Why would his association with the Jesus Seminar bother you? He is a fully credentialed and respected scholar with expertise in the relevant areas. He’s also a practicing Catholic (and former Priest). What exactly about his methodology or research do you find suspect?
Crossan is far from my only source, by the way. A lot of what I know was learned in college as a religion major, but I’ve read a great deal since then. The subject of historical Jesus was an obsession to me for years (and still is really). I’ve read pretty much every significant writer on the subject. Most of them are believers of one sort or another (though few are very literalist), and they all have their own pet theories of Jesus, so I’ve learned not to really adopt any of them, but there is a great deal they DO agree on, and that consensus (not any single authority) is what I rely on - well that and my own personal research (learning Greek, finding whatever I can about the relevant cultural/historical/geographical context, etc.).
Diogenes, I’d have to take your word for it, but I’m reluctant to, given your predilection to assert something as unambiguously resolved when it may be more nuanced. In this very thread, ISTM, your position on tekton, when called on it, has shifted from “akin to the illegals waiting behind Home Depot for an unskilled labor job” to “artisans, but they held a lower status in the social hierarchy,” though you still won’t abandon the notion that it refers to “a range of unskilled workers,” despite the evidence to the contrary provided in this thread, and however you can reconcile “unskilled worker” to “artisan.” You see what I mean? You can say you’re merely echoing the scholarly consensus, but it doesn’t appear that way. Taken with your history, to me it feels as if you’re providing positions you find compelling–which is fine–but that are not the settled matters or interpretations you make them out to be. And when called on it, you seem unable to make any form of a simple statement of, “I may have overstated the consensus,” or even, “certainly some respected scholars hold differently.”
Crossan’s association with the Jesus Seminar is not minor–he’s a founding father. And the criticisms I cited called him out specifically (and in many instances are interestingly similar to the criticisms you receive here). I am no expert and can’t evaluate the differing positions, but the little I read on Crossan, positions he emphasizes, echoed things I’ve heard you assert. And his positions are not consensus, at least not with those who find him controversial, to the extent that they do.
“a combining form with the general sense “first, principal,” that is prefixed to nouns denoting things that are earliest, most basic, or bottommost ( archiblast; archiphoneme; architrave ); or denoting individuals who direct or have authority over others of their class, usually named by the base noun ( archimandrite; architect ).”
That implies that whatever a tekton is, it wasn’t a master of his class nor a leadership position over many other men.
The big question is whether “architect”, in ancient times, meant something more along the lines of a master of the craft of building, or just the guy who flicks the whip at all the grubby workers.
What are some other words that have their root in the word, tekton?
We’re gonna have a hard time if you exclude every English word coined past 30 AD ;).
Anyway, there’s “texture” then (15th century) which comes from the same tek- root as tekton. The Sanskrit roots of tek also have to do with construction work, and axes for some reason.
IMO this does point to a “tekton” being the guy who does the heavy lifting and the rough carpentry work required to build a house, rather than the modern idea of Joseph and Jesus making tables and wardrobes for a living.
Whether that equates Jesus from 30 AD with Jesus from behind the 7-11, or says anything about his literacy I don’t know.
This is exactly why I disagree whenever people applaud Diogenes for his knowledge of religion or state that they’ve never seen him be wrong. It’s not just that he has been corrected on various matters by both conservatives and liberals. Rather, it’s because he’s enthusiastic about embracing whichever view might be most embarrassing to Christians or theists in general, regardless of the actual degree of scholarly support. He treats these extreme views as though they were unambiguously resolved, even though the actual exegesis or state of scholarship may be decidedly more nuanced. This thread demonstrates that amply.
There is another factor - assuming a historical Jesus, his actual adult “ministry” was quite short and reasonably action-packed; he may simply not have had time to compose a written screed, whether he was literate or not.
Plus, of course, he assumed he was living in the end days. Why bother to write for posterity - when there will be no posterity?
Personally I’d vote that the word means “builder”.
Now in my profession, I’m a programmer. But the word “programmer” denotes anything from people who can write a little script that makes a word blink in HTML, to people who architect out multi-million dollar systems and know all of the details of dozens of technologies.
Architects of the Roman era seem to have included people who were fairly technically oriented. At the same time, I suspect that there were many who had no major technical skills, but weren’t expected to build much of note either. There were probably tektons who could take a chunk of wood or stone and fashion it into something impressive, while there were others who were entirely unskilled labor. I know that even in modern day, construction work is quite often something where you can pretty much grab any random person and set them to work, regardless of whether they’ve done it before.
But no matter how you cut it, it’s far more likely that Jesus was either a simple laborer or at most a craftsman. He wasn’t an architect nor an engineer, so his skills would have been unlikely to have rested in mathematics, and definitely not in the written word. That’s not to say that he couldn’t have picked them up nor studied them, just that it’s not apparent that he would require such abilities.
It’s also fairly incontestable that Jesus was held to be little more than a beggar and a tramp in his own time. This is how people in the Bible, who aren’t his followers, treat him and what they call him. When he proclaims himself King of the Jews, everyone points at him and laughs like this is the biggest joke ever.
He grew up in Nazareth, which was effectively a shanty town set up 3.7 miles outside of the city of Sepphoris to rebuild it (it had been destroyed by the Romans in 4BC). That’s an hour’s walk to work and back each day, for the tektons in Nazareth.
It’s also worth noting that Jesus’ father is quite probably a fiction. He never appears to any witnesses once Jesus is an adult. He was never spoken of in Mark or John, and both of these stories seem to have included him for the sake of finding a patrilineal heritage to David. If she’s unmarried and living in the middle of a shanty town of men transported in to rebuild a city, I think it’s a safe bet as to how she supported herself. If we assume, however, that Mary was happily married, that still leaves Joseph as a tekton, living in a shanty town 4 miles outside of Sepphoris. There’s unlikely to be ample opportunity for Jesus to have received much of an education.
? Certainly he never appears or is mentioned in the parts of the Bible dealing with Jesus’s adult life, but the (perfectly reasonable) explanation for this that I’ve always heard is that he was dead by then.
I shouldn’t have said probably, just “distinctly possible” (point in fact, I would have changed it but I ran over the edit time). There’s the rumors (via Celsus) that Mary was an adulteress who was kicked out by her husband, the amazing fiction about the flight to Egypt which is the only real part that Joseph has any part in, the overall fictional (as I noted) genealogies, that Mark specifically lists Jesus’ parentage as Mary only (which would have been peculiar at the time), and the difficulty of matching up Mary’s virginity with a present and loving husband. Overall, I think it’s reasonable that at one time Mary may have had a husband who was a tekton, but either via death or adultery, she ended up on her own for a significant amount of time before Jesus started to make his way in the world.
Let’s also remember that Jesus was effectively banned from ever returning to his home town. To support himself his choice of profession was as a “mystic”. Going by people I’d imagine to fit a bill like that in modern day, I’d judge that his home life wasn’t particularly stable, nor prosperous.
Your last senetence is incorrect. You aren’t understanding the conversation. “Artisan” does not refer to something different from or something socially superior to "day laborors. Artisans WERE day laborors. That’s the niche they occupied. I haven’t changed anything. The “artisan” class was a subpeasant class of day laborors. I haven’t changed anything, we’re just using different words for the same thing (and no evidence has been produce to contradict me on that, just for the record).
I am absolutely echoing the scholarly consensus. I have never had any problem stating what the consensus is, even if I may sometimes have doubts about whether the consensus is correct.
I haven’t been “called” on anything, and I’m not overstating anything. This is my area of knowledge. I know what I’m talking about and I don’t have a personal agenda. I just want to know what the truth is. I have no desire for any *
particular* truth, no pet theories or axes to grind, just curiosity. Those who are upset with me are believers, citing Christian apologist websites, not actual scholarship.
You don’t understand what the criticisms of the JS and Crossan actually are. No one questions his professional integrity, honesty, methjodology or fact finding. The issues they have are with his personal conclusions [from the facts. For example, ne of the critics you cited, Dale Allison, takes issue with Crossan’s opinion that Jesus was a sapiential prophet rather than an apocalyptic one. What that means in English is that Crossan does not think that Jesus was predicting a literal end to the world, but that he was trying to usher in a new utopian society on earth. Allison (like many, if not most modernn scholars, including Bart Ehrman) thinks that Jesus believed and taught that the world was literally going to end and judgement day was imminent within the lives of himself and his followers. This is not a critique of Crossan as a researcher or an attack on his credibility or honesty, but merely a disagreement with his conclusions. Crossan does have some theories which are idiosyncratic and not widely accepted by consensus (he thinks that the Gospel of Peter is earlier than the synoptics, for instance, and that it provided the basdis for the passion narratives), but nobody calls him a liar about the facts themselves.
The Jesus Seminar was criticized (especially by traditionalists) for presuming to vote on what Jesus most likely said or didn’t say, but again, that’s not a critique of integrity but conclusions.
For the record, I didn’t say that all of Crossan’s opinions are consensus (they aren’t), but when I say that consensus does not accept any of the authorship traditions of the Canonical Gospels as authentic any more, that is absolutely true, and you can take that to the bank.
It’s as good of information as we have from an early, outside source. Given other comments Celsus makes, I doubt that he was doing anything other than repeating anti-Christian rumors, but hey, sometimes rumors are real. It’s data, if nothing else.
Mark 6:
Jesus said to them, “A prophet is not without honor, except in his own country, and among his own relatives, and in his own house.” He could do no mighty work there, except that he laid his hands on a few sick people, and healed them. He marveled because of their unbelief.
Luke 4:
They were all filled with wrath in the synagogue, as they heard these things. They rose up, threw him out of the city, and led him to the brow of the hill that their city was built on, that they might throw him off the cliff.
To the conclusion that Jesus was a cult leader? Which part of the New Testament isn’t a cite to that effect?
Joseph is mentioned by name in John (6:42) and is named by Matthew and Luke independently of each other. They both name him in their infancy narratives, which they did not share a source for as with their Mark an Q material. Their infancies are completely different and contradictory and contain contradictory genealogies for Joseph, but they both say his name, and along with John, that gives Joseph triple independent attestation as being the name of Jesus’ father, which gives it a pretty good case for authenticity.
It’s true that Mark only has people call him “the son of Mary,” which is odd in such a heavily patriarchal society and which some see as a suggestion of illegitimacy.
I’m also of the mind that not only is #2 correct, but most people around him were illiterate as well. Your message is going to get around a lot faster by mouth than by text.
Jesus-was-a-prophet-and-not-divine agnostic weighing in.
A notable point about the Luke story - it says that the people were going to throw him off the brow of a hill on which the village was built, but the site currently identified as Nazareth has no hill or cliff. In fact, it’s located in a basin. No First Century synagogue has been found either (actually no First Century buildings at all).
I did notice that. I can offer theories for the discrepancy (for example, that the author just guessed what Nazareth was like), but who knows really. People getting mad at Jesus and chasing him out is a fairly unexceptional happening in the Bible, at any rate. You may as well assume he had the same effect back home as he did elsewhere in the world.
Perhaps Jesus was doing fine as a wandering preacher, working on his doctrines. He figured once he got too old for the traveling he’d retire to a quiet place & begin writing stuff down. (Some of his disciples had been making notes.)