Why I don't see myself as a Christ Mythicist

[neilgodfrey]

The fact is the corroboration from Tacitus and Josephus are from non-Christians, who certainly had no interest to attest to someone who did not exist.
Tacitus and Josephus described events and mentioned persons happening/living before their time and most of them are not contested, even if sometimes uncorroborated. Why should it different in that case?
But Tacitus & Josephus corroborated in a different ways with each other about the existence of Jesus/Christ. And I do not see why there are problems with the authenticity of this secondary evidence. Mythicists do see problems, but that's because their half-baked theories would crash if they accept that evidence.

Oh Bernard, behave yourself. The method I am talking about has absolutely nothing to do with mythicism. You really do have mythicism on the brain. Does it ever let you get a good night's sleep?

Yet a Livy or a Plutarch cheerfully repeated pages upon pages of earlier accounts over which they neither had nor sought any control. . . . Only Thucydides fully and systematically acknowledged the existence of a dilemma, which he resolved in the unsatisfactory way of refusing to deal with pre-contemporary history at all.5 . . . .

Where did they [ancient historians like Tacitus and Josephus] find their information? No matter how many older statements we can either document or posit - irrespective of possible reliability - we eventually reach a void. But ancient writers, like historians ever since, could not tolerate a void, and they filled it in one way or another, ultimately by pure invention. The ability of the ancients to invent and their capacity to believe are persistently underestimated.6 . . . .

I suspect that Ogilvie's slip reflects, no doubt unconsciously, the widespread sentiment that anything written in Greek or Latin is somehow privileged, exempt from the normal canons of evaluation. . . .

Unless something is captured in a more or less contemporary historical account, the narrative is lost for all time regardless of how many inscriptions or papyri may be discovered. . . . .

So when men came to write the history of their world, Greek or Roman, they found great voids in the inherited information about the past, or, worse still, quantities of 'data' that included fiction and half fiction jumbled with fact. That is what modern historians, unwilling for whatever reason to admit defeat, to acknowledge a void, seek to rescue under the positive label, tradition (or oral tradition).24 Few anthropologists view the invariably oral traditions of the people they study with the faith shown by many ancient historians. The verbal transmittal over many generations of detailed information about past events or institutions that are no longer essential or even meaningful in contemporary life
invariably entails considerable and irrecoverable losses of data, or conflation of data, manipulation and invention, sometimes without visible reason, often for reasons that are perfectly intelligible. With the passage of time, it becomes absolutely impossible to control anything that has been transmitted when there is nothing in writing against which to match statements about the past. Again we suspect the presence of the unexpressed view that the traditions of Greeks and Romans are somehow privileged . . . .

There is no guarantee that the tradition has not arisen precisely in order to explain a linguistic, religious or political datum; that, in other words, the tradition is not an etiological invention . . . .

Some of the supposed data are patently fictitious, the political unification of Attica by Theseus or the foundation of Rome by Aeneas, for example, but we quickly run out of such easily identified fictions. For the great bulk of the narrative we are faced with the 'kernel of truth' possibility, and I am unaware of any stigmata that automatically distinguish fiction from fact. . . . .

For reasons that are rooted in our intellectual history, ancient historians are often seduced into two unexpressed propositions. The first is that statements in the literary or documentary sources are to be accepted unless they can be disproved (to the satisfaction of the individual historian).

That's all from Finley, M. I. (1999). Ancient History: Evidence and Models. Chapter 2

I think we can be fairly confident of uncorroborated sources, but only after they pass the test of critical analysis. If not, we would have to throw away a lot of accounts of the ancient historians.

Quite so. So for fear of ending up with a void you propose that we should accept accounts that cannot be corroborated? That sounds like the sort of person who would believe there was probably a historical Heracles!

Simply rewriting myth and creative and uncorroborated narrative is not serious history.

We cannot allow the fear of consequences be the deciding factor in whether a method is valid or not.

[Bernard Muller]

to MrMacSon,

Were there 1st century CE Christians?

Yes. If you don't want to accept the normal critical dating of many Christian texts (the ones normally dated 1st century), then there are the testimonies of Tacitus (during Nero), Suetonius (during Nero) and Pliny the Younger:
"Others named by the informer declared that they were Christians, but then denied it, asserting that they had been but had ceased to be, some three years before, others many years, some as much as twenty-five years" (written 111-113 CE)

There is no evidence that Tacitus & Josephus corroborated.

Maybe I expressed myself not clearly. But the evidence is here about Tacitus corroborating Josephus on the existence of Jesus called Christ.

We have good evidence that Antiquities 18.3.3 was wholly doctored or interpolated.

Agreed

Antiquities 20.9.1 / 200 is tenuous, if not also doctored or interpolated (as is likely)

it's not tenuous and there is no evidence it has been doctored or interpolated. Theories about interpolation are very problematic.

Perhaps Annals 15.44 was also doctored? Perhaps by the same people who doctored Antiquities?

Possibility? then possibility on a possibility? I am certainly not going to roll over with this kind of argument.

Bernard Muller wrote: ↑
Sat Dec 09, 2017 11:06 am
The fact is the corroboration from Tacitus and Josephus ... who certainly had no interest to attest to someone who did not exist.

But others did and do have an interest in their 'attestation', don't they?

You must be referring to Christians writers by "others". That's would be irrelevant because I was mentioning two non-Christians.
Furthermore, Jesus having blood brothers (generated by Mary & Joseph) became an embarrassment for the orthodox Christians (and Marcion & likely other Gnostics, more so the Docetists) as soon as the 2nd century. Some postulated the so-called brothers were generated by Joseph, but not by Mary, but a previous wife of Joseph.
I think that was to preserve the (alleged) perpetual virginity of Mary because if Mary & Joseph conceived by the normal way the brothers of Jesus, that perpetual virginity would be void.
Furthermore, if Mary conceived the brothers with Joseph, the Christians would think Jesus was conceived the same way.
Also, if Paul and "Mark" were writing only fiction about the earthly Jesus, it would have been highly preferable for Jesus not to have any siblings (to render him rather unique) and for the three last canonical gospels, not having Joseph associated closely with Mary.

Christianity was 'triggered' by narratives about a series of events: by belief in those narratives

Narratives are just an interface between writer and readers. Narratives can depict true facts or fiction, or a mix of both.
Many events and persons of interest in antiquity are often known to us by narratives only.
And, at first, Christianity was not propagated by narratives, but by preaching, as shown through Paul's epistles: his preaching came first, then after his epistles.

Those two statements are extremely contradictory.

No, somebody little can trigger some big events.
Examples:
a) Rosa Parks for the Civil Rights Movement
b) Gavrilo Princip for WWI

Those two statements are extremely contradictory.

I maintain that Jesus' persona was not what trigger Christianity, but events before his (very short) public life (rather local), during that public life (some he had to endure personally) and after his death (but not his alleged resurrection): http://historical-jesus.info/digest.html

Cordially, Bernard

[robert j]

Thanks for pointing to the use of ἔκτρωμα in the LXX, that is new to me and I think quite relevant.

I had a poke around and found Philo cites Numbers 12:12 :

“Travailing” is a name strictly appropriate to folly, because the foolish mind, being enamoured of things out of its reach, is evermore in travail pangs. This is so when it is enamoured of money, when of glory, when of pleasure, when of anything else. But, though in travail, it never brings to the birth, for the soul of the worthless man has not by nature the power to bring forth any offspring. What it seems to produce turn out to be wretched abortions and miscarriages, devouring half of its flesh, an evil tantamount to the death of the soul. Accordingly Aaron, the sacred word, begs of Moses, the beloved of God, to heal the change in Miriam, that her soul may not be in travail with evils; and so he says “Let her not become as one dead, as an abortion coming forth from the womb of a mother; consuming half of her flesh” (Num. xii. 12).

Greek on request. Luckily most Greek variations of ἔκτρωμα are rendered as 'abortion'.

Not sure if you were unsure about the Greek term Philo used here, but it is ἔκτρωμα, ektroma.

[Jax]

Also, if Paul and "Mark" were writing only fiction about the earthly Jesus, it would have been highly preferable for Jesus not to have any siblings

As far as 'Mark' goes, isn't his Jesus just a guy that has the holy spirit descend on him? Why else does his family think that he has gone insane? Or that the townspeople where he grew up wondering where he gets his new knowledge and wisdom?

'Mark' needs a family for his Jesus to contrast the "before" Jesus with the post spirit Jesus.

[Bernard Muller]

And last of all, as the ektroma he appeared also to me … because I persecuted the assembly of God. (1 Cor 15:8-9)

It is very likely these verses were not written by Paul but were part of an interpolation:

http://historical-jesus.info/9.html

Cordially, Bernard

[MrMacSon]

to MrMacSon,

Were there 1st century CE Christians?

Yes. If you don't want to accept the normal critical dating of many Christian texts (the ones normally dated 1st century), then there are the testimonies of Tacitus (during Nero), Suetonius (during Nero) and Pliny the Younger:

"Others named by the informer declared that they were Christians, but then denied it, asserting that they had been but had ceased to be, some three years before, others many years, some as much as twenty-five years"¹ (written 111-113 CE)

The passages that refer to 'Christians' in the texts of Tacitus (Annals 15.44) , Suetonius (Nero 16, Claudius 25), and Pliny-the-Younger are hardly 'testimonies' ie. they are not first person accounts.

¹ That citation of yours (in red), in Letters X.96-97, attributed to Pliny the Younger, refers to a group he is said to have been dealing with when he was the imperial governor (legatus Augusti) of Bithynia et Pontus province. A recent study of it has doubted it's authenticity --

• Tuccinardi, E (2017) 'An application of a profile-based method for authorship verification: Investigating the authenticity of Pliny the Younger's letter to Trajan concerning the Christians' Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, (Vol 32, Issue 2, June 2017), pp. 435–447.
  
  
  Abstract
  Pliny the Younger's letter to Trajan regarding the Christians is a crucial subject for the studies on early Christianity. A serious quarrel among scholars concerning its genuineness arose between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th; per contra, Plinian authorship has not been seriously questioned in the last few decades. After analysing various kinds of internal and external evidence in favour of and against the authenticity of the letter, a modern stylometric method is applied in order to examine whether internal linguistic evidence allows one to definitely settle the debate.The findings of this analysis tend to contradict received opinion among modern scholars, affirming the authenticity of Pliny’s letter, and suggest instead the presence of large amounts of interpolation inside the text of the letter, since its stylistic behaviour appears highly different from that of the rest of Book X.
  
  

Moreover, are any of these 'testimonies', particularly Suetonius's, references to ' 'Jesus-of-Nazareth'-believing Christians'?

... the evidence is here about Tacitus corroborating Josephus on the existence of Jesus called Christ.

Perhaps Annals 15.44 was also doctored? Perhaps by the same people who doctored Antiquities?

Possibility? then possibility on a possibility? I am certainly not going to roll over with this kind of argument.

It wasn't an argument (it was a proposition). But I'll give you a synopsis of one.

Annals was hardly referred to, if at all, for centuries. Single manuscripts turned up separately in 2-3 locations in the 12th-14th centuries, I think (in scriptoria in monasteries). The book that likely referred to most of the time of Jesus ministry - book V - is missing. Annals book 15 was part of one manuscript; the text suggested it was written in the 8th C. There have been propositions and arguments that all of Annals is a late forgery.

The specific text in question - 15.44 - is similar to a passage in the late 4th/early 5th C. 'Chronicle' of Sulpicius Severus. Arthur Drews thought that, rather than Sulpicius Severus's 'Chronicle' being based on Annals 15.44, the reverse happened ie. Annals 15.44 was doctored to align with Sulpicius Severus's 'Chronicle'.

Annals 15.44, as we know it today, is first about Nero, then about Tiberius and Pilate, then about Nero again. Jay Raskins has an interesting proposition that Tiberius and Pilate replace Nero and his underling Porcius Festus, and aligns that argument with things Josephus said in Antiquities 20:8.10 - https://jayraskin.wordpress.com/2011/04/04/294/

[MrMacSon]

Christianity was 'triggered' by narratives about a series of events: by belief in those narratives
.

... Christianity was not propagated by narratives, but by preaching, as shown through Paul's epistles: his preaching came first, then after his epistles.

Much of Paul's epistles are written narratives about preaching. Preaching is a form of narrative: a method of narrating ie. verbally/orally.

I maintain that Jesus' persona was not what trigger Christianity, but events¹ before his (very short) public life (rather local), during that public life (some he had to endure personally), and after his death (but not his alleged resurrection): http://historical-jesus.info/digest.html

Bernard, the events¹ were narrated to people. To deny the alleged resurrection as a significant narration is disingenuous.

[robert j]

And last of all, as the ektroma he appeared also to me … because I persecuted the assembly of God. (1 Cor 15:8-9)

It is very likely these verses were not written by Paul but were part of an interpolation:

http://historical-jesus.info/9.html

Cordially, Bernard

I've presented what I think is a reasonable interpretation of this verse within the wider context of Galatians and 1 Corinthians chapter 15. Certainly other solutions have been offered, including interpolation --- and some reasonable arguments have been offered.

But I don't think those arguments that you have been trotting out for years make your opinion "very likely".

[Blood]

The people who deny the historicity of Daniel are not called "Daniel mythicists."

The people who deny the historicity of Judith are not called "Judith mythicists."

The people who deny the historicity of Tobit are not called "Tobit mythicists."

It's strictly the childish, emotional need of seminarian pseudo-scholars to make this such a big deal for Jesus. By doing so, they ironically prove the necessity of myths in people's imaginations, even today, thereby strengthening the case for mythicism. If people need to cling to their emotional warm blankets so tightly in the era of antibiotics and DNA sequencing, how much more strongly were they willing 2,000 years ago?

[hakeem]

Knowing about him is not very important, because Jesus was not important in his lifetime.

You have contradicted yourself. You argue that the Jesus called Christ in Antiquities of the Jews 20 is the same Jesus in the NT but now you argue he was not important in his lifetime.

Jesus if he did exist and was called Christ must mean he was an important Jew in the 1st century.

Jesus was not a high Priest, a King nor Jewish Messiah so would not be called Christ.

The Jews could not have called a crucified criminal the Christ.

You have fallen prey to your own fatally flawed argument.

If your historical Jesus was not important in his lifetime then the Jesus called Christ in Antiquities of the Jews 20 must be some other person.