Here’s my problem with agnosticism on this issue. Weighing evidence is a good thing, but before you do that, you need to subject your hypothesis to a few tests.
Firstly, does your hypothesis pass the laugh test? For example, if somebody claims that Jesus is a myth and Paul believed that he was crucified near 30AD, it’s hard to take such a person seriously. (I was under the misapprehension that mythicists believed this for a while: it turns out they in fact do not.) The laugh test isn’t fail safe: 20th century physics generally fails it, but such theories also explain some very real puzzles that Newtonian mechanics cannot. At any rate, IMHO Christ Myth Theory passes the laugh test.
Second, is your hypothesis demonstratively plausible? Here, I’m not so sure. I see a lot of hand waving behind the “Process of Mythical Agglomeration”. Remember there is no evidence of anybody from the first century claiming that Jesus was a myth: there is no recorded controversy considering the year of his death. Now, mythicists respond that the author of Mark was writing 40 years after the main event, in a different language and in a different locale. If anybody walked into the door of his church and said that Jesus doesn’t exist, nobody would listen. So again, the mythicists have cleared the laugh bar. But jeez, we know of a lot of intra-Christian rivalries that spanned across wide geographic territories (eg Gnostic heresies). It seems to me that “Your Jesus died in 30AD, but the real Jesus died 50 years before that,” might have made its way into the historical record. If Paul genuinely believed that Jesus was a wholly spiritual being or that he lived 100 earlier, I would think there would be some ancient text that argued as such – or one that claimed such views were heretical. Instead, we have nothing.
OTOH, a close study of John Frum et al might show that the myth building process can occur faster than I think. Or not.
I’m not dismissing mythicism; I’m just saying that they haven’t met my bar for adopting an agnostic stance. More work is needed.
First, does Paul believe that Jesus was crucified near 30 AD? I can’t find any place where Paul says when or where Jesus lived or died.
Second, if he does believe it, why does he believe it? Paul believed that he had encountered a heavenly being. Paul believed that this heavenly being had once been a man who after his death was exalted by God, and that this exaltation is the opening salvo in God’s eschatological scheme.
I do in fact think that Paul believed that the crucifixion had been a relatively recent event, but I don’t see anything in his letters that would lead me to believe that his belief was based on anything he heard from anyone who had witnessed the event. As far as I can tell, Paul believes it for theological reasons because scripture and revelation tell him that the crucifixion took place three days before the resurrection and that both of these are key events in the apocalyptic plan that God had recently initiated.
In other words, if Paul believed that the man Jesus had been crucified around 30 AD only because either the heavenly Christ told him so or the scriptures told him that’s when it must have happened, that wouldn’t give me sufficient reason to think that there was an actual historical person connected to the visions that Paul had.
The question is it demonstratively plausible is a very good one.
As pointed out earlier in the thread, looking for ancient sources to debunk or question Jesus’ existence is not. Ancient writers simply didn’t do that. The ones that express doubt at clearly superstitious beliefs (like making lots of noise during an eclipse so that the Sun would return), didn’t express doubts towards the historicity of various ‘heroes’. While I’m sure there could be an account or two that would fulfill such a criteria, I have yet to come across it. So if you know of any attempts by ancient writers to say that X person didn’t exist, I’d be very interested in reading it. Even in the dialogue with Trypho, Justin says something to the effect that he cannot prove any of the miracle stories happened, he can only show them through scripture.
When you think about it, what is really remarkable about the Jesus story that would necessitate the ancient people trying to debunk it? There really is nothing all that new or special. It was new to Judaism, of course, but they were more concerned with whether or not it fit in with scripture. The miracles were not new, the life after death was not new - with perhaps the specific jewish-type of glorified body.
We also need to remember that we have almost no evidence of what any non-Christians from the first century thought about Jesus and what we have shows signs of tampering. I think that Meatros is correct that we really shouldn’t expect to have any such evidence.
To put it somewhat crudely, Paul claimed to have seen a ghost named Christ. He did not know Jesus the man who became Christ the ghost and he wasn’t interested in anything Jesus the man did before he died. He doesn’t say when or where Jesus the man lived or died. For Paul, what matters is what Christ the ghost did, not what Jesus the man did. Paul tells us that other people saw Christ the ghost, too, but not that they were companions of Jesus the man. Paul doesn’t claim to know anything about Jesus the man that Christ the ghost didn’t tell him.
Without some record of what Paul believed about Jesus the man, I don’t think that we can expect to have a record of someone challenging what Paul believed about Jesus the man. All anyone knew from Paul is that Jesus the man had been crucified for unspecified reasons at some unspecified time and place.
I can easily imagine that no one in Mark’s church would have listened to the idea that Jesus the man didn’t exist, but might not some of them have recognized his composition as a creative reconstruction based on Old Testament texts of what Jesus the man might have done rather than a record of stories passed down from eyewitnesses? We cannot establish external references to the gospels until well into the second century so there is at least the possibility that it took some time for Mark’s stories to gain widespread circulation and acceptance.
So the question becomes whether the origin of Christianity might lay in the visions that Paul and others had of Christ the ghost rather than in the activities of Jesus the man. Is it possible that the stories about the sayings and doings of Jesus the man were later additions? Personally, I don’t think that the evidence we have is sufficient to eliminate that possibility although I agree that much more work would be needed to establish that as the most likely scenario. That’s why I am agnostic on the question.
While Paul was, indeed, writing exclusively about ‘Jesus the Ghost’, he’s writing to Christian communities that pre-existed his writing, and many pre-existed his ‘conversion’. It is implicit in his writings that ‘Jesus the Ghost’ is synonymous with the ‘Jesus the Man’ his correspondents already knew and loved. The Mythical Jesus people have to explain how such a person could have been invented in the mere 20 or so years since he supposedly died. Paul didn’t invent him, Paul merely added on some stuff about the spiritual meaning behind the man’s alleged resurrection. His correspondents already believed in ‘Jesus the Man’.
I think that most of the communities to which Paul wrote were communities that he founded. The one in Rome was not, but I’m not sure that it’s possible to say whether it pre-existed his conversion.
As Paul is our earliest source by some ten to twenty years, I don’t know how we could go about establishing that his correspondents had any more interest in Jesus the Man than Paul did. Our best and only direct evidence of what they knew about Christ the Ghost and Jesus the Man is what we find in Paul’s letters. It is surely not everything they knew, but I think that it may be everything that we can establish that they knew.
My hypothesis would be that as soon as people heard about Christ the Ghost who was the Messiah from Paul or others, they would have been curious about Jesus the Man. If in fact, no one claimed to have known Jesus the Man personally (which seems to me to be a possibility that we can’t eliminate), the logical place to look for information about him would have been in the Old Testament prophecies that the Messiah would have had to fulfill.
One possible hypothesis would be that Paul’s preaching was based entirely on his encounter with Christ the Ghost, but as his converts spread the message to others, it proved effective to include stories about Jesus the Man. The more these stories proved to be effective, the more of them would have been invented or “discovered” in the Old Testament.
I think it is a legitimate question whether there was enough time for this to occur, but I think the potential time frame is a bit longer than twenty years, which is the time from when Jesus the Man was crucified until Paul’s writings. I would add to that another twenty or so years until stories about Jesus the man start being written and perhaps as much as another fifty years before we have solid evidence that the stories were generally accepted.
Again, I don’t claim that we can know that this is what happened. But it seems to me that the evidence allows it as a logical possibility that cannot be fully eliminated.
You have good points, which is why I don’t fully eliminate it, either. His letters just talk about what he considered ‘the important part’, ‘Jesus the Ghost’. But I see, reading Paul, an implicit assumption that ‘Jesus the Man’ existed, and his readers were aware of, and followers of, that person. YMMV, on that built in implicit assumption, but before a Mythical Jesus proponent can convince me, he’s got to address that.
I can appreciate that. While I think that mythicists are correct about many of the problems with the evidence for a historical Jesus, I don’t think that pointing out the problems is enough to make a purely mythical Jesus more likely than not.
Then I see we are in virtually complete agreement. It’s been pleasant discussing this with you, unlike some of the old-timers. Hope to see you in more threads around here.
I don’t know. My understanding is that his letters are ambiguous.
According to Acts, Paul interacted (regularly?) with Peter. Acts was written much later of course. I’m not sure how the mythicists handle it.
Nice response. Honestly though, my knowledge of the ancients is pretty spotty. Christianity was certainly held up to ridicule early on: see the amusing Alexamenos graffito.
If I did have knowledge, I could push my argument in 2 directions. I could say that a satirist such as Lucian would have questioned Jesus’s existence. I accept that such an approach would be unlikely to be fruitful (subject to my ignorance, which is massive). But also I’m saying that if there wasn’t a consensus of the time of Jesus’s death, then Mark’s implicit timeline would have caused a kerfuffle. Not necessarily in the locale that he wrote it, but rather eyebrows would have been raised, schisms formed and accusations pitched when the text made its way to Jerusalem, Egypt, or other centers of the Christian/Jewish diaspora. Or so I speculate. Instead we have nothing. Which suggests to me that there was such a consensus c. 70, across a number of regions.
I’d like to give VinnyJH the last word, so as to concede that I haven’t wholly handled his POV:
c. 30 AD Crucifixion of Jesus
c. 35 Conversion of Paul [Not sure what the basis for this is -mfm]
c. 51-52 First and Second Thessalonians written
c. 57 Letter to the Romans written
70 Fall of Jerusalem
Mark was written after 70, so there’s a 40 year gap there.
Vinny, a question - what do you think the Christian leaders at the time of Paul thought? I think it’s clear that Paul’s view differed from their view. For one thing, I think it’s probably the case that Paul was the one that started the whole ‘preach to the Gentiles’ thing and made it easier for Gentiles to convert. Prior to Paul, you basically had to become a Jew to be a Christian (most significantly you had to get ‘snipped’).
Paul also says that he didn’t get his revelation from any man. He had an experience with what I think we can safely say was a spiritual Christ. Paul doesn’t differentiate his experience from the first disciples, so, IMO, I think the first Christians probably believed in a spiritual resurrection (not a physical one). There are many reasons for this, and it’s effectively argued by Carrier in the Empty Tomb, IMO.
Do you think we can gleam anything about the original disciples from Paul’s letters?
Acts is problematic, but I do believe you are right with regard to Peter. I do not think mythicists deny that Peter existed, I think they would say that he believed similar to Paul, which would be something to the effect that “Jesus” was sussed out from the Bible kind of like how people suss out Bible code messages. I’m not 100% on this, so it’s probably best if Vinny answers. I did want to say that IIRC, Acts has a wide range of dates between 80-130 AD.
I’m not an expert by ANY standards - but I have read a few things that are translated from back then. One thing that I’ve found is that the ancients were radically different from us. I know that this is probably not a shocker - but it’s kind of surprising to me that they would just accept the supernatural claims, but then quibble on the reasons. It’s like, okay, X person did heal Y person, but it’s because he was possessed, not because he was right!
Lucian might have questioned his existence - but I’m not convinced of that. I just don’t think the ancients thought that way. Of course, it’s possible that he did - the Trypho dialogue comes very close to questioning Jesus’ existence, but he was simply saying something to the effect of ‘look it happened a while ago and we can’t prove he did what he said, what we have to do is investigate scripture’.
Basically I can concede that a few ancients might have scoffed at the entire tale - I say this because I do have a memory of reading of one of them scoffing at a village belief of banging pots together - but it’s not like they would have gone out of their way to investigate it. So Josephus, for instance, wouldn’t have gone to Rome, dug up crucifixion records (if they existed) compared them with tax records to verify Jesus’s birth (if they existed) and then questioned Pilate and other witnesses. Instead, he would have asked some Christians about their beliefs. I think it’s significant that he knew about them, but not so significant that it completely establishes Jesus’ historical existence.
I haven’t read Against Celsus, but to my understanding Celsus didn’t even question Jesus’ existence (again, I could be wrong), it’s the beliefs associated with him that were questioned.
By the time Mark was written there were already a number of Christian communities. We are uncertain as to what they all believed, but we can be sure that they did have a variety of beliefs because even by Paul’s time there were various factions of Christianity. Further, we have to remember right around the time of Mark there was a huge Jewish war - 70AD. There were other things on the majority of Jew’s minds then whether they should verify Christianities claims or not. I’d guess that quite a lot of material was destroyed, quite a lot of chaos in the material, beliefs, etc occurred at this time.
The majority of Jews would not have been concerned with a relatively small cult at that time. It’s not like the Christians were the only cult, btw, there were something like 10 rival Jewish sects and some Jews (Josephus included) though that Vespasian was the Messiah, but you don’t see any surviving documents of Jews going out of their way to debunk that claim.
I think that our inability to answer this question is one of the biggest obstacles to reaching any certainty about the existence of a historical Jesus. Unfortunately Paul never tells us why he persecuted the early Christians. Paul is usually portrayed as adopting the beliefs of the earliest Christians, but I think that there are plenty of good reasons to wonder how much continuity there actually was.
One thing I would note is that it is not uncommon for those who persecute religious groups to have a particularly poor understanding of what those groups actually believe. The Romans who persecuted Christians thought they practiced cannibalism and incest because they claimed to eat the body and blood of Christ and they called one another brother and sister. The perpetrators of pogroms against Jews accused them of ritual infanticide. In many cases, the actual beliefs of the victims don’t even matter because they are really being scapegoated for some unrelated social ill which might be real or imagined. Perhaps Paul’s persecution of the Christians was instigated by some powerful Jewish leaders who just needed someone to blame for the problems of living under Roman rule.
I would also note that persecuting a religious group is not particularly conducive to gaining a better understanding of their beliefs. Paul may have used torture, in which case his victims would likely have told him anything they thought he wanted to hear. Informants would have leveled wild accusations against their neighbors in order to shift Paul’s attention from themselves. I think it is also possible that Christians were not the only group that Paul persecuted. There were many messianic cults in first century Palestine which might have offended the sensibility of Jewish leaders. I can easily imagine that Paul tried to stomp out a number of different heresies.
This leads me to think that when Paul had the vision that caused him to embrace that which he had previously persecuted, what he embraced could have been an amalgamation of a the beliefs of several unrelated cults combined with a healthy dose of misinformation. It may have had very little continuity with the specific beliefs of any particular group that Paul had been persecuting.
Add to this that Paul says in Galatians that he went out and preached for three years before he bothered to go to Jerusalem to meet Peter and James. Historicists always view this as a meeting where Paul learned from Peter and James, but I can’t help but think that Paul might have done most of the talking. After all, he was a well-educated dynamic preacher who had been successfully spreading his message over the region for three years while they were illiterate peasants who were still hanging out in Jerusalem. Moreover, Paul had a reputation for violent intolerance towards those who disagreed with him. I can easily imagine Peter and James deciding that it would be prudent to go along with whatever Paul had to say.
Where all this leads me is the possibility that Christianity was actually Paul’s invention for all practical purposes. I don’t think we can be sure that his gospel corresponded in many particulars to what any of his predecessors had believed. It is possible that it did, but I don’t think that we can be certain from Paul’s letters what the original disciples actually thought.
Acts is problematic, but I do believe you are right with regard to Peter. I do not think mythicists deny that Peter existed, I think they would say that he believed similar to Paul, which would be something to the effect that “Jesus” was sussed out from the Bible kind of like how people suss out Bible code messages. I’m not 100% on this, so it’s probably best if Vinny answers. I did want to say that IIRC, Acts has a wide range of dates between
[QUOTE]
I think the most common mythicist position would be that Peter, like Paul, only had visions and revelations of the risen Christ. I think that most mythicists (and many mainstream New Testament scholars as well) would say that Acts was written for propaganda purposes to create the impression of unity among the earliest believers. As a result, it’s portrayal of the relationship between Peter and Paul has to be taken with a large grain of salt.
I would say that the fact that ‘our gospels’ contain anti-Peter propaganda, like the 3 time betrayel, would speak for a real Peter. An actual apostle ‘on the preach’ whose teachings had to be countered.
This is true, and has been pointed out to me recently, this is also a reason to question whether Peter was really the illiterate peasant he was made out to be.
Tacitus and Josephus are non Christian sources and while skeptical as unbelievers say absolutely NOTHING that shows signs of tampering.
Also Vinny I don’t think you realize this… but you have over 25,000 snipits of scripture that date within ancient antiquity for the New Testament. However lets say we ignore 100% of those. Do you know you have enough ancient antiquity sources from theologians and church fathers who directly quote from the biblical account in this time period you could still assemble the new testament. We for example even have as early as 95AD church fathers citing the “four-fold” Gospel…
The next closest book we have snipits off is the Iliad. It however only has essentially 620 snipits. There is no figure we have more text on than Jesus. It’s an embarrassment of riches. The thing is, I don’t even have to go to Christian indoctrinated sources to make this argument. As I showed in my last post where I cited the world’s probably foremost atheist critic of the source text of scripture- Dr. Bart D. Ehrman. Dr. Bart D. Ehrman will mention the idea of believing these books are literal the literal Word of God as foolish and believing in myths… He loves to go on and on about why you shouldn’t believe, but Dr. Bart D. Ehrman is quick to point out anyone who doesn’t think Jesus was a historical figure doesn’t know what they are talking about.
Mark wrote Peter’s Gospel. For the record. So when you read the Gospel of Mark… you are reading the Gospel of Peter.
We know this from Papius, bishop of Heirapolis (A.D. 130), in which Papius records “Mark, having been the interpreter of Peter, wrote down accurately all that he (Peter) mentioned, whether sayings or doings of Christ, not, however, in order. For he was neither a hearer nor a companion of the Lord; but afterwards, as I said, he accompanied Peter, who adapted his teachings as necessity required, not as though he were making a compilation of the sayings of the Lord. So then Mark made no mistake writing down in this way some things as he (Peter) mentioned them; for he paid attention to this one thing, not to omit anything that he had heard, not to include any false statement among."
I read the original Evidence that Demands a Verdict back in 1975. I had recently accepted Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and Savior, and I was curious about the evidence for my new beliefs, which the people who led me to the Lord had assured me was quite impressive. I was profoundly disappointed. I could not believe that any thinking person could believe that those were good arguments. While this did not cause me to immediately abandon my new found beliefs, it certainly contributed to my decision to do so after less than two years.
Regarding Tacitus, he wrote in the second century. It is true that he wrote about events that occurred in the first century but that doesn’t contradict anything I said.
Regarding Josephus, it is my understanding that the overwhelming consensus of scholars, including most conservative scholars, is that the Testimonium Flavium reflects alterations that Christian scribes made to what Josephus originally wrote. You are of course free to disagree with them (as I disagree with mainstream scholars like Ehrman on some points), but I cannot see how you are justified in accusing me of lying.
Interestingly, Papias never quotes the Gospel of Mark as far as we know, nor does he even indicate that he had ever seen it. Moreover, his description of the writing is not entirely consistent with canonical Mark.
First: Vinny said ‘almost no evidence’. Second, Josephus shows major tampering. Third, neither Josephus nor Tacitus really make any substantial comments with regard to what they thought about Jesus. I would cool it on the ‘lie’ business.
"Within ancient antiquity’ is code for 100+ years after Jesus’s life. Further, what do copies show, exactly?
If I accumulated 25,000 copies of the Koran, would that make Mohammad’s splitting the moon trick real?
Also, I think that most of us would assume the gospels were written somewhere around 70-100 AD. I’m not sure why you think this is a big deal though.
I think most of us are familiar with McDowel. It’s not really scholarly, you realize that.
Ah, so what’s the threshold for truth? If it had 20,000 snipits could we consider the account true? Could we take, as truth, that Odysseus battled a cyclops?
I’ll be blunt, this is one of McDowell’s horrible arguments.
Ehrman will also argue that we don’t know what the initial texts actually said. He shortcuts his historicity arguments with his textual criticism.
He’s been blasted by fellow scholars, by the way, for essentially ignoring their work. He basically stated that scholars don’t take the question seriously, which ticked off a number of scholars who did take the question seriously (all of which argue for a historical Jesus, btw).
Unfortunately you posted some rather poor reasons for agreeing with him (# of copies = historicity).
