Just a side question for my own edification, but Mack’s position seems to be substantially what Albert Schweitzer said in his criticism of German efforts to find the historical Jesus. From ambushed’s earlier posts, it seems Mack also claims such quests reveal more about the researcher’s own beliefs than the target of inquiry, also something Schweitzer noted in his criticism.
I’m betting there is more to Mack’s criticism of historical reconstructions of Jesus than a rehash of scholarship from the turn of the last century. I am curious to learn what that is.
Joseph Smith claimed to have seen God and Jesus Christ. He claimed an angel named Moroni showed him where to find gold plates, which he translated into the Book of Mormon. He claimed the the prophet Elijah and John the Baptist appeared and conferred upon him the true authority to act in God’s name which had been gone from the earth for centuries.
He was imprisoned several times for these beliefs, and was eventually killed in prison for them. All of this happened during the span of modern recorded history; there are dozens of newspaper and other eyewitness accounts. Are you prepared to give Mormonism the same weight you give mainstream Christianity, in sight of this?
Despite your denial that you are claiming that Jesus was completely imaginary, that is the pretty clear subtext of your statements.
What I have pointed out is that there are, indeed, persons or beings related to various religions who have been “introduced” to the world at particular times, (as distinct from more clearly mythological gods who may have evolved), who are completely imaginary. However, their presentation to the world follows a particular pattern–a pattern that is not repeated in the stories from early Christianity. I make no claims about a historical Jesus and tend to agree that any effort to discover him are fruitless. However, the fact of a human bearing that name in the first century (and nothing more) is the more plausible deduction from the materials presented.
No, he wasn’t. He was imprisoned for practicing polygamy, for citing a riot and destroying another person’s printing press, for treason and various other charges. Nor was he killed for those beliefs; rather, he was lynched by an angry mob before he could be tried for treason.
Illness and work obligations have forced me to take time away from this discussion, but I did want to respond at this point. The objection that you raised is indicative of the many false analogies that have been raised – false analogies between the martyrdom of the Apostles under severe persecution and the public lynching of Joseph Smith, for example, or spread of early Christianity and the spread of, say, modern-day Islam. As the Apostle Paul said, Christianity is predicated on the Resurrection event. And, as Stratocaster said, the closer one is to that event, the more relevant one’s actions become – whether we’re talking about martyrdoms or explosive growth. None of this is conclusive, but as I keep reminding people, there is a difference between evidence and proof.
Which underscores another problem. People keep saying, “What if the Apostles were mentally ill?” or “What if there was bias in what Eusebius recorded? Maybe he can’t be trusted.” Once again though, that’s why I emphasize the distinction between evidence and proof. The mere possibility for bias or error is not sufficient reason to discard evidence.
Virtually the only documentation we have on the Gallic Wars (just a few years before Christ) comes from a decidedly biased source – Julius Caesar’s own memoirs, of which only ten manuscripts survive, copies that are dated to 1000 years after the fact. Yet historians do not simply discount everything in these documents. Rather, they are treated as evidence, instead of being ignored altogether.
Now, this is the point at which ambushed and his like would say, “But you still haven’t proven that the Resurrection occurred, or that the Apostles were martyred!” and so forth. As I keep reminding people though, I am not out to provide proof. Rather, I contend that there is evidence for the Resurrection, despite what some say. You might propose alternate explanations, if you wish, but guess what? That doesn’t make the evidence vanish. As tomndebb said, it might not be compelling or conclusive evidence, but it’s nonetheless evidence to consider.
No, but it is reason to take that document with a grain of salt. No real historian would take a single account of a phenomenal event as basis enough to claim the event occured without corroberating evidence. To continue with my example of Lincoln, if a letter surfaced that claimed Lincoln did a strip-tease at his Gettysburg adresss, must we then take that as “evidence” that he actually did, even though nothing else supports it?
No, they’re taken as an account. If Ceasar claimed a battle occured in a certain place, but no archaeological evidence emerged, such as bits of armor from that time period or there were no corroborating accounts elsewhere, historians would not make the assertion that the battle definitely occured. They would say that it’s possible, but nothing has yet been found to support the claim.
I don’t mean to be insulting, but you’re apparently unfamiliar with how historians actually work, so I think it’s unfair for you to keep saying that historians would do this or that when it’s not the case.
Well, sure. And Jesus was executed for stirring the Jews up to rebellion, right? No; that’s what they came up with as a pretext for killing him because they didn’t like what he was saying. And while we don’t have any documentation, AFAIK, for the legal pretexts under which the apostles were martyred (if indeed there were any), I would wager that they were similar.
Joseph Smith was accused of inciting riots, destroying the printing press, and treason. He was killed because people hated what he had to say.
Because you’re misusing it. Something that might under some intepretation be a related thing we might expect to find if conclusion X is true is not what evidence is. Evidence is supposed to show that it is more likely that conclusion X is true than we thought previously: it’s supposed to help confirm or disconfirm something explicitly. Weak arguments to begin with that require special assumptions with several “if” statements afterwards aren’t evidence. Just because there are trees in Lord of the Rings and trees in the real world is not evidence (not even weak evidence) that maybe the Lord of the Rings is a little more likely to be historical fact.
There is no evidence that the apostles were martyred for their beliefs. You’re begging the question. We at least know that Joseph Smith was lynched and that he never recanted his claims. I also think it’s a bit disingenuous to say that his lynching had nothing to do with his claims, official charges notwithstanding.
It’s predicated on a belief in the resurrection event. No historicity is necessary.
The people who were historically and geographically closest to the alleged ministry and crucifixion of Jesus emphatically did not believe any of the central Christian claims about him. The movement failed among Palestinian Jews. It only succeeded among gentiles and diaspora Jews who had no proximity to the historical claims of Christianity and no access to witnesses or evidence. The growth of Christianity was not unique or extraordinary. calling it “explosive” is hyperbole. LDS grew larger faster and has better evidence and witnesses.
And once again, there is no evidence that Jesus’ direct followers were martyred for their beliefs. We don’t even know what thir beliefs were. They didn’t leave any writings that we know of and all we have is claims made about them by people (with the possible exception of Paul) didn’t know them. Paul claims to have met some leaders of the Jerusalem church – people who he calls “apostles” and who he claims that Jesus had “appeared” to after the crucifixion but he does not give much helpful information about what they specifically believed about Jesus, what their relationship was to him or about the nature of the “appearances.” Paul does not say anything about a physical resurrection or an empty tomb, draws no distinction between Jesus’ appearances to the apostles and to himself and he claims that he did not learn these things “from any man,” but that he got his information by direct revelation from Jesus. In fact, he claims that he received this information from Jesus three years before he met the Jerusalem “Pillars.”
He also never says that any of the apostles were persecuted or martyred for their beliefs.
It’s not evidence. It’s just an assertion of evidence. No discussion of the mental state or motivations of the apostles is necessary since we have no idea what they believed. Assuming that any of them claimed to have witnessed a physical resurrection is assuming your own conclusion that the Gospel claims are accurate. You can’t use the Gospels to prove the Gospels and Eusebius is simply not a reliable source of historical information. Historia Ecclesia is a repository of Christian traditions, folk history, legends, uncorroborated hearsay, tendentious inference, and the like. He does not provide evidence that Jesus’ followers were martyred. He provides evidence that Christians in the 4th Century believed that they were.
Yes, the Gallic Wars chestnut. I’ve seen this often on apologist websites. First, historians don’t automatically believe everything in Gallic Wars and they have no illusions about it as a biased source. However, many of the claims within it have been verified by archaeological investigation of battle sites, contemporary statues and inscriptions, secondary documentation, etc. Nothing is taken as true just because Julius Caesar says so. There’s a bit of an apologist strawman that historians treat the historical claims of the Bible differently than they do the claims of other ancient historians. They don’t. Supernatural claims by Jospehus and Herodotus are dismissed just as casually as supernatural claims in the Bible, coroborration is always sought to confirm specific claims and no assumptions are made that the author can’t be lying or mistaken. Skepticism is part and parcel of historical method. What really bothers Biblical literalists is not that historians treat the Bible differently from other ancient texts, but that they treat them the same. For some reason, many of them seem to think it’s unfair that historians don’t just take the supernatural claims of the Bible at face value, insisting against all principles of methodology and logic that the Bible should be considered “innocent until proven guilty.” Somehow I don’t think they would take that same approach to Gilgamesh or the Iliad.
You have neither evidence nor proof for a physical resurrection of Jesus. It seems to me that you are attempting to use a legal definition of “evidence” rather than a scientific one. They’re not the same.
Well I waited and waited but no one is going to do it by me wishing it so:
I would be interested in a GD ruling on this from** Diogenes** and Tomndeb and** whomever else ** cares to weigh in.
I think that the extraordinary claim that Jesus was entirely mythical while the scientific/historical consensus* (save an iconoclastic and usually less credentialed few) is that he existed. If that is in fact true, then the burden to overturn a scientific consensus, in other words a hypothesis, needs provide proof not the other way around.
[*Not to pick on ambushed but sort of what he said in post 108]
So who does have the burden of proof the guy who says: Jesus was entirely a myth or the person worshiped/mythologized & who we are discussing here is based on a real Jesus a Jew lived in Galilee and Judea ~5-32AD
First, I’m pretty sure that we are not taliking scientific proof in any sense.
Scientific proof is digging up some corpse and matching DNA against another corpse or a currently living person to determine whether the people were related.
However, once we get into any sort of “proof,” we are looking for factual evidence and there is simply none (pro or con) regarding Jesus. What we have is a certain amount of testimony from various sources that we can evaluate and from which we can draw inferences. I do not think either side has a strong enough case to claim proof.
I have already noted that I believe a search for the “historical Jesus” is doomed to fail. There is simply not enough information (and particularly not enough uncontested testimony) to determine any facts about Jesus.
On the other hand, I think that in the context of “how did the legends/mythologies/stories/whatever arise?”, those that we do have are not presented in a way consistent with narratives of persons known to have been created from imagination. So a declaration that “he did not exist” is far too strong, but I would say that a declaration that “he probably did not exist” or “we have no reason to believe he existed” are also too strong.
(And my statements, here, will probably set off a new round of the same arguments already set forth.)
My answer would be basically the same as tom’s on this but with a caveat that it might be the wrong question. I think that the issue is more complex than simply asking in a vaccuum whether Jesus was historical, it’s a question about what constitutes a better explanation for a known phenomenon. Namely, is the origin of Christianity better explained with a historical person at the core or without one. It could be said that the Gospels are myth either way (in the literary sense of the word) but the question is whether it’s mythicized history or historicized myth. Was Jesus a real person who has become buried under layers of myth and legend (essentially the mainstream view of historians and NT scholars), or do the gospels represent an attempt to create a history for a figure who was originally pure myth (which represents the dissenting view of Doherty, Wells, Price, Carrier and others)?
Since I think this is a question without a certain answer, I think it’s overstating it to say all the burden is on those who believe in HJ, When the question is framed in terms of what constitues a better explanation of history, I think the default is really somewhere in the middle. While it can’t be said that we have any real. smoking gun, incontrovertible proof that Jesus existed, I also don’t think we know enough to be certain that he did not. My personal opinion on this is that we don’t have enough data to know either way and I essentially agree with tom (and Burton Mack) that it’s probably fruitless to search for HJ in the evidence we have available to us. I think trying to find HJ in the Gospels is like trying to learn about the 4th Century Bishop Nicholas of Myra by reading Clement Moore’s “A visit from St. Nicholas.” There was really a St. Nicholas but you can’t learn much about him from the Santa Claus mythos.
I should also point out that the HJ question raises the non-inconsequential issue how we determine the minimum requirements to qualify a historical person as being identical to the Jesus of the Gospels? How much does he have to resemble that person in order for us to say that Jesus existed? What if there was a teacher named Jesus who is the authentic author of the common sayings tradition found in the gospel but that he was not crucified? What if he was crucified but did not originate the teachings attributed to the Jesus of the Gospels? need he have healed people? Performed any miracles? Been resurrected?
Obviously, this question doesn’t have an easy answer and since there could be a lot of hypothetical kinds of historical figures at the root of the movement, I just don’t think it’s methodologically sound to say that we can be certain that there was nobody there at all.
There is simply no realistic basis for the expectation that Paul should have provided either historical context or biographical information regarding Jesus. Paul was not a biographer. He was a Christian missionary involved in church starts. His epistles are not biographies–they are correspondences. I doubt that when he wrote his letters he ever imagined that they would be canonized as scripture. They were letters, essentially from “pastor to pastor”. They might have been preserved and fallen into our contemporary hands but they were written to the churches that Paul preached to in the time in history that he preached to them. The above assumes that when Paul wrote his letters (not biographies) that he knew he was writing letters (not biographies) that would be one day canonized as scripture and therefore owed it to “us” to included every detail that existed about Jesus Christ.
Why would they contain a known biography?
If I write to you “Fred, I really enjoyed our visit and our discussion about JFK’s assasination conspiracy theories”, am I bound to include the background information of his political and family background? Do I have to mention that he was a US President who was shot down in Dallas, Texas? Do I have to mention Lee Harvey Oswald? Do I have to mention Jackie and the children? His mother, father, brothers and sisters? The swearing in of LBJ?
Why not?
Because we are “near” to that event in history and you already know the details…just as did the people to whom Paul preached Jesus.
Who said we should expect to find biographical material in Paul? I wouldn’t expect to find a life story necessarily, but it’s odd that Paul says almost nothing at all about the life of Jesus before the crucifixion. We should expect that he would make some kind of reference to his life. At the very least, we should expect him to quote some things that Jesus said but with the exception of a formulaic eucharist passage, he does not. It’s especially odd that he doesn’t quote Jesus even when it would help support some point that Paul is trying to make. To me the strangest thing of all is that Paul seems to show no interest at all in anything Jesus taught. He’s obsessed with “Christ crucified” and with his own “revealed” salvation theology but doesn’t spend a dime on trying to convey any of Jesus’ sayings, parables or deeds. That’s a pretty ringing silence, in my opinion.
Why should we expect Paul to reference anything at all about the life of Jesuse prior to the crucifixion to people who likely already knew about it? Paul wasn’t a historian or biographer. His writings are correspondences, essentially offering encouragement to new churches. Paul’s focus, as you rightly point out, was the resurrection, the central focus of testimony to Jesus. You assume that because he doesn’t convey Jesus “sayings, parables or deeds” in his correspondences/letters, that he hasn’t taught them. I simply don’t agree with that assumption.
Nonsense. There is every expectation that Paul would at least make reference to some teaching or or saying or event in Jesus’ life in order to make his arguments. His letters are primarily weighing in on theological debates, but instead of discussing what Jesus taught, he instead does things like wildly re-interpret Scripture (Paul may or may not have really been a fully trained Pharisee: he claims he was, but his writing style bears little imprint of the rigid form and doctrine that is taught. It’s possible he “flunked out.”) to try and support his points: which perhaps part of why Christian theology never really caught on with the Jews the way it did with the Gentiles.
Quite the contrary: many of the people to whom Paul wrote never even set foot in any area that Jesus ever lived in, or met anyone who had met him, let alone met him themselves. And it’s quite obvious that Paul at least believes that the people he’s writing to don’t quite “get it” about the proto-religion: they need constant advice about various struggles and matters of doctrine. These are not well-informed people: they are people whom Paul fears will get mixed up without his advice.
And as I said, Paul’s letters are not “hey, how are you doing!” They are advice and commands on all sorts of subjects: some of which the very subjects that the Jesus of the Gospels weighs in on. Yet Paul never really references the teachings of Jesus, the way a devotee of a teacher, rabbi, or any other follower would their master. Instead, he seems taken with his own interpretation of what the death of Jesus means, for which he cites little support other than his own convictions and his very strange reading of scripture (for instance, totally rethinking the sons of Abraham).
That’s pretty weird behavior, no? And while that’s not evidence of anything relating to what Jesus’ life and teachings were really like, the fact that the earliest writer we have on Jesus shares none of those details and specifics certainly makes it far less likely that we will ever have a good picture of what Jesus was really like, what he taught, how and why he died, or even what his followers were really like. Instead, all we have is the take of later devotees to the religion, all with their own particular temporal agendas and concerns, and in a context where mythologizing isn’t lying, but simply passionate believers getting carried away.
