I think historians do their best using some common sense heuristics. Is what Jesus is saying here consistent with historical and cultural realities of his time? If the four Gospels are all in agreement on some thing he said, they must have gotten it from somewhere. Oral tradition? An earlier text? And like I mentioned upthread, did this thing he’s saying contradict the writer’s personal beliefs? That’s also a clue.
It seems like Jesus was saying all kinds of things, even contradictory things, so the Gospels are probably some combination of things Jesus actually said and words someone put in his mouth. I actually think the fact that his words were sometimes contradictory lends credibility to the idea that he existed. If he were a complete fabrication, he probably would have behaved more consistently.
As far as the miracles though, I don’t believe in that kind of stuff at all. But it’s entirely possible they didn’t occur AND he believed he was divine. A lot of people who can’t perform miracles have believed they are divine. When I hear those stories I can’t help but wonder if they are some kind of metaphor for what actually happened. Maybe Jesus, obviously a very charismatic guy, convinced a baker to open his doors to the hungry, or something, and that was reported as a miracle.
To me, at least, scripture provides proof that Jesus did, in fact, believe in his own divinity.
Luke 23: 42-43
42 And he said unto Jesus, Lord, remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom. 43 And Jesus said unto him, Verily I say unto thee, To day shalt thou be with me in paradise.
Well, he certainly had some great biographers/publicists. But, if we can take at least he had a good deal of reported popularity while alive, which is not too surprising; crashing wedding feasts and transmorgrifying water in into booze is a sure way to get noticed in the Judaean social scene.
“Man just wants to forget the bad stuff, and believe in the made-up good stuff. It’s easier that way.“
A special agent of God, sure. God? Not so strong a case. Stuff like that happened around Moses, and no one thinks Moses was God.
(His staff turned into a snake. He turned the water off the Nile into blood. The angel of death killed all the first born except the ones marked in the way Moses ordered. A tornado followed him around. The red Sea parted at his command, and then came crashing back. Manna fell from the sky to feed his people…)
In fact, God said to Moses:
Exodus 7: The LORD replied to Moses, “See, I place you in the role of God to Pharaoh, with your brother Aaron as your prophet.
And still, that’s understood to be a metaphor, the role of God. Moses is not taken to be a god.
Contemporary non-fundamentalist Christians may like to check out QS56 in my link. This scholarship puts both the prohibition on divorce, and the apparent requirement to obey traditional Jewish laws, in italics, which means that “Mythology has completely taken over here, and only a glimpse of who Jesus actually was is left.”
One problem I have with such scholarship is that, due to the paucity of data points, the professors write as if Jesus’s teachings didn’t evolve. Even if some gospel saying is accurately identified as a real Jesus quotation, we have no idea if that was his final opinion on any given moral question.
Similarly, I’m not sure how this demonstrates that Jesus thought he was God. Just the king (anointed one) of the Jews. Previous prophets were thought to have been taken up into heaven by God.
Not only that, but Jesus thought the resurrection was imminent and that all good Jews would go to paradise. He spoke elsewhere saying the Judgment Day would come within his generation and that some of his disciples would still be alive when it happened.
So he may well have been saying, “The resurrection will happen today. We’ll both be there!”
I suspect he thought the resurrection was so imminent that God would intervene in his death, and he was rather surprised to suffer such an agonizing death. It’s the best I can make of his final lamentation about God abandoning him.
Bah. Healing the sick? Ant Tent revivalist preacher can do that today- and modern medicine back that up (to a point- the Placebo effect is strong and stronger if a caring person says you will get better). The Dead? Well, maybe they were only “mostly dead”. Miracle of the loaves and fishes? Mass suggestion and people putting stuff in as it was passed around. I am not saying Jesus didnt do any miracles, but you can believe in Jesus the mortal man and teacher and even accept some of those miracles.
Because 3rd party evidence exists that show Jesus was a real person, and that what he did was not uncommon back then.
Then the Jews he was speaking to immediately picked up stones to stone Jesus to death for blasphemy of claiming to be God. Jesus had to explain that he was not claiming to be God in the literal sense.
“We are not stoning you for any good work,” they replied, “but for blasphemy, because you, a mere man, claim to be God.”
34 Jesus answered them, “Is it not written in your Law, ‘I have said you are “gods”’[d]? 35 If he called them ‘gods,’ to whom the word of God came—and Scripture cannot be set aside— 36 what about the one whom the Father set apart as his very own and sent into the world? Why then do you accuse me of blasphemy because I said, ‘I am God’s Son’? 37 Do not believe me unless I do the works of my Father. 38 But if I do them, even though you do not believe me, believe the works, that you may know and understand that the Father is in me, and I in the Father.” 39 Again they tried to seize him, but he escaped their grasp.
As displayed in the Bible, Jesus seems to be pretty firm that he’s (some form of) God on Earth. Maybe you could make some argument like, “We’re all the children of God”, to bring him out of that, but you’d probably need to squint a little.
That said, there’s signs that during the Early Church, in the groups that were closer to Jesus (e.g. geographically) and weren’t subordinate to Paul, that they preached that Jesus was a normal man and more of a prophet than a god. Their gospels have been lost and destroyed but we have writings against them, that quote them as having said such.
Different doesn’t mean non-divine. If Jesus was claiming to perform magic, claimed to come back from the dead, and claimed to be the kin of a deity, then he’s some form of divine.
Of course, that also puts Hercules down as divine.
But then you’ve got to come to grips with every jot and tittle of the First Commandment; there’s no conceptual hurdle for Hercules, but there is for Jesus.
I don’t doubt that Jesus exists because of the multiple overlapping accounts in the New Testament. But I question that 3rd party evidence. I think this is the closest, but the problem of alteration and additions, by a medieval copyist, is a big one. Anyone else?
Also, who were the others who did what he did? John the Baptist? Anyone else?
If he were a complete fabrication by one person, yes. But not necessarily if he were a complete fabrication by multiple people.
Though that is also a point. Maybe he said different things at different times.
Yeah. If he said that, then he was expecting to have an afterlife in some sort of paradise. He may even have thought he could authorize other people to join him. None of that requires him to have thought he was God.
He was Jewish. It’s a pretty foreign idea to Judaism. That doesn’t prove some Jew didn’t have it; but it’s a lot longer stretch than it looks like to a lot of people raised in the Christian tradition.
The best I can make of it is that he had expected to become, or thought he already was, the living political King of the Jews; and when he realized he was actually dying on the cross, he realized that wasn’t going to happen. The Messiah was supposed to live to bring about a golden age for the Jewish people; that’s the god-given promise he may have thought he was fulfilling.
Even that doesn’t read to me as ‘I am God; I am divine; God and I are identical’. It reads to me as ‘God has named me specifically to take on this task and I am doing God’s work’.
To say that people are children of God is pretty common. It’s sometimes applied to all humanity.
If God’s omnipotent, or even only very potent, then God could make human people perform magic and/or come back from the dead. God wouldn’t be making them gods, but just channeling some bit of God’s power through them.