of Jesus. The evidence is completely against the idea that James was a biological sibling of Jesus.
Non sequitur alert! I didn’t offer that as an “argument against historicity”; I offered that to rebut an earlier claim that the reference to James as Jesus’ biological sibling demonstrated that someone in the early days knew a historical Jesus. You can’t refute the entire historicist position with one or even just a few arguments! The debate must go as follows: A historicist provides evidence that he or she thinks is solid, credible evidence of Jesus’ historical existence and I have to challenge or invalidate it. If I or the scholars I’ve read can’t do that, I lose and the historicist position survives until that claim can be examined. I’m one of the few posters here who have openly admitted changing my mind as a result of debates here, and so I promise you I will do so again if some historicist brings a challenge I cannot answer.
First, I never said that the entirety of the staggeringly confused and fractious early Christian churches focused only on a purely spiritual Christ (I tend to think that’s true, but I personally lack the evidence to establish that). No, what I wrote is that there was a single, specific Christian community that was led by James wherein everyone in that community were called “adelphos” of/in The Lord. But the leader – James – was referred to as "THE “adelphos” of/in The Lord as a formal title for the leader of that group. As such, that term didn’t refer to James as a literal biological sibling of Jesus.
Again, it’s not up to me to prove he wasn’t Jesus’ biological sibling, it is up to you to prove he was!
sigh Please try to understand the nature of this debate. As I described above, you’re improperly and fallaciously trying to shift the burden of proof to myself rather than have 100% of it born by the historicists instead, as it must be.
So? Huh? The key word there is “supposedly”. I don’t know what point you were trying to make with that.
Oh, gosh, no it doesn’t! The Jews thought bloodlines and family trees were extremely important! What are you talking about? 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 killed to have 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 birth. But they could find no one like that at all!
What does that mean? I can’t reply to something I don’t understand.
I’m not going to try to list many in this already very long post, but here’s a few:
Paul and/or all the others would have written about visiting Gethsamane and Calvary after Jesus’ alleged death and recording the words of first-hand witnesses, the majority of whom would have still been alive. Someone would have quoted Pilate’s trial transcript and Herod’s exact orders and noted that at least 3 out of the 4 Gospels which would eventually become canonical were bogus or at least overflowing with errors. The various apostles would not have had to fight at all, let alone so bitterly, if there were any historical record to base decisions upon. Those historical records would still be with us today. This debate wouldn’t be taking place. Etc., etc. etc., etc.
Oh, come now! An English grammar lesson that may well not fit the grammar of Koine Greek or even Aramaic is rather trite for a counter-argument, don’t you think?
Dio, would you be so kind as to apply your strong knowledge of Koine Greek to shed light on the most likely interpretation of 1 Corinthians 15:5-7?
When the Gospels speak of “the Twelve”, they are called “disciples”. But Paul and the other early epistle writers refer to “apostles”, not disciples. The two are often confused in common English usage. The term “apostle” means “messenger”. Everyone who went out into the world to preach Christ’s teachings were called apostles, so there were a hell of a lot more than 12 of them.
The point I’m making is that there’s no indication anywhere in the Pauline or other pre-Gospel epistles that suggest that the members comprising the group known as “The Twelve” were the 12 disciples mentioned in the Gospels. It’s quite possible, as respected Christian scholar Rudolf Bultmann among others strongly holds, that the 12 disciples were entirely fictional and that rather than Paul referencing “The Twelve” as the alleged group of 12 disciples from the Gospels, the Gospel writers got the idea of creating a fictional body of 12 from Paul’s reference to some non-disciple group of twelve! It’s the old puzzle of cause and effect, but in this case, Paul’s reference to some unknown body of 12 people came first. By a long shot.
I have to stop now because this post has maxed out the character count… Continued in Part 2.