I think you can get where you got without violating the idea of the vision. Paul was going around arresting and even being involved in the killing of Christians. He was even there for Stephen’s sermon. It makes sense that Paul found Christianity appealing, but his own Jewish beliefs prevented him from accepting them. Then he had some sort of religious experience, which were far from uncommon in Pharisees, and believed it was a calling from God to change his mind.
The main reason I believe in the vision are his repeated explanations for it. He explains why those with him didn’t see what he saw. I can’t a reason to do that unless he thought that one of them might object to what happened. Thus he is sure they wouldn’t disagree that there was a big light–which could even just be lightning.
Furthermore, you have the part about Paul being temporarily blinded afterwards, which also describes a lot of witnesses.
How would they know the exact details of a crucifixion of some Jeshua (a very common name) in some backwater of the empire more than 30 years ago.
Roman record keeping wasn’t anything like a modern bureaucracy.
Besides, as has already been discussed, it is very very unlikely that if there had been anti-christian documentation that it would have survived to this date.
Remember in who’s hands the preservation, the actual copying of books was?
I’m going to refer to “Luke” as the the author of Luke-Acts, and “St. Luke” as Paul’s traveling companion, to try to avoid confusion. I hope that keeps this a little clearer.
There’s speculative and then there’s rampant speculation. No, scholars do not agree precisely about when the gospels were written, nor exactly who wrote them. They do agree, though, that the gospels are written anonymously; nowhere does any Gospel writer specifically identify himself. They do agree that the gospels were written between 65 A.D. and 125 A.D., mostly clustering on the earlier half of that range. The wide consensus among secular scholars is that Luke was written after Mark, and that Mark was written no earlier than 65 A.D. You can say “but if” but you are flying in the face of some pretty widely accepted ideas.
Leaving aside the contradiction inherent in “slight consensus”, either Luke wrote after Mark, or he didn’t. And there is tremendous evidence that he did, unless Mark did a truly bizarre abridgment job. And indeed, there is no actual evidence for St. Luke’s authorship. The Gospel itself is anonymous. The earliest traditional attribution of St. Luke as the author of Luke-Acts that I’m aware of isn’t until the late second century, more than 150 years after the events in question and at least 120 years after St. Luke died. We tend to compress those events because we’re looking at them from millennia away, but it’d be like trying to pin down today the author of an anonymous biography of a little known street prophet from 1860 written around 1890 and doing it in a largely illiterate society with no modern research tools. And last but not least, those early Church fathers who are our first evidence for this have a very obvious desire to claim the most authoritative author possible for their preferred Gospel because they are heavily engaged in combating heretical Christians who don’t accept Luke-Acts at all. You can’t blame them for accepting the tradition that St. Luke was the author of Luke-Acts. (Unless you want to accuse them of making it up out of whole cloth, but I think that’s less likely.)
Why would they? By the time they were aware of the legend, it would have been decades after the fact. What were they supposed to do, launch a full investigation into the birth records of a guy from a little town? Why would they have done this? It’s not like the Jesus movement was substantial - as it later would have become - and it’s also not like it was the only movement in town.
Further, they didn’t investigate other, more popular, miracle men, so why bother with Jesus? The time period is filled with such men. Phlegon of Tralles talks about Centaurs and no one went out to disprove them!
The ancient people didn’t doubt like we do today - you are looking at them as though they were skeptics. This is not the case - some people back then believed that Jason (of the Argonauts) existed. He has a complex history as well.
Why would the Romans or the Jews have called him on it? The Romans wouldn’t have cared and the Jews wouldn’t have cared whether or not Jesus lived, they cared that he claimed be the Messiah. In fact, the reason the Christians started preaching to the Gentiles is because the Jews didn’t buy the whole Christian narrative because it didn’t match their beliefs (this is what Trypho is criticizing in justin Martyr’s letters).
Further, let’s suppose they did doubt that Christ existed, what do you suppose they would have done to try to prove it?
Again, I’m not saying that Jesus didn’t exist - I think his existence is the most parsimonious explanation of the early Church - but some of the claims being made are anachronistic.
The Gospel of John developed over a period of time in various stages,[26] summarized by Raymond E. Brown as follows:[27]
An initial version based on personal experience of Jesus;
A structured literary creation by the evangelist which draws upon additional sources;
The final harmony that presently exists in the New Testament canon, around 85-90 AD.[28
That sez that steps 1&2 were done by John, as I said “Originated” by that Apostle. Exactly as i said.
earlychristianwritings is a highly biased source. Even so, that line could have been added by a later editor, as there is little doubt the Gospel was edited after Johns death)which was some 60 years after the death of Jesus, so not only did John have 60 years to mis-remember, he also was quite old for that period. In any case, as even your site sez "Those inclined to see the expulsion more in terms of an informal action on the part of a local synagogue are free to propose an earlier date."
I wasn’t talking about the Romans investigating Jesus immediately after his death, but later, when Christianity became a threat to the Empire. Even then, there is no claim that Jesus did not exist, in fact the opposite, Tactitus and Josephus seemed to take it for granted, even tho there was no reason for them to support Christianity in any way.
So yeah, it’s unclear what historical material can be taken from John, according to scholars and yes there does seem to be some good material there. Some scholars think it’s more historical than others. The majority do not side with your view, however. You selectively quote one of the cites and then in the same post, you attempt to discredit the other source as bias.
Really?
Yes, it’s highly dishonest to post opinions from scholars that represent both sides of the issue and include the consensus view based on your say-so.
I’m sorry, but you are being ridiculous here. Your reason for claiming bias seems to be merely because you don’t agree with it.
Let’s remember what I was responding to. You stated that the consensus was that John was dictated to a scribe and edited by his disciples. This is not the consensus view.
Further, I simply posted one discrepancy - as you can see by the website, which quotes scholars, there are others.
Finally, if it’s bias, then why trust the part you quoted? But let’s quote the whole section:
He’s not saying that most scholars should be inclined to see the expulsion that way, only that the ones who do would argue for an earlier date! So if you are hell-bent on interpreting it earlier, then you can ignore the problems, basically.
When do you suppose this was?
Again did these authors commonly go around refuting these sorts of miracle people?
No. Tacitus doesn’t refute Hercules, for example, so does that lend support for Hercules’s existence?
Relevant passage:
Why doesn’t Tacitus say ‘oh, but there is no evidence that Hercules existed’. He doesn’t because this is not what the ancient people did - how would they do this, anyway? Where does Josephus argue against the existence of someone?
You are arguing from silence here. You are putting modern day skepticism on the people back then, ignoring their cultural mindset. No one went around debunking people’s existence. There wasn’t a counter book to Phlegon of Tralles’ book of marvels - for instance.
So on what grounds can you say that we should expect either Tacitus or Josephus to have written that they doubted Jesus existed?
Paul was initially dealing with a fairly well developed, decent sized “cult” in Jerusalem and other places of the Jewish society; this within 30 years of Jesus alleged death. I don’t think theat sort of detail can be made up in that locale with that timeframe. Maybe in Rome they could refer to an obscure happening in a remote province, but not in Jerusalem. I assume in that setting, when the High Priests have a rival cult leader crucified by the Romans, it’s big news for the next decade. Also remember in a setting where writing is less common, where there is no other entertainment, oral tradition and repetition is pretty strong.
My contention is there is no way the initial Jesus cult could “make him up”.
Again, the details of what happened are not what you’d expect for a made up superhero - barefoot preaching, crucifixion, etc. It indeed sounds like a repetition of real events.
I had a devotee of St. Simeon the Tanner honestly convinced that around 900AD the saint miraculously called forth an earthquake in the name of the Christian God to move the hills beside Cairo a distance of 3Km. (And yet the Caliph stayed muslim?!) You can make that stuff up about remote times or places, but not about the home town in the living memory of most adults there.
(Notice how Jesus’ miracles were mostly done in small towns in the countryside, not in front of huge crowds in Jerusalem… “Once, when he was in Canaan for a wedding…”)
Why not?
There are/have been other literary genres that have other characters and plots than American super-heroes.
Indeed I have read that one genre in those days was transposing a well known hero/character into another culture and have him do the exact opposite.
The ‘Jesus story’ could certainly fit that description.
That’s a very interesting point. I would concede that this is a compelling factor for historicity. It explains a lot of the phenomenon of the early church.
Maybe, maybe not - I would say that a bare bones case could certainly be made. Then again, maybe I’m misinterpreting you. I’m taking you to mean that the non supernatural events in the NT are real events, wholesale. I’m not convinced of that. I think that it’s possible that Jesus was crucified, was a messiah figure, had a cult and stuff like that (bare bones). I do not find Pilate finding him innocent or letting a murderer free based on a supposed Jewish tradition particularly plausible.
True, and his crucifixion was public, while his resurrection, private.
I’ve never heard that before, and I’ve done a fair amount of reading on gospel research. Do you have a source where I could read about this?
Personally the best take on Gospel genre that I’ve read is in Dr. Craig Blomberg’s The Historical Reliabilitiy of the Gospels. He considers a several possible genres: apocalypse, aretalogy, comedy, tragedy, parable, and midrash. While acknowledging that there have been scholars who have treated the Gospels as each of these, none of these treatments has ever caught on among mainstream Gospel scholarship. By contrast, “the broadest and most widely proposed genre for the Gospels” is biography. There was a large, well-established body of biographical writing by the late 1st century. The Gospels match up with this biographical writing well in terms of length, focus, style, organization, and so forth.
I was afraid someone might ask where I read that.
I’m sorry to say that I can’t for the life of me remember where I picked that up.
It must have been some 20 years ago and kind of stuck in my memory.
I have not come across it since, either.
Anyway it was meant to point out “No one would make this kind of story up” is not such a strong argument.
On the contrary, it’s a commonly used argument when trying to suss out which parts of an account are historical and which were added (or subtracted) by later authors and redactors. It’s sometimes referred to as the “criterion of dissimilarity”, and it’s never without controversy, but in conjunction with other arguments, it can help support an idea.
For instance, in Jesus’ day, the Messiah was expected to be a king or military conqueror who saves the Jews from Roman oppression. Jesus was most certainly not such a figure; he was an impoverished wandering preacher who was executed by the Romans at the request of the religious authorities. Surely if a Gospel writer was going to invent or lie about how Jesus died, he’d pick something more plausible. Dying a criminal’s death because the high priests’ ruled against him is a lousy place to begin a religion. That’s not enough to make us really believe it, of course, but we also think that the historical Jesus was really crucified because no early source contradicts it and because so many early sources (canonical, non-canonical, Jewish, and pagan alike). So we can use the criterion of dissimilarity to argue that it’s more likely that Jesus was crucified than not; it supports the argument already supported by the evidence.
Or try this one: Barring divine intervention (and we have to, because a historian who argues from divine intervention becomes a theologian), either Matthew copied Mark or Mark copied Matthew. One of the reasons that we believe that Mark was written before Matthew is that one of those authors clearly plagiarized* the other, and if we consider Mark sitting down and abridging Matthew, it’s very weird that he would eliminate things like the birth in Bethlehem that support his argument and add things like Mark 13:30. That’s the passage where Jesus tells a crowd that a bunch of apocalyptic events will come to pass while some in the crowd are still alive. Now, if Mark is writing after Matthew, that’s a really weird thing to add, since this looks a lot less likely by that point. But if Matthew is writing after Mark, that’s an obvious thing to cut, because by the time Matthew is writing, it’s looking less and less likely that any of that generation will still be alive to see Jesus’ prediction come to pass, and he wouldn’t want to pass on bad information or make Jesus look bad.
Anyway, my basic point is that the argument from “No one would make this kind of story up” is not the strongest argument that a person can make, but serious scholars of the NT do make it on occasion.
*Only be sure, always to call it please, research.
(The article originally appeared two months ago, but for some reason my local paper printed it today, minus the phrase “as Christians prepare to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus.”)
Our earliest source for Jesus is Paul who is not interested in anything Jesus said or did during his life. Paul’s interest in Jesus arises from the fact that he is believed to been exalted by God after his death and it is this event and its theological significance that is the subject of Paul’s writings. Stories about the things that Jesus said or did during his life appear somewhat later.
I think this makes Jesus of Nazareth a unique problem for historians. We have many examples of people like Alexander the Great about whom supernatural stores arose as a result of the things that he accomplished in his life. When we scrape away the supernatural stories, however, we still have a significant footprint in the historical record.
With Jesus of Nazareth, however, we start with his supernatural accomplishments after his death and the stories about what he did during his life come later. If we scrape away the supernatural stories about Jesus, we scrape away the very reason that anyone ever told stories about him in the first place. Stories about the earthly Jesus were only preserved order to propagate belief in the supernatural events.
As far as I can tell, every other person in the ancient world about whose existence historians are certain left their mark in the historical record as a result of things that they did during their life which had an impact on the prominent and literate people of the their. Jesus is unique in that we only know of his existence as a result of things that he accomplished after his death.
It’s true that Paul is our earliest source, and that the surviving accounts of what Jesus said and did are all (by scholarly consensus) later. But that doesn’t mean that stories of Jesus’s words and deeds hadn’t “appeared” or been written down (possibly to be used as source material by the writers of the gospels we have) by Paul’s day.
That is true, but there is nothing in Paul’s letters to indicate that preserving and sharing memories of an earthly Jesus was a practice in his communities. In fact, there is some indication that it was thought at that time that Jesus did not become the Messiah and the Son of God until he was resurrected from the dead which might explain why Paul didn’t have any interest in the earthly Jesus. So based on the evidence that survives, I don’t see how we can determine that the gospel stories were in fact preserved memories of a historical person rather than inventions that historicized a spiritual being.
Close reading of the primary source documents can provide some evidence. For example there is the matter of James, brother of Jesus.
Furthermore, there are an abundance of awkward things Jesus appears to say and do, things that need to be explained away. You would not expect such problems with a wholly mythologized being. The core one is having the main character arrested by the Roman state for disturbing the peace: that isn’t a good way to attract followers, at least at the time. But there are plenty of sayings that rubbed the mainstream the wrong way, including the lauding of Samaratans (enemies of the Jerusalem) and eunichs (widely vilified at the time), the prohibition on divorce (absolute in Mark, softened in Matthew), and sayings that are just plain weird (the bit about sand and salt).
We’d expect a purely fictional character to have a more consistent and cohesive narrative.