I don’t understand the OP. You start by saying that you are not going to argue that there is no evidence Jesus existed. Yet then you go on to try and disprove the evidence cited by scholars that he does exist. You say that there is evidence in the New Testament itself that Jesus never existed, but you never articulate a single bit of that positive evidence.
Your argument entirely in the OP is that the evidence we do have is not good. Despite your claim at the beginning of the OP, you are not saying that the New Testament itself provides evidence that Jesus did not exist. You offer no evidence of that sort. All you seem to be doing is trying to prove that we don’t know what we think we know. You are saying that there is no evidence that Jesus existed.
That’s nice, but that’s not what you promised, which was evidence that Jesus didn’t exist. You make it very clear that there is a distinction between these two. So, please, go on and tell us what in the New Testaments provides evidence of Jesus is not historical.
Are you saying you see in there a claim that I won’t argue there’s no evidence Jesus existed? Just to be sure, are you keeping clear the distinction between “there’s no evidence Jesus existed” and “there is evidence Jesus didn’t exist”?
Are you talking about just the OP? In the OP the only thing I can see that you might be referring to is where I talk about the “seed,” “born of a woman” and “brother of the lord” passages. But the place of those comments in my argument is to stave off objections, not to provide evidence for my own view.
I don’t think I say that in the OP. The closest I’m seeing is this: “the evidence we have most plausibly only suggests events which do not imply or presuppose the existence of such a historical figure.” That’s not a positive claim that there’s evidence against Jesus’s existence, rather, it’s a claim that it is plausible that the NT evidence doesn’t make Jesus’s existence the most probable hypothesis.
You see how careful I’m trying to be? I think you may totally understandably have misread what I said for a related set of less careful claims that would be more commonly expressed.
Bolding mine. What I bolded is much closer to what I said I would say at the beginning of my OP. (But not exactly right, which is why I didn’t just say “there is no evidence Jesus existed.” It’s more like agnosticism concerning what the evidence implies, with a strong suspicion that it fails to support existence.)
ETA: Anyway I know it’s not the clearest thing I’ve ever written, and later in the thread some clarification happened. Hopefully if you keep reading the thread that will help.
You’re engaging in some very fine hairsplitting here and using a very dull instrument to do it.
Existence tends to be a binary state. Well, until you get into the quantum world anyway. So when looking at the ancient past, you will either have information that that seems to support or contradict whatever your hypothesis happens to be.
But there are a couple of problems here not the least of which being with the use of the word ‘seems’ in the previous sentence. Even when we can understand with perfect certainty what an ancient text says, the meaning it will have held for the people reading it will generally have been lost in the mists of time. And by that I don’t mean the literal meaning but the import, the emotional and psychological impact it would have had. We simply don’t see the world, the universe, the gods the way our ancestors did. That seems to be obvious but the implications can be anything but obvious.
Another issue with evidence besides its interpretation is how it should be weighed. How often have you heard of juries hearing the same witnesses give the same testimony yet come back with no verdict - hopelessly deadlocked. You can have absolute agreement as to what evidence does or doesn’t exist and come to wildly different conclusions based on the weight to give to the evidence.
So now you have to get into a discussion as to each and every item and what weight is appropriate and that has been done here to some extent, but to what end? In each instance you don’t seem to have been swayed let alone persuaded, so you give the very distinct impression that you have already adopted a viewpoint which you wish us to now challenge.
The problem with that however is that we can’t. No one can for the reasons I’ve just given.
Well, to be clear - I did use “IIRC” - so it is entirely possible I am not remembering correctly - Haveing done a little ‘fresh’ research, the ‘Gospel of Thomas’ is primarily the ‘sayings of Jesus’ and the ‘Acts of Thomas’ is what I am likely remembering something of - specifically this quote @ Wikipedia seems to be what I am remembering -
(bolding mine)
[QUOTE=Acts of Thomas - Wikipedia]
The view of Jesus in the book could be inferred to be docetic. Thomas is not just Jesus’ twin, he is Jesus’ identical twin. **As such, it is possible that Thomas is meant to represent the earthly, human side of Jesus, while Jesus is entirely spiritual in his being. **In this way, Jesus directs Thomas’ quest from heaven, while Thomas does the work on earth. For example, when the apostles are casting lots to choose where they will mission, Thomas initially refuses to go to India. However, Jesus appears in human form to sell Thomas as a slave to a merchant going to India, after which Jesus disappears
[/QUOTE]
Secondly, again, as I recall - Thomas, as a Gnostic, felt that the kingdom of God was within, etc - the primary point being that even the direct apostle had a very different view of Jesus and the kingdom then what is reported in the official guide book.
Or maybe, just maybe, since all of the gnostic gospels seem to have been written well after Mark and I would hazard to guess all of the synoptic gospels, Thomas was chosen as the name precisely for his by then well-known status as a doubter.
You do know there is also a gnostic gospel in the name of Judas as well which explains how Judas didn’t actually betray Jesus but was in fact doing his bidding.
As long as I’m attacking John, I should also mention that it is the only gospel I believe to mention the pool of Siloam (chapter 9) which wasn’t discovered until 2004 - although I’d heard about this back in college so I think it was suspected for quite some time.
edit: this is the original one, not the reconstructed, 5th century version.
Very possible - its been close to a decade and a half since I did alot of that research, so my memory is notably faulty here - either way, it seems Thomas’ works were left out specifically because they did not fit in -
I always thought of Judas trying to force Jesus’ hand into taking power - he expected an earthly rule, felt he had the right guy, just the right guy needed a ‘push’ -
It would be interesting if we had ‘real access’ to the people/works of the time and not just the few glimpses we have.
There’s also the fact that although the the canon wasn’t created 4th century with Constantine, it’s not an accident that the bishops got things more or less ‘right’ in the sense of selecting mostly works of established provenance.
The reason we don’t have more works like the gospel of John or Revelation is because Christian gnosticism was considered a heresy by most Christians even before the formal establishment of the church by Constantine. AthansiusIIRC was one of the people who argued effectively against it. And the reason why you don’t have many records of Christian gnostic texts until Nag Hammahdi is because they were systematically destroyed.
I don’t know why this idea persists. Constantine had nothing to do with the canon.
We have evidence for a canon that is strongly consistent with the current one dating to about 170. The canon was not “officially” adopted until the late fourth century, with a synod at Rome declaring the canon in 382 and with several different synods and councils, usually in Africa, repeating the same list over the next 40 years. The Church in the East has a canon that has never, to my knowledge, been “officially” adopted and they date that canon to the second century.
All the discussions of which books were canonical occurred before and after Constantine and the Nicene Council, neither of which were involved with the selection of the canon. The Council of Nicaea presumes that an existing list of books that they possessed is the correct one without ever naming the books or declaring any specific one to be legitimate.
Well what do you mean by canon? I’m talking about the books and only the books currently in the New Testament, not including the Apocrypha.
First you say it’s a lot like agnosticism and then you say BUT with a strong suspicion that that Jesus didn’t exist. Well, in the true definition of agnosticism, you can’t have it both ways, not if definitions are going to have any meaning. Agnostic means without knowledge, or in this context, having no opinion on whether or not Jesus existed.
I understand that there is a trend for people to use the word for anything that falls between hardcore atheism and hardcore theism, but some of us are agnostics and don’t like to get smeared with either brush simply by virtue of logically falling in the middle.
So if you actually meant what you said, it didn’t make any sense. I was trying to be charitable.
I’ve actually got a copy of the Gospel of Thomas in front of me. I knew saving my textbooks from the Early Christianities class would pay off!
The Gospel of Thomas is a collection of sayings with no narrative structure at all. It’s over a hundred quotes from Jesus, mostly of the form “Jesus said, '(some cryptic, nonsensical, weird thing)”. Some of them are parables. There are a lot of very familiar bits from the canonical gospels, like references to mustard seeds, to the blind leading the blind, new wine in old wineskins, snippets verbatim from the Beatitudes, as well as some very mystical bits that make Zen koans look straightforward. It’s very, very Gnostic, but that doesn’t necessarily imply that it suggests that Jesus was not a real person. Thomas outright states that Jesus gave his disciples special knowledge, and that this special knowledge is contained in the text of the Gospel. It’s the only non-canonical Gospel I’m aware of that mainstream scholars even consider dating as contemporary with the canonical Gospels, though a fair number of scholars put it later than John, which is usually considered the last gospel written.
On a quick reading, I’m not seeing anything that suggests that the author saw Jesus as not a living person. He sees Jesus as having a powerful spiritual nature as well, of course, but that’s hardly unusual for a Christian. A couple of nice quotes, all emphasis mine:
He’s specifically saying that Jesus had a physical body and physical nature in addition to a spiritual nature.
Again, Jesus specifically saying that he’s a living person.
I think the simplest interpretation of that is that Jesus is speaking of himself as “the living one”, though I admit you could read it otherwise. I wish I had more context for this bit, but the whole book is a bunch of out-of-context Jesus quotes.
Again, that’s a pretty clear statement that Jesus is a physical person.
appleciders - sure - I think it was something I read at the time that was more ‘about’ Thomas, etc - maybe the gnostic bit had him say something to the affect that he was now unsure if it was physical/spiritual that walked with them (or some combination) - I don’t doubt that the sayings would imply that jesus was physical - but “the living one” can certainly mean either physical or spiritual life, right?
I scanned my copy of the ‘Nag Hammadi library’ in the prefaces to the two works it included (Gospel and book) and can’t find the reference - its very possible I am misremembering.
This is off topic, but I think Jesus probably did do and say a lot of things that provided fuel for gnostic views and may in actual fact have favored some gnostic beliefs. But because of secret, or what we have to assume would have been the secret nature of those teachings plus the later and vehement opposition to the gnostic heresy, pretty much anything that even had a whiff of gnosticism was purged from Christianity.
Earlier I mentioned that John almost wasn’t accepted as an inspired gospel because of this. That would have been a shame since it certainly the most beautiful and inspiring of the 4. But you need look no further than the opening verses for Thomasesque mystical wording.
BTW, for anyone who is interested, you find most early Christian writings here. This seems to be an academic site but I won’t swear to it. I’ve seem some commentary here and there when I’ve looked for it but mostly I’ve used it when participating in discussions like this. In addition to standard fare you can find things from the Nag Hammadhi library like the gospels of Thomas and Judas but also early church fathers like Athanasius, Eusebius and Irenaeus.
So what’s you’re point? I said the canon was formalized in the 4th century. Are you saying it was or it wasn’t? I didn’t make reference to any particular council did I?
The whole reason for the formalization was the fact that Constantine agreed to commission copies being made. That cost money and required standardization. Standardization meant that whatever books were chosen had to hang together without any overt conflicts. He didn’t care much about the details. That was my point.
I think you’re misremembering, maybe conflating it with a different Gospel. Some of the other Gospels are a little more of a biography, like the canonical ones.It’s really not about Thomas at all-- the opening says that “Didymus Judas Thomas” wrote down these sayings, and at one point Thomas answers a question about Jesus’ nature along with Matthew and Peter. That’s all.
There’s also a non-canonical Acts of Thomas that describes his evangelism in the East. Maybe that’s what you’re thinking of?
I suppose “the living one” could support the idea of a spiritual life, but I don’t think that’s the simplest or most likely interpretation. That passage doesn’t support my thesis as strongly as the others, but I included it to be thorough.
I am not sure you understood the full thrust of the comment you just replied to. You do recognize the words, don’t you? Anyway, what you just said is not true. Agnosticism means not knowing. Not knowing, meanwhile, is compatible with suspecting. It’s as simple as that.
Here, anyway, I’ll go back and give a fuller response to your previous post. Coming up.