pavurcn wrote: ↑Wed Mar 21, 2018 6:38 am
You seem to make fundamentalists out of all mainstream New Testament scholars (who put Jesus in the first century,
sub Pontio Pilato). The extreme outlier idea is that Jesus was active in the second century.
Not at all. In fact I'm not aware of any mainstream academic or Biblical scholar or historian who has made such an argument, and I'm only aware of one other person who came to a similar conclusion as myself, but through a different avenue. (In fact, I owe a lot of my own thinking to him, even if I believe he was mistaken in a few areas. But that's neither here nor there.)
But if you do hold such a view, then you are implying that those who made Jesus a first century figure were mythicizing: putting a figure in a more remote time.
I think there is a difference between mythicizing, and a deliberate ploy to undercut their opponents. The necessity of having Jesus where he is was to conform to 1), place him back far enough that the heretics could not claim him as their own, and 2) to comply with the prophecies of
Daniel and
Ezekiel. (The fact that the numbers are not at all precise should be cause for alarm, if the Gospels were relaying the history of someone who lived not too long before hand).
The main point was something else: non-mention of Christianity in certain extant authors' works can be of highly dubious argumentative value (if it has any at all).
No, it does have value. If Jesus was active in the time he is said to be, and Christians were gaining ground in religious and political spheres as
Acts of the Apostles would have us believe, then it is bloody well unlikely that no one would have missed it. And yet, they did. Even if you want to dismiss it as an argument from silence, you still have to address the silence; you still have to explain why no one bothered to jot it down, even a brief mention. And saying that it was because it so marginal is not a satisfactory answer, given that Jesus would have to have had enough notoriety as to be crucified by the ruling procurator, and his disciples hunted for following him.
Or the alternative: that everyone is looking in the wrong place--the wrong time.