That was nearly 40 years after the most widely accepted date of the death of Jesus; long enough for most of his generation to be dead. But since you bring it up, the destruction of the Jewish Temple would seem to be an ideal time for people to try something new.
In any case, the environment was surely no worse than the Arabian Peninsula of Muhammad’s lifetime, where tribal wars and blood feuds went back beyond any written records, let alone living memory. Yet in less than a century, not only were the tribes united under Islam, but they were winning battles against the powerful Persian and Byzantine empires.
There WAS a somewhat different attitude toward conflict though, right? And as to the 40 year gap, that’s easily explained by the fact that Christianity just never went over very well with the Jews. It too radical a departure from their traditional views of the Messiah.
The screwed up thing is that the message of Jesus wasn’t all that different from what Hillel preached barely a generation before. Only he didn’t claim to be the son of god and didn’t die broken, defeated and abandoned.
Here’s my main argument: we have almost no evidence of ANYONE’s existence from those days, except for the top-level aristocracy and military leaders. (I’m doing this from memory, but my recollection is that there is only one reliable source that Pontius Pilate existed, and he was the governor!)
Also remember that the first Christians never saw any reason to write things down. They thought Jesus would return any day now, the Kingdom of God would be established, why bother to write things down for posterity? Only after a few decades passed, when Jesus didn’t appear, was there a feeling that it should be written down as the first generation died out.
As I see it; the psalmist told the people(as least the Jewish men); "I said you are gods and sons of the most high. Then Jesus seems to back this up when accused of Blasphemy in John 10. It doesn’t sound to me like Jesus was thinking he was anymore God or a son of god, in the way people view it today.
Totally off topic, and my apologies for that, but weren’t you a Christian a few years back Frylock? Maybe it’s because of my lack of sleep, but I could swear I discussed religion with you back in the day and you were a Christian (I can’t recall whether I was or not at that point).
How much non-Gospel evidence is there for John the Baptist?
Answering this might help calibrate, very roughly, how much historical evidence of Jesus to expect. (Of course that would assume John’s historicity.) (I asked this in a previous thread on the topic, but it wasn’t answered.)
BTW, three months ago I ordered Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth by Reza Aslan. (It’s not yet arrived. Nevermind my pipeline’s ambagiousness.)
Had I realized the zealot is likely fictional, I might have saved the $16.
I’m actually trying to talk about just what they literally say, rather than any interpretation of them into events from other times.
It’s not really relevant what “virtually any Jew” today thinks the traditional interpretation has always been. How much does “virtually any Jew” know about what things were like in the first century?
The prophecy in Daniel “fits” the leaders of the various Jewish Revolts far better than it does Jesus. The prophecy refers to a prince who fortifies Jerusalem (a moat or protective trench is specifically mentioned) but who is defeated and killed - and the killer is himself eventually destroyed.
After that destruction will come the millenium where justice rules [well, THAT part didn’t happen!].
The “suffering servant” in Isaiah 53 is pretty clearly the people of Israel itself - personified for poetic effect. If you read the verse as a whole, ALL of the stuff above Isaiah 53:13 is about the sufferings of the people in Babylonian captivity. The structure is: the people of Jerusalem are suffering in Babylonian captivity; but there is good news - the suffering will end; the ‘suffering servant’ has suffered horribly, but will be redeemed in great honour. All of which refers to the Jews as a people, although at one point they are personified as “Jerusalem” and another as the “suffering servant”.
Both verses can be reverse-engineered to shoehorn in references to a Jesus-like suffering messiah, and indeed Christians have done so; but it is a severly strained reading. The more obvious readings are that they have to do with specifically Jewish themes, unsurprisingly, as they were written both for and by Jews.
You’ve certainly given as a thorough and well-written OP, and are much more intelligent than most of the folks who show up to tell us that Jesus didn’t exist. That said, much of what you write is simply wrong.
In the intellectual world that Paul existed in, there was a clear division between the spiritual realm and the physical, earthly realm. When referring to the spiritual realm, people would used the Greek phrase kata pneuma; when referring to the physical realm, they would use the phrase kata sarx. There is no ambiguity about this; anyone who used the phrase kata sarx was trying to be very clear about the fact that they were speaking about something dealing with earthly life and life of the flesh, as opposed to spiritual. And what does Paul use to describe Jesus? He uses “kata sarx”, so therefore we know that Paul believed that Jesus was an earthly human being. (Cite)
Moreover, there are many other passages in which Paul uses the phrase kata sarx: Romans 8:3-6, Romans 4:1, Galatians 4:22-29, just to name a few. In all of these, it is abundantly clear that Paul used the phrase exactly as others used it, to unambiguously indicate physical, in-the-flesh descent. In Romans 9, Paul specifically says that Jesus was descended in the flesh in exactly the same way that normal people are: “…my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh, who are Israelites, to whom belongs the adoption as sons, and the glory and the covenants and the giving of the Law and the temple service and the promises, whose are the fathers, and from whom is the Christ according to the flesh…”
There is absolutely no rational way to interpret what Paul writes on this matter as saying anything other than that Jesus was a flesh-and-blood human being.
Not really. What you’re referring to here is neo-Platonist philosophy. And it’s certainly true that neo-Platonist ideas were traveling in the Roman world during the first century; no one would dispute that.
But to claim that Paul himself was a neo-Platonist, and thus that all of Paul’s references to the earthly, in-the-flesh life of Christ are really references to Christ living in a lower tier of a neo-Platonist Heaven? That’s completely off the wall; it has no relation to mainstream interpretation of Paul’s letters, nor even to more modern and liberal interpretations. It’s a desperate excuse that folks like Carrier and Doherty use to dismiss the many passages in Paul that are obviously fatal to their argument.
Lord of Legend:Wrestling with the Jesus Dilemma, by Greg Boyd and Paul Rhodes Eddy. It’s a fairly common book that’s probably available in your local public library. The Historical Reliability of the Gosepls, by Craig Blomberg, is more academic and devoted to the overall topic of gospel accuracy, not merely on arguing that Jesus existed. Frankly very few scholars will write books arguing that Jesus existed for the same reason that very few 20th-century historians will write books arguing that the Holocaust happened. What’s the point in writing a book to prove something that nearly all serious thinkers accept?
There are also online resources. James Hannam, a professional historian, has collected articles about the existence of Jesus here.
I haven’t said Paul was a neo-Platonist. What I have said could be construed, maybe, as a suggestion that some neo-Platonist ideas had something to do with how Paul thought about things. That hardly seems implausible.
Both of the books you linked to appear, from summaries, to be using the tools of textual and historical criticism which I’ve seen effectively criticized by this new crop of ahistoricists. What I’m hoping to find is a response to those criticisms.
I agree that the “seed” and “according to the flesh” phrases are the most difficult to understand on the ahistoricist hypothesis. I’ll hopefully be able to follow up on the kata sarx question in coming days or weeks.
Frylock, you seem to be saying that Paul invented Jesus and that the gospel writers (starting with Mark) picked up that idea and fleshed it out.
If that were the case, wouldn’t we expect more evidence of Paul’s viewpoint and perspectives to be portrayed in the Gospels, especially the earlier ones? Yet the issues that Paul is so focused on - the themes of faith and grace, Jesus’ superceding the Law of Moses - are not the same themes that one finds in the book of Mark. In fact I can’t think of anything in Mark that seems to come out of Paul.
Even the author of Luke-Acts, who writes so much about Paul’s travels and sermons, does not always agree with Paul in certain details (such as his conversion experience).
What I’m saying is that it’s difficult to read Mark and come to the conclusion that it is a rehashing of Pauline theology. It seems very much to be an independent tradition, which lends credence to the idea of an actual historical source.
First of all, regarding parallels between the Gospel of Mark and the Odyssey, that thesis comes from The Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark, published in 2000. While the author of that book is a real scholar of early Christianity, the thesis is not by any means mainstream. Indeed the main flaw is fairly obvious. MacDonald claims that the Gospel of Mark was written to have parallels to Homer’s epics that were clear and obvious to the reader. If so, how is it that no one noticed this fact prior to 2000, if the parallels are so obvious? Most mainstream scholars do not believe that Mark borrowed from Homer or any other Pagan source.
Regarding your claim that Mark “looks exactly like a literary construction intended to teach what Jesus is about without nailing him down as an actual historical figure”, I have to say that to me it looks like the exact opposite. Mark does everything imaginable to represent Jesus as a real figure. The entire gospel of Mark clearly represents Jesus as a human being on earth, who appeared at specific locations on specific dates, spoke with specific other individuals, and did specific things. For instance, in chapter 15 Mark reports that on the way to the crucifixion, they met “Simon of Cyrene, the father of Alexander and Rufus” and the soldiers forced him to carry the cross. There is no reason why Mark would bother naming both Simon of Cyrene and his sons, except to identify for his readers the real person who participated in the crucifixion, who was presumably still around when Mark wrote his gospel.
You seem to think a lot has changed in 2000 years. Seriously though, while I’m sure there aren’t many modern Jews waiting for the Messiah, I doubt the traditional interpretation of the scripture has changed much over the millenia. ** Malthus **mentions this indirectly in the next post in talking about the proper interpretation of Daniel. Sure you find plenty of prophetic references to suffering, but the traditional interpretation of these is NOT to associate these with the Messiah. That is a characteristically Christian approach to OT prophesy that you simply will not find any support for among Jewish scholars or in Jewish tradition.
So Peter and James were talking about Jesus in Jerusalem before Paul wrote his earliest epistles? Wouldn’t there still have been eyewitnesses around? There just doesn’t seem to be enough time to create the Jesus myth out of nothing.
Seriously though, while I’m sure there aren’t many modern Jews waiting for the Messiah, I doubt the traditional interpretation of the scripture has changed much over the millenia. ** Malthus **mentions this indirectly in the next post in talking about the proper interpretation of Daniel. Sure you find plenty of prophetic references to suffering, but the traditional interpretation of these is NOT to associate these with the Messiah. That is a characteristically Christian approach to OT prophesy that you simply will not find any support for among Jewish scholars or in Jewish tradition.