What are you talking about?
Before they found the Pilate stone, some of the same atheists that claim Jesus never existed also claimed Pilate never existed.
He didn’t say “If you say so”. He said “You have said it”, which was the circumlocution meaning both “you answered your own question” as well as “Yes”.
Compare it with other Gospels who report the same incident - they just say that Jesus said “Yes”. There was nothing evasive about the answer, especially since Jesus goes to made a prediction of His return. Also note that the high priest is in no doubt - he tears his robe, the traditional gesture in response to blasphemy, and the whole Sanhedrin reacts the same way.
The prosecution couldn’t get witnesses to agree, so the high priest asks Jesus to incriminate Himself (which was against their law, BTW). Which is what Jesus does, and everyone understood what He was saying.
Regards,
Shodan
It does,yes.
Unless you’re an Alexander-mythicist (which I’m not). If you are, then you can point out that “Alexander” was a very common name, and we know of many distinguished leaders of that name. Even if we accept that Alexandria is named after someone called Alexander, how do we know it’s n named after that Alexander? If I’m not mistake, the source which tells us that it’s named after that Alexander is also one of our two independent sources for the life of Alexander, so the existence of the city of Alexandria isn’t an independent source for the historicity of Alexander.
In a later post I granted that is unfair to put the weight of poor writing on Jesus’s shoulders. For those particular sections, there is no reason to believe that they are actual quotes. As written, he comes across as a jackass, unless you are of the inclination to defend circumlocutions as wisdom rather than passive aggressiveness. Personally, having read a wide array of classic literature from many different eras, the particular phrasing comes across as snotty and unnecessary. But, as said, I don’t think he actually said that, so regardless of whether you agree with me or not, is unfair of me to blame him for the language used.
Factually, we have no reason to think we have any idea what he said. All we have is the outcome. And whereas John the Baptist and Paul are able to postpone their sentences for years, Jesus failed at least three attempts at gaining sympathy from either the elite of society or the common man, and was executed more-or-less as quickly as they could arrange it. And, purportedly, the crime he committed was that he called himself The King of the Jews and the Messiah, either before or during the trial.
If we remove the idea that Jesus was actually the Son of God, that he had foreseen his own death and was gladly embracing it for mumble mumble reasons, then we’re talking about a real, non-magical man. He’s a minimally successful faith healer who went to the market, pushed some things over, and got himself into trouble with the law. He probably doesn’t have enough followers to be a threat to the powers that be, and his claim to be King of the Jews probably doesn’t really matter to the Romans at all, yet they kill him.
Ignoring the popularity of Christianity and the base assumption that brings with it that its founder must have been quite the guy - because, really, the guy was Paul - and ignoring the presentation that is given in the Gospels, where we are told that this is a wise and successful man speaking the complete dope. And instead, simply looking at the things we are told happen, he made a mess at the temple by pressing things over, he failed to gather more than a dozen or two followers preaching greatness to the lowest common denominator, he antagonized the general populace to the extent that they begged the Romans to kill him, his followers abandoned him and his church, and he failed to gain any mercy from three entirely different sources.
The saying goes that “No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.” Just look at the success of Donald Trump and the Communist revolutions, and I think it’s easy to see the potential that is there by preaching to the bottom of society and telling them that they’re the true masters. We have every reason to think that Jesus would be a giant, unstoppable force in ancient times, if he had any talent at all. Particularly if he’s going around bringing people back from the dead, curing the blind, curing leapers, generating food from air, etc. We given these great parables and wise sayings, and then he goes and destroys things and rains down a bunch of insults.
If he’s a real man, a wandering non-magical, completely normal faith healer, just like our modern faith healers, either he was bipolar, with moments of clarity and wisdom, and moments of being an insufferable jackass, or he was really just not that talented and the good lines attributed to him come from Paul, John the Baptist, or are strongly upgraded from what he really said. There’s insufficient evidence to say how much of Jesus’s good parts are thanks to Jesus. But the bad parts of his life - his failure to catch on, his tendency to annoy the masses, his failure to bargain for leniency - we have to put on him.
We don’t know what he said at his trial. The dialogue given to him is less than compelling. The real words that he said, on that day, almost 2000 years ago, I’m betting wasn’t conducive to his long term health. That’s certainly what the outcome was.
I don’t think it was poor writing, and, WADR, reading a wide array from different eras is somewhat beside the point. What is important is what the phrase meant, and was understood to mean, in that era, in that culture. For Jews of that era, it would not have come across as passive-aggressive. As I said, the high priest and the Sanhedrin understood Him instantly as saying “Yes”. And then tore their robes to disassociate themselves from the blasphemy.
The gospel of Matthew is generally considered to be aimed at Jews, hence the genealogies and emphasis on Jesus’ teaching about Jewish law and other factors. Thus the writer of that gospel gave Jesus’ answer as “You have said it” because that would be understood by the writer’s audience. Other gospels give the answer as much more direct, because their different audiences would not necessarily have understood “You have said so” to mean much the same thing.
Not ignoring it - understanding how the presentation would look to a given audience.
I don’t know any scholars who believe that Paul or John the Baptist had any hand in writing any of the Gospels.
What’s the difference in the level of evidence between Jesus’ good parts, and His bad parts? Why does He get all the blame, but none of the credit?
Regards,
Shodan
wiki:
*More recent criticism[edit]
The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in Qumran marked a change in Johannine scholarship. Several of the hymns, presumed to come from a community of Essenes, contained the same sort of plays between opposites – light and dark, truth and lies – which are themes within the Gospel. Thus the hypothesis that the Gospel relied on Gnosticism fell out of favor. Many suggested further that John the Baptist himself belonged to an Essene community, and if John the Apostle had previously been a disciple of the Baptist, he would have been affected by that teaching.[citation needed]
The resulting revolution in Johannine scholarship was termed the new look by John A. T. Robinson, who coined the phrase in 1957 at Oxford. According to Robinson, this new information rendered the question of authorship a relative one. He considered a group of disciples around the aging John the Apostle who wrote down his memories, mixing them with theological speculation, a model that had been proposed as far back as Renan’s Vie de Jésus (“Life of Jesus,” 1863). The work of such scholars brought the consensus back to a Palestinian origin for the text, rather than the Hellenistic origin favored by the critics of the previous decades.[citation needed]
http://www.thesacredpage.com/2011/12/did-john-write-fourth-gospel.html
http://www.agapebiblestudy.com/john_gospel/introduction.htm
there’s also Dr. C. Marvin Pate, who wrote several books on the subject.
Generally, the current scholarly consensus is that John had some hand in the Gospel attributed to his name, but it was edited and put into it’s final form by his followers at Ephesus.
Maybe I am not following you. John the Baptist is not the same as John the traditional writer of the last Gospel. According to the Gospels, John the Baptist died before Jesus.
Regards,
Shodan
Apparently I was confused. :smack:
I want your head on a platter.
Regards,
Salome
As I mentioned, my take on “thou hast said it” - is not really “Yes” as Shodan suggests, but a way of saying “You brought that up not me”; in other words, Jesus is not going to utter words that are essentially blasphemy - but “you said it” is a way of evading the “yes” or “no” and leaving the option up in the air… “If you are such a holy high priest, why would you even bring up such an option?”
Again, reading between the lines - and referencing Aslan’s book - Jesus mainly preached in the Galilee area, and DID have large crowds following him. He finally came down to Jerusalem. On his entry into the city, he was hailed by huge adoring crowds. As a religious zealot he was offended by the trading happening in the outer courtyard of the temple, and went medieval on their collective asses. He walked away in all the chaos.
Basically, he was a troublemaker. He was condemned because the Temple hierarchy appear to have convinced Pilate he was a threat to public order - not difficult when several similar “messiahs” had been waging guerilla warfare in the countryside over the last few decades. The Roman overseer had one job, to keep the peace.
The herod you say!
Only Matthew and Mark have that quote. Luke has him saying something completely different, and John still a third dissimilar utterance. If Jesus was real, why are there conflicting accounts of the most important event in his life?
One good reason to invent a fictional messiah is the real people that may claim that title are all flawed, such as being dead.
Even if there was one particular wannabe revolutionary in Judea at the time named Jesus (or Yeshua or whatever), the character we know today is such an amalgamation of different sources, each with an agenda, the connection to the original person is so thin it might as well be altogether fictional.
That’s what you expect when you assemble accounts from diverse witnesses of the same event. If all the accounts are the same, that’s when you start to become suspicious.
No, I don’t think so. There are quite a lot of historical personalities of whom we have competing biographies that paint different pictures. We don’t conclude as a result that those personalities “might as well be altogether fictional”.
I guess you’ve all heard the latest news — *first-hand evidence of the Jesus story has been found! * Can we agree that, if this recording passes scientific scrutiny, Jesus was NOT “historic”?
[QUOTE=tape recording 39 A.D., recorded in a Jericho tea shop, found in cave 1973 years later]
[translation]
Judas the Essene: Have I told you my friend Mark is writing an inspirational story? He wants to base it on Melchi and the cute parables he tells. The hero of the story will be a miraculous healer.
Eliacim the Essene: Melchi, that drunken klutz? Mark had better change the name.
J: Yes. For one thing he wants the Messiah to die a martyr’s death, but Melchi will probably die of syphilis. He said if I help him with the story, he’ll write me in to the plot as one of the disciples.
E: Well, that Baptist guy, John, would be an obvious choice. But so many people remember him that Mark wouldn’t be able to take any poetic license. It would be nice to base it on a real guy though.
J: Wasn’t there a fake Messiah crucified by Pilate on Passover Day a few years back? What was his name? Yehoshua or something?
E: Yeah, I remember that. That guy was from Galilee. That would be perfect. Galileans are all illiterate: there’d be nobody to contradict the story details.
J: Which village in Galilee?
E: Does it matter? Just pick one of the tiny villages few have heard of. It sounds like Mark’s going to have a lot of fun. I hope he writes a lot of thieves and whores into the story.
J: Sounds good. I wonder what kind of role Mark is going to give me?
[/QUOTE]
- Usually the competing biographies aren’t published in the same book.
- This smacks highly of “If the stories match, this is evidence that it must have happened…however, if the stories don’t match, this is also evidence that it must have happened!” What differences would be evidence that it didn’t happen?
How is this relevant? You do know that the different gospels weren’t originally written as parts of the same book, right?
I think you’re missing (or ignoring) the point, which is that the differences are evidence that the accounts weren’t just copied from one another.
It might also be evidence that the original story got buried because it was too mundane, and just the tall tales survived. Yes, there are often conflicting stories when an event occurs…but then those collecting the evidence separate the wheat from the chaff. The third and fourth hand stories are thrown out, the stories that are just silly are tossed, the stories from those who have a vested interest are look upon with suspicion,and then you look for what the various stories have in common. You say that “the differences are evidence that the accounts weren’t just copied from one another”, and in a way I’ve got to agree with you. The differences in the stories make it seem like each author got the barest outline of a itinerant preacher’s life as an assignment in class and was told to make fantastic story out of it.
They weren’t published in the same book. They were written decades apart, by different authors for different audiences. Centuries passed before they were presented between the same set of covers.
You can’t seriously think that the historical value of a text is affected by later editorial decisions about which other texts should be read alongside it.
A text arguing that it didn’t happen? Or a text recording that anyone at the time argued that it didn’t happen? I’ts not as if the early Jesus movement encountered no opposition or criticism; we have plenty of evidence of that. And if that evidence included any suggest that anyone at the time pointed out that there was no preacher of that name, no-one of that name was crucified, no crucifixion happened at Passover under Pilate, or anything of the kind, that would certainly be pertinent evidence.
Or, non-textual evidence that it didn’t happen. For example, lots of scholars argue that the trial of Jesus did not unfold as presented in the gospels, because what’s presented is inconsistent with what we know about the relationship between the Temple and the Roman authorities, and with what we know about judicial processes.
Or wholly inconsistent textual accounts. Few scholars accept that Jesus was born in Bethlehem. Only two sources have any nativity account at all, and those two accounts are almost completely different. They serve a clear ideological purpose, and they are hard to reconcile with the fact that in most of the sources he is clearly identified as being from Nazareth. (But note there that part of the case for debunking the Bethlehem narrative rests on accepting the reliablity of the texts that identify Jesus as being from Nazareth.)
So, yeah, we can conceive of lots of evidence that would cast doubt on the reliability of the sources we have for Jesus and, in many respects, that evidence exists. As it happens, it just doesn’t exist on the question of the basic historicity of Jesus. And “the gospel accounts are inconsistent in parts!” is definitely not such evidence. Anyone whose business it is to assess witness evidence knows that the evidence of different witnesses is usually inconsistent in parts.
An interesting example from Aslan’s book - there’s a passage in one gospel where, as Jesus begins to gather a large crowd of followers to hear him preach, the locals say “Is this not Jesus from Nazareth? Is his mother not Mary?” To much later ears hearing this it reaffirms his saintly mother’s position, and so was not edited. Aslan suggests it was more of an insult - people were known by their patriarchal lineage, and locals who identify him by his mother are bringing up the scandal that Joseph married an already knocked-up girl. Perhaps.
These are the sort of inferences we draw by reading between the lines. It may be simple speculation, it may point to a grain of truth.
As I mentioned earlier, how much proof is proof? The president of the USA was born in Hawaii, but the evidence is just shaky enough - typewritten documents, obscure newspaper birth announcements, the word of people who have a reason for bias - some prominent people on zero evidence to the contrary feel this is not enough. How much evidence is enough?
As the saying goes:
“There’s no pleasing some people.”
“Yes sir, that’s exactly what Jesus said.”