What’s inconsistent about them? Be specific. Do you have an understanding of what constitutes the accepted Common Sayings Tradition? Give me two examples from Q[sup]1[/sup] which you believe to be inconsistent.
I already listed some historical material which emerges as early as Paul. A few other pericopes also include framing narratives and anecdotes.
We’re arguing the same stuff over and over again. The Jesus movement in its earliest form was not a religion and Jesus was not an object of worship. He was a teacher and his teachings were what was preserved. The mythicized figure came later.
It’s like you’re trying to find mythical precursors to Santa Claus in order to disprove a historical Saint Nickolaus. One has very little to do with the other.
I sure as hell hope you’re just blithering around! Although if so, it would be nice if you stopped wasting my time…
Can you imagine?
SomeGuy (to Paul): Oh, great teacher Paul! Tell us of your dangerous, sacred pilgrimage to see the holiest of holy sites!
Paul, master of words, replies: Peh.
SomeGuy: Tell us about the glorious Mount of Olives, the favortite place of our Lord! What was it like?
Paul, master of words, replies: Just dirt.
SomeGuy: Oh, but Paul, surely you felt a sacred moment of transcendence when you went to stand in the very spot where they crucified our Lord!
Paul, master of words, replies: ech.
Someguy: Then tell us of the tomb, the glorious tomb with its sacred stone set aside!
Paul, master of words, replies: heh.
Yep, ya got a real genuine scenario there, sport. Real nice. Me? Well, I would have probably found a thing or two to say about 'em. Not much. Just a few score thousand words, I figger. But then I’m not nearly as prolific as that Paul guy wuz…
Anyone who claims NOT to know after seeing the evidence and finding that it cannot be fit into any theory but ahistoricity can justifiably claim to be ignorant of logic, ignorant of reason, ignorant of the facts… Hell, just plain ignorant.
Two things. I’ve said them both already but I’ll say them again.
The letters of Paul do not contain the sum total of all that Paul said, did or knew. So not finding testimony that Paul visited or venerated any sites associared with Jesus is nothing more than a rather weak argument from silence.
We have seven Pauline letters which are indisputedly authentic. Seven is not very many and can hardly be taken as a catalogue of Paul’s entire life experience. I have over ten thousand posts on this message board and and there are all kinds of things I’ve seen, done and heard about that I’ve never posted here. It would not be possible to download my entire life experience onto a message board and it’s simply not scientifically defensible to conclude that if Paul did not write something in his letters that he had no knowledge of it.
If you read the letters carefully, I believe you will find that Paul never once mentions his own mother or father. Does that mean he didn’t have parents?
(and this is probably more on point), the tomb was in all probability a literary creation. The site of the crucifixion was likely unknown. There was really nothing else for Paul to visit in Jerusalem. Jesus was not from Jerusalem, after all and the only known site strongly connected with him was the Temple.
In which, with respect, you appear to have failed, based on the serious mistatements and logical errors you’ve made here (in my opinion). In any event, your posts show an surprising innocence of the works of Price, Doherty, and Wells for someone who has claimed to have read them. You’re actually debating this issue in a vaccum.
Quite true. There’s nothing about the historical Jesus position that’s factual.
But the absence of evidence where it MUST be there for the historicist position to hold up completely and utterly damns the historicist view as impossible. And since the historicist position is untenable, the ahistoricist position wins by default.
Me, too. Until I read some 20+ works on the ahistoricist position, studied them carefully, then I was the one handing people their asses. Yes, I know how arrogant I sound, but I’m really not. It’s just that the ahistoricists have blown such huge, gaping holes in the traditionalist and modern “skeptic” views that after all these years I’ve seen through all the bullshit. No one here has even come close to revealing a flaw in the position I hold, which truthfully I expected to have far more difficulty defending here at the Straight Dope. But none of my challengers have even sufficiently recognized what utterly untenable positions they hold, let alone how solid and, thus far at least, undamaged my position is! I might have had a difficult time if my fellow debaters had read Doherty and actually found a flaw there. But that hasn’t happened yet.
First, no one’s yet laid a hand on the position I’m defending. Second – and this is the point that I think you’ve been hammering me about – I know damned well that 100% certainty is unavailable to me on this. But 100% certainty is unavailable to anyone when it comes to synthetic knowledge. However, we can be as certain as we are about any logical chain of reasoning that the ahistoricist position is the ONLY one that can explain ALL the evidence and therefore must be the correct one.
That’s what I’m saying and that’s all I’m saying.
p.s.: Have you surrendered on the questions I asked of you earlier in this thread?
No, I don’t. This debate is over the question of whether there was a historical Jesus or not. It is NOT about explaining the rise of Christian theology, whether historicist or not. But I will tell you something of extreme importance:
Burton Mack, in his 2001 book The Christian Myth writes as follows: I want now to offer four criticisms of the quest for the historical Jesus, especially as it has been pursued in recent American scholarship, and then suggest a better approach to the examination of Christian beginnings. (1) A first criticism is that the quest has not produced any agreement about a textual data base from which to work. …
(2) A second criticism is that none of the profiles proposed for the historical Jesus can account for all of the movements, ideologies, and mythic figures of Jesus that dot the early Christian social-scape. We now have the Jesuses of Q1 (a Cynic-like sage), Q2 (a prophet of apocalyptic judgment), Thomas (a gnostic spirit), the parables (a spinner of tales), the pre-Markan sets of pronouncement stories (a lawyer for the defense), the pre-Markan miracles stories (an exorcist and healer), Paul (a martyred messiah and cosmic lord), Mark (the son of God who appeared as messiah, was crucified, and will return as the son of man), John (the reflection of God in creation and history), Matthew (a legislator of divine law), Hebrews (a cosmic high priest presiding over his own death as a sacrifice for sins), Luke (a perfect example of the righteous man), and many more. Not only are these ways of imagining Jesus incompatible with one another, they cannot be accounted for as the embellishments of the memories of a single historical person no matter how influential. Thus the link is missing between the historical Jesus as reconstructed by scholars and the many figures of Jesus imagined and produced by early Christians. Since the quest for the historical Jesus has been pursued in the interest of explaining Christian origins, this missing link is a very serious consideration. It means, in fact, that the quest has failed. The object of the quest has purportedly been to remove the fantastic and miraculous features of the Christ myth and gospels from the “real Jesus of history,” but the more important problem for explaining Christian origins is to account for the diversity of mythic claims about him. No reconstruction of the historical Jesus has done or can do that.
(3) A third criticism is that the link between the teachings of Jesus on the one hand and the story of his crucifixion on the other is missing. None of the scholars that start with the sayings of Jesus has ever been able to account for the crucifixion of Jesus on the basis of those teachings. This means that something is wrong. The teachings and the crucifixion should make sense when put together, but they do not. This is a very serious criticism of the quest. It is also a very serious criticism of the narrative logic of the gospels where the teachings and the crucifixion are in fact interwoven. …
A fourth criticism is that the publication of books about the historical Jesus as well as the public discussion of them has assumed a purpose for the quest that is unreasonable and ill-conceived. …
Changing the Focus
This means that we need to start over with the quest for Christian origins. And the place to start is with the observation that the New Testament texts are not only inadequate for a Jesus quest, they are data for an entirely different phenomenon. They are not the mistaken and embellished memories of the historical person, but the myths of origin imagined by early Christians seriously engaged in their social experiments. They are data for early Christian mythmaking. The questions appropriate to these texts should be about the many Christian groups and movements in evidence, their particular social circumstances and histories, and the various social reasons they had for imagining a teacher in so many different ways. To read these texts only in the interest of the quest to know the historical Jesus has been to misread them, to misuse them. They simply do not contain the secrets of the historical Jesus for which scholars have been searching.
The historical Jesus is dead. Long live the myth!
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.
[/quote]
And after all that, we’re still left with an authentic sayings tradition from a man who was not a figure of worship while he was alive. No, his biographical details didn’t matter. He was not a figure of worship. Do you get that yet?
Now I know you don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. Please…entertain me…name a single non-Pauline book in the New Testament which dates from before the gospels. I’ll give you a hint. There aren’t any.
You are really just flaunting you ignorance now. The items I named are objectively historical claims made by Paul about Jesus. You said Paul made no such claims. You’re wrong. He did. Not very many, not very useful, but historical claims they be, nonetheless.
So please enlighten me. Is it your position that Paul did not make those claims? If so, please present your thesis for why his letters are wrong.
You’re missing the point. Paul claims that Jesus appeared to “the Twelve.” That is a historical claim. The authenticity of the claim is irrelevant. I’m starting to think you don’t quite grasp how scholars use this terminology.
Paul said he was a disciple. We are only discussing what Paul claims, not about whether his claims are true.
Nothing, but Paul says that Jesus had a brother named James. One agin, we are only discussing whether Paul makes historical claims, not about whether his claims are true.
Now this is just completely false and asinine unless you believe that virtually the entirety of mainstream Christianity are “extreme fundamentalists.”
Who said anything about a list of attendants? I just said Paul claimed a last supper, and he did. I actually think that Paul was the origin of the Eucharist stories.
Once again, Paul made a historical claim. It is false to say that he didn’t. Whether the claim was true is not relevant.
You’re kidding me right? You’re seriously denying that Paul claimed Jesus was crucified?
You have no idea what you’re talking about.
We are only discussing historical claims made by Paul. Paul claims that James was the brother of Jesus and that Cephas was his disciple.
Josephus claims that Jesus had a brother named James.
Your claim that “believing Christian scholars” don’t believe that Cephas and James knew Jesus is complete horseshit.
[quote]
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!
It doesn’t matter what you think it means. All that matters is that it is a historical claim by Paul.
I have no idea what you think your point is with this but genre is quite relevant and you have not made any sort of response o my point about that. Your quotation from Galatians has nothing to do with my point
How do you know what they did or did not tell him? This is absurdly reductionist crap.
I have read it. I have even linked to it on this board. Search the forum for “Jesus Puzzle” and you will find me talking about it. Like I said, I was not convinced.
Why don’t you read Bernard Mueller’s critique of Doherty and let me know if still so damn confident about his conclusions.
(FYI, Mueller is a borderline mythicist himself. He actually agrees with Doherty on a number of points- as do I- but he debunks a few points too. Doherty tends to be somewhat selective and ad hoc in his presentation of evidence. I’m sure you will agree after reading Mueller’s piece)
This second Jesus/Josephus mention is pretty rock solid as it is accepted that the reason why James was stoned is because he was one of the leaders of the Early Church. In other words, it’s not just a co-incidence of names.
Next there is something missing in the Historical record- soemthing that shoudl be there if Jesus was a complete myth- the Romans, during the persecution, did not use that as an argument. And the Romans should have had access to Pilates records. They certainly could have said “There was no Jesus, and we have proof”. But they didn’t. Why not if they had good evidence that the records showed no Jesus ever was executed?
Why would the Pre-gospelic writings say any of these things? There were more or less private letters, written from Paul to various Church leaders, all of whom shoudl have known this stuff. It’s not suprising that such details are missing- what would be suprising is if they were included. The fact that Augustus didn’t mention a lot of personal detail about Julius Caesar in his letters doesn’t prove that Julius didn’t exist. By the way- can you prove that Julius Caesar existed as a Man?
Why should they be interested? That whole thing about visiting “holy sites” was a later invention, and so were the sites themselves. We have no idea of where Ceasar “crossed the Rubicon”- in fact we really aren’t sure where the Rubicon was/is. Why didn’t Augustus or the later Ceasars visit this “holy place” and erect a shrine? Or Julius’s birthplace? There is no shrine where Alexander died- although he did have a very fancy tomb- hundreds of miles away. The whole idea of a “place that was holy because xxxx did this here” is mostly a later creation of the Christian Emperors, etc. The Early Fathers simply weren’t interested- like it or not.
I have no idea what you’re saying, and I doubt you do, either. Ranting, one-sentence dismissals are a sign of not truly grasping the argument.
Good grief. You don’t know anything about Q either, do you.
No, it’s not. Where are you getting this nonsense? If Mark didn’t have to invent Jesus’ “life”, he wouldn’t have had to secretly rely on Homer to do it for him, now would he. Where was this Jesus’ “life” you’re going on about? Why did no one else merely publish it? Why didn’t Mark just publish it? You don’t appear to have any idea what you’re talking about.
Holy Bob save me from misguided people who clearly don’t understand the issues being on my side!!
That doesn’t make any sense at all! It’s ridiculous. What you’re so bizzarely claiming, when we include the actual evidence, is that the early decades’ worth of followers of Jesus had some kind of weird writers’ block that somehow, magically, prevented them from writing down any of the biographical stuff that anyone would have written down for decades and decades. Then, all of a sudden, many decades later, some guys who never knew Jesus invented all those historical, biographical details, but even though you know that’s all fiction, you claim through some kind of supernatural gift that there were real biographical details for a real guy.
That’s just nuts. On what basis can you even begin to claim such nonsense as fact?
You were saying, in your last post? You know, where you were implicitly claiming supernatural knowledge that a historical Jesus existed even though you admit that his biography is fiction? :smack:
I reported that Dio’s (and others’) simplistic, evidence-ignoring historicist position fails utterly because doesn’t addresss a large number of facts, one of which is the utterly inconsistent “Jesus” personas wandering aimlessly in the NT and elsewhere. He replied:
I quote again now from a source who is vastly more knowledgeable and informed than either of us: Dr. Burton Mack (from The Christian Myth):
So, as we see, Mack acknowledges the vast inconsistencies I referred to. I wasn’t talking about inconsistencies within the same persona or reference (such as within Q[sup]1[/sup]), but large, inexplicable inconsistencies between the Jesus of Q[sup]1[/sup] and the Jesus of Q[sup]2[/sup], and between the pre-Markan non-Pauline NT Jesus and the Pauline Jesus, etc, etc, etc
Only because you’re mostly refusing to respond to what I actually wrote in all these posts. You’re ignoring what you can’t provide an answer to, while providing either bull-headed denials or evasive pseudo-replies to the rest.
Sigh… See what I mean? You haven’t come anywhere close to directly explaining why this alleged man’s students and followers were utterly unable or unwilling to write word one of any of even the slightest biographical or historical hint that this alleged guy ever existed! There’s no teacher there, only the teachings. I tell you that no such phenomenon – a guy who teaches inconsistent things but never touched the ground, never ate, never rested, never disagreed, was never used as an exemplar, never used to win a doctrinal dispute – ever existed! Your thesis is laughable! As laughable as a historical Santa Claus!
Have you actually read any of Porphyry? Or are you just going off of some quote taken out of context on some website? We also have this one from Porphyry:
There doesn’t seem to be any question from Porphyry that Jesus as a man actually existed and that he helped found a religion. In fact, there also doesn’t seem to be any question that Jesus died on the cross. Instead, he objects to the myths that have become assigned to him by his followers in the years following his death.
From Hoffman’s analysis of Porphyry’s Against the Christians:
Looks to me like Porphyry accepts a historical Jesus, but rejects the mythical tales that have sprung up around him - thus his attack on the evangelists historical abilities.
