ambushed I was gonna do along drawn out proof on the probability of Jesus’ existence but I don’t think that’ll be necessary. Let’s do it real quick like and I’ll use your own cites to do it. That way you can’t argue their validity. Okay
I assume you recognize this passage form your own sources. This proves that there were in fact probably hundreds of men named Jesus at the time. Not necessarily The Jesus but only that proof (A) some Jesus’ existed
I would also use as a proof the fact that YOU believe based on your sources that Eastern Philosophy was:
So according to you and your sources it is highly likely that there were several men named Jesus who lived then and there. Also that because of the huge influx of Eastern Philosophy in the region that some of these Jesus would have been exposed to such thinking. Therefore:
**proof(B)**some Jesus was “influenced” by Eastern thought.
Are you in agreement thus far? The fact that in all probability there was at least one Jesus who lived then that had been exposed to Eastern Religion.
Not necessarily The Jesus but at least some influenced Jesus…
If you are with me so far then the rest is cake, better yet pie.
So if we agree that any Jesus lived and that any Jesus believed and/or practiced “Eastern” philosophy. Then you must surely agree that he would have proclaimed himself to be a Son of God. As in, we are all “Sons of God”… We are all part of the One. The only thing we have to do is to proclaim this truth and live by it. Whether or not this Jesus was born to a woman named Mary is irrelevant for the debate. Whether or not he is the descendant of David and yada yada …
The proof is that you agree that some Jesus lived and that some Jesus was influenced by Eastern thought. The proof is that if you agree with the first two proofs then you must surely admit to the POSSIBILITY of the 3rd proof.
proof(C) some Jesus proclaimed himself to be God’s son.
It is a simple logical proof using your own cites that show the probability that there was an actual man named Jesus who lived that claimed to be the Son of God.
As per the OP was Jesus man or myth?
Actually a true believer would say NEITHER.
I have somewhere in my files even better quotations and citations that I haven’t been able to put to hand yet, but in his brilliant and devestating critique, Against the Christians, this incredibly well-educated and well-informed critic of Christianity wrote:
As for the fact that Porphyry wrote these remarks in the second century, recall that that was when the written manuscripts of the Gospels first start showing up.
At that point, Porphyry begins scuruplously researching the historical claims – spurious and otherwise – of the newly arrived Gospels. It wasn’t particularly difficult with the evidence available at the time to learn that Jesus and Christianity were pure inventions.
My philosophy professors years ago would have kicked my ass with such silly logic. This does NOT prove Jesus never existed. Absence of proof is not proof of absence.
Wow. I didn’t know this point of view was out there. It’s neat. But some of its adherents are a bit … odd.
You may be right, but Doherty hurts himself by trying to claim that no one believed this before Ignatius in CE 107. Overreaching is a sign of mania.
I’m not aware of any extant copies of Q. So these “strata” would seem to be in someone’s imagination.
Or he took a historical Jesus’s life & made it Homeric, which is just as plausible.
This is on your side.
Pauline epistles had specific teaching purposes of higher mind than plugging shrines. Maybe early Christians didn’t care about shrines. Maybe they weren’t quite like later hagiographers & pilgrims in their outlook, despite believing in a historical Christ. How many Mormons venerate spots where Joseph Smith was run out of town? Give me a break!
I had a sort of argument with my mother the other night, where she was saying that I don’t believe in Jesus because I never studied the historical evidence. She’s a Josh McDowell disciple. Well, I never bothered to really read any of McDowell’s books, but the argument seems to be based on, “This stuff was written down within 50 years of its purportedly happening,” which would make most fiction “historical.”
But it got me to thinking. I’d assumed for years there was a real Yeshua, who was believed to be resurrected, & this mutated in time into deification. But maybe Cephas & James made him up. Thoughts?
Porphyry was a brilliant historian, critic, expert on both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament (far more so than the well known Christian apologists of his day), and was an expert at chronology (the timing and order that historical events took place). So brilliant was he that the Christian fathers and apologists were absolutely terrified of him and his arguments. Yale professor Robert Louis Wilken, like Robert M Grant, calls him “the most learned, most astute” challenger of Christian claims in all of ancient history. Porphyry so frightened Christianity’s defenders that generation after generation of apologists – including such luminaries as Jerome, Eusebius, and even the great Augustine – tried desperately to rebut him without much success at all, finally admitting defeat by having all his work destroyed . Only fragments remain, and they only because various apologists quoted him in their desperate and unsuccessful efforts to find a chink in his armor. In the end, circa 488, they simply ended their problem by mass burning of his works.
Augustine called Porphyry “the most learned of philosophers”, and Eusebius, no minor intellect himself, declared himself quite intimidated by Porphyry’s bullet-proof arguments and historical facts and reasoning.
So because Porphyry declared that Jesus never even existed, and apparently established it with little or no room for doubt with his chronological tour de force (I say apparently, because although apologists reported this, the vast majority of the actual work was destroyed by Christians), we must give his pronouncement considerable weight.
Obviously, we can’t draw a valid conclusion from documents that no longer exist, but that such an awesome intellect – with contemporary and near-contemporary evidence at his disposal – concluded that Jesus never existed but was instead an “invention”, we are much more clearly shown that those who claim that Jesus was a historical figure bear an enormous burden of proof.
I can only hope they’d kick your ass for such a snide and pointless “nyah, nyah” of a post! If you won’t reason and provide evidence, take it to the Pit, okay?
I assume you’re not talking about me with this comment, since I actually posited that you can prove a negative! I would have thought that you would have known that as well as I.
That’s simply not true; it’s an unjustified assertion. It would appear that you haven’t read Doherty very carefully, not The Jesus Puzzle and certainly not Challenging the Verdict. The proof is there in long form, and here in necessarily abbreviated form.
The historicist position is logically and factually incoherent given all the facts that must be accounted for yet cannot be, among the many is the fact that Paul and all the pre-Markan NT writers absolutely WOULD have given anecdotes, sayings, teachings, and a historical setting for Jesus if Jesus had been a historical personage. The fact that they didn’t PROVES that Jesus could not possibly have been a near-contemporary historical person!
It PROVES it! For in logic, when you prove that a given position is logically incoherent, you’ve disproved that position. And the only alternative to the historicist position is the ahistoricist position.
THAT is why I asked you those questions, because they can only be either admitted as solid, compelling evidence that Jesus wasn’t historical -OR- they can be pseudo-answered with evasive, sophist rhetoric (which I am not claiming you have done, yet).
Which will you choose?
Didn’t you already claim to have read Doherty? Surely you don’t expect me to cut and paste his entire book here? Are you unwilling to accept a foundation that’s far too long and too complex to paraphrase in a few words in this forum? Surely we must allow the foundation to have been built up elsewhere, such as, in this case, Doherty’s web site and his books.
You know what my questions mean. I would be pleased if you would try to answer them. The burden of proof is on you. My point in asking them is to show that they cannot be answered in any rational way that supports the historicist position.
Okay, you agree it’s a reasonable assumption. Then let’s get on with it.
Okay, we agree that there’s no need for me to set up the foundations of my questions here, since an informed readership may be assumed. Then let’s get on with it.
I thought we’d agreed we wouldn’t spell out every detail of the foundation for the questions? What everyone heard on CBS or Fox? Furthermore, you are in grave danger of evading the questions if you focus exclusively on Paul. You’ve got to explain why ALL of the pre-Markan NT writers wrote exactly as if no historical Jesus existed. You can try to pan this utterly inexplicable silence off entirely on Paul, but I hope that our fellow readers wouldn’t allow that any more than I would.
A vague paraphrase is all that’s needed for my questions. I’m not going to fall for a rhetorical gambit that requires I spell out each and every one of Paul’s and all the other pre-Gospelic writers’ words just to show that:
they don’t quote Jesus’s sayings, which they would have had he been a historical figure;
they don’t cite Jesus’ teachings, which they would have had he been a historical figure;
they don’t tell any anecdotes about Jesus’ life, which they would have had he been a historical figure;
they don’t place Jesus in a full historical setting, which they would have had he been a historical figure;
they don’t try to solve any doctrinal disputes with Jesus’ own words, which they would have had he been a historical figure!
How much more proof can reasonably be demanded than to simply present those otherwise totally inexplicable facts?
My dear Polycarp, please cite even a single instance where Paul or any other pre-Gospelic writer ever says they went to visit, say on some kind of holy pilgrimage, any of the holy sites where you historicists assert were so critical to the Jesus story. Say, the location of the Last Supper? No? Can’t do it? How about holy Gethsemane? No? Okay, well, then, surely you can find a cite for one of them visiting the Mount of Olives? Not even the burial vault, to see with one own’s eyes the location of the Resurrection? What? You can’t do even that? Astounding! Why, it’s just as if a historical Jesus never existed!
Seriously, my friend, there’s not the slightest suggestion that any pre-Gospelic writer(s) – the ones who would likely have known of the alleged historical Jesus the best, since they were much closer to him in time – ever taking an interest in any of what the Gospels show are the holiest sites in the entire world! Sure, visiting a few of these sites might have been dangerous, but wild horses or demons couldn’t keep me from visiting the holiest sites of Our Lord! If he existed, that is.
If you tell me they simply weren’t interested in these holies of holies, I’ll be forced to call you a fool, and we wouldn’t want that. These early Christians’ utter dismissal of these sites has one and only one explanation: There was no historical Jesus!
Come, come now! Where are you getting these completely out of phase assertions? That’s preposterously false!
As I said above, Porphyry was an exceptionally brilliant historian, critic, expert on both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament (far more so than the well known Christian apologists of his day), and was an expert at chronology (the timing and order that historical events took place). So brilliant was he that the Christian fathers and apologists were absolutely terrified of him and his arguments. Yale professor Robert Louis Wilken, like Robert M Grant, calls him “the most learned, most astute” challenger of Christian claims in all of ancient history. Porphyry so frightened Christianity’s defenders that generation after generation of apologists – including such luminaries as Jerome, Eusebius, and even the great Augustine – tried desperately to rebut him without much success at all, finally admitting defeat by having all his work destroyed . Only fragments remain, and they only because various apologists quoted him in their desperate and unsuccessful efforts to find a chink in his armor. In the end, circa 488, they simply ended their problem by mass burning of his works.
Augustine called Porphyry “the most learned of philosophers”, and Eusebius, no minor intellect himself, declared himself quite intimidated by Porphyry’s bullet-proof arguments and historical facts and reasoning.
So you’re brute dismissal of Porphyry, I’m afraid, seems rather wrong-headed and ill-conceived. Anyone whom Augustine praises is someone to be dealt with honestly!
All of that is precisely as relevant as the price of root beer in Kurdistan, which is to say it’s not relevant in the slightest. I know what the Incarnation means to Christian doctrine, and it’s simply not relevant here. The non-historicity of Jesus doesn’t harm Christian theology very much at all; Paulism is even left completely intact. But this isn’t about theology, sir, it’s about history. There isn’t the slightest real-world historical setting given by Paul or the other pre-Markans for the last supper, the passion, the crucifixion, or the resurrection. Perhaps if you were more adept at recognizing the powerful influences on Paul from Plato’s (via Philo of Alexandra’s Hellenic Judaism) mystical, ideal universe and the mystical, ideal, Seven Levels of Heaven we see as part of Paul’s milieu, for example in the later Ascension of Isaiah, you would understand that these writers are speaking only of an mystical, supernatural Christ.
That would require a book-length treatment, as I discussed above, so read Doherty yourself for that, please. And instead of waving your hands for the Nteenth time, why don’t you answer my questions as best you can?
Unless you want to take the postmodernist route and claim that nothing can be proved, the otherwise inexplicable evidence that Jesus was not a first-century historical personage provides overwhelming proof of its thesis.
Paul, in keeping with his strong Hellenist influences and interest in the Savior Gods, saw the crucifixion as occurring in the mystical realm, in a lower sphere of Heaven.
Allow me to expand on that observation, which I have also raised previously…
Take a look at the Pseudepigraphical Jewish-Christian work, The Ascension of Isaiah, especially Chapter 9. It speaks of the seven levels or spheres of Heaven, which is a constituent belief that Paul very clearly held and which is pivotal to understanding what Paul is really talking about. It foretells (ostensibly from the time of Isaiah) of the Son descending through the layers of Heaven where people will only think he is physical, even though he will not be!
Here are verses 13-18 of Chapter 9 (emphasis my own):
The Lord will indeed descend into the world in the last days, (he) who is to be called Christ after he has descended and become like you in form, and they will think that he is flesh and a man. And the god of that world will stretch out [his hand against the Son], and they will lay their hands upon him and hang him upon a tree, not knowing who he is. And thus his descent, as you will see, will be concealed even from the heavens so that it will not be known who he is. And when he has plundered the angel of death, he will rise on the third day and will remain in that world for five hundred and forty-five days. And then many of the righteous will ascend with him, whose spirits do not receive (their) robes until the Lord Christ ascends and they ascend with him. Then indeed they will receive their robes and their thrones and their crowns, when he has ascended into the seventh heaven."
This gives some idea of how the crucifixion Paul and the other pre-Markans speaks of is an event occurred in the celestial realm, not the physical realm.
… Oh, and that bit about how the descended Christ will become like humans, even though he will not be flesh or a man? That gibes exactly with Paul’s extremely curious description of Jesus being kata sarka, “like flesh”. Kata sarka is quite inexplicable if applied to an actual, living man of flesh; Paul would have used a different formulation to describe an actual, historical human.
For Paul, Jesus’s bare-bones existence was only in the lowest angelic sphere, the lowest level of heaven, where angels and Jesus were mere reflections of living matter.
Oh, what happy nonsense! Jesus as a person doesn’t matter “yet”? His life and deeds don’t matter “yet”? You’re kidding, right? Kidding?? PLEASE tell me you’re kidding? Man, you’re easily one of the smartest, most educated people I know, but do you even read what you write? That’s… that’s… well, it’s bullshit. I mean no personal insult, but that argument is the weakest, wateriest, most transparent bullshit I’ve seen peddled in quite some time.
That’s exactly the kind of bullshit the historicists have routinely clung to because they have no rational defense of their rationally indefensible position. They can’t explain it, so they just come right out and say “it doesn’t matter”. Sheesh! He’s God on Earth, sure, but the details of his life just don’t matter!?! I don’t know whether to laugh or cry…
More ludicrous BS. Look:
First google result for Mark Twain: Mark Twain in His Times homepage
First google result for Benjamin Franklin: The World of Benjamin Franklin
What were you saying again?
Plato speaks considerably about Socrates’ worldly milieu.
No biographical details at all? None at all? That must be another dose of “God on Earth doesn’t matter” absurdity.
Well, ladies and gentlemen, there you have it: either a truly “dumbth” comment, or a desperate debater’s desperate choice: denying the established facts!
Should I assume you’re kidding again? Honestly, you must start being serious. There are many pre-Gospel NT epistles, only a portion of which are actually Pauline. How could you not know this? Didn’t you, er…, claim to have read Doherty, Price and Wells? How could you have?
Characterized by the desperate or those unfamiliar with the facts, I suppose, but not by well-informed, knowledgeable persons.
Yes, there were many earthly followers of the supernatural Christ.
If you mean he was a direct disciple, that’s flat out wrong and reveals an astonishing lack of knowledge on your part. If you mean he was a peer of Paul’s, then big deal.
What’s to stop an ordinary guy who never knew Jesus from having a brother? Only extreme fundamentalists believe Cephas was the Peter of the much later Gospels!
Are you kidding us again?! In any case, you’re cheating: the list of attendants of the last supper comes from the Gospel stories, not from Paul or any of the other pre-Markan writers.
Who was crucified? If you mean Cephas, who didn’t know Jesus, then big deal. If you meant Jesus, he was crucified in the angelic sphere of heaven, not on Earth.
So? It seems you understand even less than I’d imagined about the NT and modern scholarship. Cephas and James never knew Jesus! The only ones who believe that, as I said, are fundamentalists. Modern, believing Christian scholars know that there is no legitimate, contemporary knowledge at all of the people the Gospels report were Jesus’ alleged direct disciples. Polycarp, could you please fill him in on this matter?
I’ll just quote Doherty (just because he’s handy), whose views on this matter are not controversial in the least:
That’s slightly more subtle. Did you know that Paul includes himself on the list of people who have seen the Risen Christ, just like – he asserts – the rest of the apostles and the mysterious “500”? Do you know what that means? What it means for a man who never could have seen Jesus on Earth nevertheless claims to have seen him? No? Well, it means that Paul, like all these others, only saw Christ in mystical visions!
Yee haw! Silly, evasionary nonsense, Texas style! I knew it was coming; I knew it, I tells ya!
Christ on a hovercraft, man, didn’t you ever read Galatians?
I have an appointment coming up in just a few minutes, so I’ll have to make this very brief: Here is Galatians 1:12 For I would have you know, brothers, that the gospel preached by me is not the product of men. For I did not receive (parelabon, from paralambano) it from any man, nor was I taught it, but (I received it) through a revelation of/about Jesus Christ.
Yee haw, this is fun! Paul visited Jerusalem and spoke with the so-called “pillars of Jerusalem”, including Cephas and James, who as Paul just told us told him NOTHING of any historical Jesus at all! Why not? Well, because they didn’t KNOW anything of any historical Jesus!
I’ve got to stop now.
I don’t think you were being honest when you said you’d read Doherty, Price, and Wells, because all of this is just the most rudimentary stuff. You should at least read Doherty’s web site thoroughly before coming back for more of a drubbing, my friend.
With respect, I don’t think you’ve considered all of the implications of that thesis; it doesn’t make any human or psychological sense in the end. The historicist position is absurd in the extreme because it relies COMPLETELY on the inexplicable, desperate belief that Jesus was far less important and noteworthy than just about any other teacher or wise man, ever. But still prior to the Gospels, people praised and admired Jesus so greatly that they wrote down what he said-- but in the process they never even casually remarked about what town Jesus was in, what country, what region, what season it was, etc. Now, some people might be able to fool themselves into thinking that’s reasonable, but what only the insane could delude themselves into believing that they’d also refuse to describe his actions, his activities, his friends, his travels, his hosts, his interests, his opinions, etc. Nope: nothing at all.
The historical view requires an ultimately boring lump of flesh to walk the earth who was paradoxically fascinating enough to draw a considerable number of followers and writers who were incapable of writing anything but his actual sayings.
Here’s a thesis that makes far more sense: A few (or more) people happened upon street philosophers like the Cynics or Stoics or Hellenistic Jews who spoke of or taught various pieces of wisdom. Those initial oral sayings almost certainly contained historical place and time settings at the very least, but for reasons we can only speculate about, they didn’t want a collection of a bunch of sayings from a bunch of different rabbis, philosopher, or wise man. They wanted a more uniform collection or oral sayings that wouldn’t distinguish between authors or locales, so they stripped out the historical data and eventually a single, made-up name (“Jesus”) was attached to these wildly disconnected and incompatible sayings in order to make the collection, “Q”, more finely focused, easier to remember, and uniform in apparent source.
All done without the alleged human being “Jesus” we learn of in the Gospels. This view is simple, neat, and explains everything perfectly – even the great inconsistencies of the New Testament sayings.
This historicist position cannot explain all the facts, and is logically incoherent, thus false.
I have nothing to lose or gain if you want to declare you believe the coin will land on it’s edge. Far be it for me to stop you claiming ignorance.
But since it is a hard and cold, inescapable FACT that a historical Jesus thesis cannot explain all the facts, while the ahistorical position CAN explain all the facts, logic and Occam’s Razor dictate that we accept the ahistoricist view.
The cleaner theory- and the one more consistent with the evidence- is that a sayings tradition coalesced around a real person who then became mythicized.
All of the sayings in the what is currently regarded as the “authentic” CST (not just Q- actually only Q1 is probably authentic) show enough consonance of phrasing, formulation, and philosophy to be cconsistent with a single author. there is a sort of stylistic “fingerprint” to the sayings which would not be consistent with a disparate compilation of sayings, nor is it likely such a collection acquire such an early and independently attested association with a historical person- a person whose authority must be defended within the tradition itself- unless that person actually existed.
[We also need to get at least a broad, reasonable handle on how and why such a vast amount of pre-Christian, foreign mythology ended up in central elements of the Christian Myth. Answering that question in detail is the work of the swelling ahistoricist consensus of scholars and historians, and Burton Mack in his 2001 book The Christian Myth has issued the call for them to turn even more closely to those questions now that all the quests for a historical Jesus have been objectively observed to have failed miserably.
This is a complex subject that simply can’t be summed up as compellingly as I’d like, particularly not in a space-limited forum like this. The case for how and why any particular myth appears in one form or another – however concretely or abstractly, in full or in part – in the Christian myth simply cannot be proven with the source texts available to us and must remain the work of Mack and his colleagues, like Price, Wells, and Doherty. But that these diverse, pre-Christian myths are now part and parcel of the Christian myth is simply undeniable, no matter how desperately any orthodoxy-constrained readers wish it were not the case.
The wisest intellectual approach to this subject must therefore be one of adopting the view best concordant with the principle of parsimony – a parsimony which must account for all the relevant evidence. This is the way many other historical and scientific views are decided. I submit that the syncretic mythical, philosophical, ideological, social experimental theory of the origins of the Gospels and their Christology represents BY FAR the most adroit and parsimonious explanation.
What are the basic elements of the traditional view of Jesus and Christ that are also in common with several non-Christian mythologies?
Thought to be predestined to birth during a special, if unstated, period of history.
Miraculous conception effected by spiritual entity.
Virgin birth, usually celebrated on or around December 25.
Birth usually heralded with stars or other astrological event.
Special lineage (i.e., in Christ’s case, from David’s lineage).
Threatened in infancy, generally by tyrant fearful of new arrival.
Parental flight to foreign land (very often Egypt) to escape threat.
Bestowed with title of “Savior”, “Son of Man” and often “Son of God”.
Considered to be a God or God incarnate.
Considered to be co-equal with God or Gods.
Myths and fables featured often hidden astrological references.
Performed many miracles, often involving fish and especially including healings, casting out of demons, restoring sight or hearing, and raising the dead.
Participated in special communal meals, often commemorative.
Suffered a visceral and humiliating death, usually held to have taken place around the Vernal equinox.
Bodily restoration or resurrection, typically three days later.
Ascent, typically bodily ascent, into higher sphere or heaven.
Now, some readers here, especially the traditionalists, hate to be faced with these lists (most of which are more extensive), because they know that their counter-“arguments” are pitiful and hopeless in the face of such lists’ powerful effects for parsimony.
But while a historical story might have one or two aspects which merely coincidentally match one or two elements of the mythical outline, when we correctly observe that the Christian fable matches key elements of all those common mythical sources, it becomes obvious that it is anti-parsimonious in the extreme to hold that there is any historical truth underlying the Jesus of the Epistles, the Gospels, and the Church. The historicist view is therefore correctly seen as astoundingly improbable and complicated and is thus directly opposed to the principle of parsimony.
If we’re going to employ Occam’s Razor, the only conclusion is that both Jesus and The Christ can only be mythical!
It is the fact that we were all raised on the Gospel fables being presented as historical accounts and were also raised to assume the New Testament Myth is basically historical that accounts for the great difficulty that even some atheists and other freethinkers have recognizing the purely mythical nature of the Christian story. Note that even if there were some Cynic and/or Stoic itinerant philosophers whose statements were later borrowed and embellished for the creation of Q and from there to the Gospels, that is absolutely NOT to say that there ever was any historical model for Jesus! The notion that a historical Jesus was the model for the Christian Myth simply isn’t rational when one considers all the facts and the overpowering mythic parallels to other religious myths including astrological and/or sun gods and Mystery cult GodMen and/or Greco-Roman Gods and/or etc., etc., etc.
Here is a list of various Saviors of whom various aspects of their myths have parallels to the Jesus/Christ Myth (even though not all of them preceded the invention of the Jesus Myth):Adad of Assyria
Adonis of Greece
Alcides of Thebes
Attis of Phrygia
Baal and Tuat, “the only Begotten of God,” of Phoenicia
Bali of Afghanistan
Beddru of Japan
Buddha of India
Cadmus of Greece
Crite of Chaldea
Deva Tat, and Sammonocadam of Siam
Divine Teacher of Plato
Fohi and Tien of China
Gentaut and Quexalcote of Mexico
Hesus or Eros, and Bremrillah, of the Druids
Hil and Feta of the Mandaites
Holy One of Xaca
Indra of Tibet
Ischy of the island of Formosa
Ixion and Quirinus of Rome
Jao of Nepal
Krishna of India
Mikado of the Sintoos
Odin of the Scandinavians
Osiris and Horus of Egypt
Prometheus of Caucasus
Salivahana of Bermuda
Tammuz of Syria
Thor, son of Odin, of the Gauls
Universal Monarch of the Sibyls
Wittoba of the Bilingonese
Xamolxis of Thrace
Zoar of the Bonzes
Zoroaster and Mithra of Persia
Zulis, or Zhule of Egypt
The historicist position can only tremble and fall when faced with this data and my other arguments.
It’s cleaner because it is grossly inadequate to explain all the facts. Any theory will be cleaner when you cut out those nasty ol’ facts that just don’t fit.
Your theory is incomplete because, in part, the sayings are too inconsistent to be from the same person, and worse, it fails to explain the glaring lack of biographical detail in the earlier strata. Are you telling me it does’t kick off your bullshit meter to see that, contrary to the order in real life, the biograpical material of “Jesus” doesn’t come in to the picture AT ALL for many decades and decades, whereupon it suddenly acquires exactly those attributes?? Not a loud buzzer, not even a little whistle?
You need to have your bullshit meter worked on, my friend.
BTW, Ambush, if there’s one thing I’ve learned in over a decade of trying to research Historical Jesus and try to form solid conclusions, it’s that nothing about HJ can be stated as “FACT.” It’s a field of study which is maddeningly speculative with a subject who is all but untouchable. People who go around hollering “MYTH” in a completely unequivocal matter are really on no better ground (and frankly are taken no more seriously) than fundies who won’t accept anything but absolute literalism. Take it from a former loudmouth. I got my ass handed to me in a bucket more than once by Religion professors and Catholic priests who taught me just how much I didn’t know.
That’s not even to say that you’re necessarily wrong, but don’t get the idea that you’ve got this all figured out. Nobody does. I wish I had a dollar for every time I thought i had it figured out or that some author had convinced me his model was correct (Crossan, for instance). But then someone else always comes along and opens some other can of worms and sounds equally plausible.
The best we can do at this point is educated guesses and hypothetical models. Anyone who says they KNOW what the truth is either isn’t being honest or has a naive understanding of the scholarship.
Hardly. I just think tha Jesus was a real man who preached a message, and after his death his followers grafted on ahistorical details of his life borrowed from other sources. Possibly some of those you mentioned.
