That is the most difficult passage to explain, yes.
Dr. Deth said something along the lines of, “There is no doubt Jesus existed…” And went on to booster Joesphus.
Mine alone? There is a guy quoting a novel and thinking that it’s the actual letters Pilate wrote… a little perspective please. Also, I use profanity, I don’t know where you live, that such outbursts are confined to adolescents. 
Of course they do. Christians don’t say, “Even though the evidence is scant, I believe in Magic Jesus, and his ability to nuke fig trees.” They say, “Jesus rose from the dead.”
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[ul][li]“He was told that by someone. Like maybe a follower of Christ.”[*]“Josephus spoke to an early Christian at some point”[/ul]Of course, Josephus could have just as easily gotten his information about James from some Roman (or even Jewish) source, but you prefer to manufacture/proclaim those ‘facts’ that suite you.[/li][/quote]
If James wasn’t actually the brother of Jesus, then the idea that he was was probably created by Christ’s followers. That idea might have been transmitted to Josephus by anyone, but its genesis was likely a Christian.
Again, that’s not evidence. That just shows that Josephus is repeating something he heard, something that he’d reasonably believe to be true, because of the awareness of the nascent Christian sect.
Modest evidence is overstating things a bit. I would say that it is evidence that by 90ish C.E., Josephus was exposed to someone who thought the James that was stoned was Jesus’ brother.
I’m not witnessing. I’m not a Christian. I’m interested in religion purely out of social-evolutionary and historical interest.
Not unusual. Messianic figures–actual human ones who actually lived–were executed like common criminals with some frequency. It was a type of event all too well known to Jews at the time, and there is no reason to think they would have seen an execution by the Roman occupation to be effectively humiliating. The idea of a martyr had been around for quite some time prior.
Well, if the question was “did Jesus, performer of actual miracles and the son of god, exist”, then the question would be a simple one: no. No-one can perform miracles, and god doesn’t actually exist, and so cannot have sons.
However, that isn’t the question in the OP.
No. In Judaism, by definition, a messiah can’t also be a failure. Failure makes one a false messiah. See: Simon Bar Kokhba.
The execution of Jesus makes it very difficult for Jews to accept claims of his messiah-hood, as it is totally contrary to the Jewish understanding (then as now) of what a messiah is.
True, but that’s part of the reason it’s a good story, and has such buy-in. Also, his death was a trivial inconvenience. He didn’t die in any reasonable sense. He took a long nap and woke up fine… well almost fine, he still had his injuries, which is a bit weird.
You don’t think that the death was necessary to have the reveal at the end? It’s a good story, that’s why it’s the most popular religion on Earth.
It doesn’t need to be a genius group of inventors. It could have just built up over time from many hands.
I believed your point was that once a person had been crucified, Jews at the time would have stopped respecting him. This is a common argument that’s made in conversations like this, but it seems to be a completely ungrounded idea.
I can see my own reply confused the issue by using the term “messianic.”
Up for grabs is the question of whether Jews thought of killed-then-resurrected messiah as a thing that could happen or not. Many have asserted that Jews at the time did not and practically could not have conceived of such a thing. But the very fact that Jews conceived of the resurrection story of Jesus seems to cast doubt on that idea, and we do have at least one albeit very vague reference in an inscription to an executed messianic figure named Simon of Perea, 40 years prior to Christ’s execution, which seems to indicate an expectation that something will happen three days after his death. Again: It’s a very vague inscription so this can’t be taken as a clear record of such a belief, but remember that my whole point in threads like this is to urge uncertainty. Lots of things people assert with an “It is known, Khaleesi” intonation simply aren’t so known.
It is far more likely that Jesus of Nazareth was a real person than that he was cut from whole cloth. Messianic pretenders were hardly rare at that time, it would be hard to walk down the streets of Jerusalem without tripping over a few. And just as with cults now rivalries would be fierce. Reading between the lines of the NT I think it likely that Jesus and a few of his disciples had been followers of John the Baptist before breaking away and setting up their own stall. Such has always been the fissiparous nature of sects. John’s loyal followers, who continued for centuries, must have been furious when they saw their Master recast in Christian literature as an obsequious herald for this upstart Nazarene.
The New Testament is too messy to be wholly fictitious. Again it’s easy to spot the ghosts of old rivalries. How Paul must have resented being Johnny-Come-Lately who, as the real disciples surely took pleasure in reminding him, had never even met the Master. And imagine how those disciples felt when the news came in, “Hey, guess who Paul bumped into on the way to Damascus?” I just bet the air was alive with the babble of many tongues that day and none of them emanated from the Holy Spirit!
With one bold stroke Paul had set himself on a par with the elders of the movement. Even above them: when was the last time they saw Jesus? Really? That long ago?
My point is that no writer would make this stuff up. These were all real people, including Jesus himself.
Thanks for the response.
So you accept a Jerusalem sect led by James and yet claim that the fabrication of Jesus is more likely than is the idea of James as successor to Jesus. Why is that?
Possibly but, again, I see zero reason to believe it more likely.
There is an exceptional two volume work by David Flusser titled “Judaism of the Second Temple Period” with volume 1 focusing on “Qumran and Apocalypticism.” There is little evidence that “cosmic figure” theology had much currency. On the other hand, there is much evidence of charismatic sect leaders sounding very much like the prophets of old. It seems much more likely to me that Jesus was such a leader later promoted to “cosmic figure” in the diaspora.
Well, it was popular once it grew outside of its Jewish roots. The “great story”, as it turns out, appealed to non-Jews, but not to Jews so much - because, despite all of the attempts made to connect Jesus to the Biblical notion of a messiah, his ignominious death simply isn’t part of - and is, in fact, directly contrary to - the Jewish notion of messiah-hood.
My “take” is that Paul took a struggling Jewish sect and made it viable by making the story accessible to non-Jews.
This strikes me as having the hallmarks of a happy accident, not of planning. If it was planned (or even “built up”), why not do so with a story that appeals specifically to Jews - as the authors evidently intended? Why do so with a story that turns them off?
This. A genius group of inventors wouldn’t have included that bit about zombie saints rising up and shambling towards the town…never to be heard from again.
Long story. Sorry, but see below:
My own view is that it’s at least a little more likely, but more to the point what I really try to emphasize in conversations like this is that we just don’t know a lot of things people assume we know. To me it’s serious, important progress if someone will just admit that Jesus’s non-existence is a live possibility based on what evidence we do have. Not just a speculation or tendentious implausible idea but a live possibility.
You can estimate how likely a Jew was to join the sect and how likely a non-Jew was to join the sect?
Jaywalker, to be a little more helpful on “what’s the case for mythicism” front I’ll present this synopsis with some trepidation: http://www.bibleinterp.com/articles/2014/08/car388028.shtml
You’re going to hear a lot of valid criticism of the author in terms of his bedside manner (though in the linked article he’s in scholar mode so the crankiness is not on display) but in my view, as to the logic of the debate (ignoring the rhetoric and drama), he’s got a plausible case–at least as plausible as non-mythicism.
We have descriptions of their beliefs and those descriptions aren’t insane, unlike with the Borborites, so there’s no reason to think that the writer made up this particular accusation. And the descriptions tend to be consistent in this regard across the Jewish-Christian and early Gnostic groups.
No - the idea is that a guy who fails and is executed can’t be a “messiah”. This is totally grounded. A “messiah” in Judaism is someone who succeeds in saving Jews, leading to a brighter future.
The only specific individual identified in the OT as a “messiah” isn’t even Jewish - he is Cyrus the Great, King of Persia. He’s a “messiah” because he saved the Jews from Babylonian captivity, and sent them back to Judea.
Someone who fails and is executed may be a “hero”, or have any one of a number of positive labels - but he just can’t be a “messiah”. That’s by definition. Just like someone who fails to win a race isn’t “the winner”, even if his or her failure was totally noble.
Of course they could “conceive of such a thing” - just as I may argue that, because of my good sportsmanship in a race, I’m the “real winner”. What I can’t do, is convince the judges to give me the winner’s cup - just like the early Christians evidently found it hard to convince Jews of their day to accept Jesus (the executed) as the “messiah”. The cult only took off once non-Jews began to join.
No, but I can point out that hiostorically the cult only achieved success once Paul reformatted it to make it appealing to non-Jews.
I am just insisting that they’re not sources.
Again, do the people who think Jesus was wholly mythical think John the Baptist was also mythical? How about Jesus’ brother James?
The idea that someone creating a religion around a martyr would have avoided fraud detection by using a real martyr, rather than a fictional one, does not depend on whether the fraud was discovered, but whether it might have been. Certainly there were residents of the tiny town of Nazareth alive in 62 A.D. who would know whether “James brother of Jesus” made sense.
If you assume Josephus’ Antiquities, published in 93 but written earlier, contained the phrase translated “the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ, whose name was James” then this was presumably considered a true story in 62 A.D. Are you now suggesting that James was real, but his connection to the mythical Jesus was invented?
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Given the rest of the post your claim of ignorance on the matter was redundant. But good show getting some “nutter” digs in while having “no interest” in learning. You’d fit in real well in a thread on the topic: those most ignorant get most vehement!