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Re: Does anyone have On the Historicity of Jesus yet?
Posted: Thu Jun 26, 2014 3:50 am
by toejam
Tenorikuma wrote:Now you're being uncharitable, Toejam. I'm not alleging any conspiracy. I am, on the other hand, trying to come up with hypotheses that are based on sources — especially those written long before the Gospels. They describe a heavenly Christ who was crucified in secret (Paul, Ignatius), who acts as our high priest in heaven (Hebrews), whose nature can be learned from the Jewish scriptures (Paul, Epistle of Barnabas), and who will one day return to be the Messiah. I'm also willing to admit I don't know how Christianity actually started; there are too many possibilities and not enough evidence for certainty.
I don't buy the crucified-heavenly-being hypothesis. It's pretty clear to me that Paul thought Jesus had been here on Earth (even if he did think he was something more than a normal man). The more I've read Hebrews, the more I've lost confidence in Carrier's reading of it. I totally agree with your last sentence.
Re: Does anyone have On the Historicity of Jesus yet?
Posted: Thu Jun 26, 2014 4:11 am
by MrMacSon
toejam wrote: ... It's pretty clear to me that Paul thought Jesus had been here on Earth (even if he did think he was something more than a normal man).
The Pauline writings we have today are likely to be redacted documents to make them align with the Gospels.
We don't know who 'Paul' was, or who wrote the Pauline texts.
Re: Does anyone have On the Historicity of Jesus yet?
Posted: Thu Jun 26, 2014 4:15 am
by toejam
^If that's the case, I don't think they did a very good job at alignment!!
Re: Does anyone have On the Historicity of Jesus yet?
Posted: Thu Jun 26, 2014 4:38 am
by Blood
toejam wrote:Answering your questions above: Although I'm not a huge fan of Reza Aslan's latest book, I agree with him that the two most probable things about the historical Jesus are his crucifixion and his Jewish identity. Second to that, I would simply say that I see the broad outline of the gospels as being historical (in the same way that the broad outline of the scientology.com biography of Hubbard is historical - i.e. the basic story is there but it's filled with exaggeration, developing legend, propaganda etc.). So for Jesus, that means that I take his baptism by John, his cult-figure status (teacher/exorcist/miracle-worker etc.), his anti-establishment views, and his eventual arrest as more or less historical. In the next tier, things get blurrier. The best reconstructions I've read are those pointing towards Jesus being some kind of apocalyptic prophet, but it is at that point where I find hypotheses start to fall below the level I'd call "probable".
There's a fundamental misunderstanding people (including Carrier) have, which is that Biblical writers are historians.
"Real" people and places present in a Biblical document does not make it historical. Stories about the past are not history. Theology is not history. Prophecy is not history,
The gospel writers are not historians. They are not collating oral history or reporting eyewitness testimony. They are very carefully writing myth. Not as mythic as, say, Genesis 1-11, but myth nonetheless.
Re: Does anyone have On the Historicity of Jesus yet?
Posted: Thu Jun 26, 2014 5:49 am
by ghost
MrMacSon wrote:We don't know who 'Paul' was, or who wrote the Pauline texts.
It was Flavius Josephus. The gospels are dated to 70 AD to 100 AD; that's when Flavius Josephus was in Rome. Acts 9-28 is based on the Flavius Josephus autobiography.
Re: Does anyone have On the Historicity of Jesus yet?
Posted: Thu Jun 26, 2014 6:14 am
by Stephan Huller
Ha ha ha.
Re: Does anyone have On the Historicity of Jesus yet?
Posted: Thu Jun 26, 2014 9:20 am
by Hawthorne
toejam wrote:Tenorikuma wrote:Now you're being uncharitable, Toejam. I'm not alleging any conspiracy. I am, on the other hand, trying to come up with hypotheses that are based on sources — especially those written long before the Gospels. They describe a heavenly Christ who was crucified in secret (Paul, Ignatius), who acts as our high priest in heaven (Hebrews), whose nature can be learned from the Jewish scriptures (Paul, Epistle of Barnabas), and who will one day return to be the Messiah. I'm also willing to admit I don't know how Christianity actually started; there are too many possibilities and not enough evidence for certainty.
I don't buy the crucified-heavenly-being hypothesis. It's pretty clear to me that Paul thought Jesus had been here on Earth (even if he did think he was something more than a normal man). The more I've read Hebrews, the more I've lost confidence in Carrier's reading of it. I totally agree with your last sentence.
Why throw out the charge of conspiracy? It immediately marks you as not understanding the mythicist position which does not rely on a conspiracist theory.
That Paul thought Jesus had been "here" on Earth could be pretty clear (it is to you, but then why not everyone, can we agree that none of us are delusional?) and still not rule out a mythicist position.
Can you establish from Paul's writing at time frame for when he believed Jesus' descent to Earth took place? Can you establish from Paul's writing who he thinks killed Jesus? If you don't buy the crucified-heavenly-being hypothesis, how do you explain Paul's explicit description of exactly that in 1 Cor 2:8?
Re: Does anyone have On the Historicity of Jesus yet?
Posted: Thu Jun 26, 2014 9:28 am
by ghost
Divus Iulius is heavenly. So it should be no surprise if Jesus was also heavenly at some point.
Re: Does anyone have On the Historicity of Jesus yet?
Posted: Thu Jun 26, 2014 10:38 am
by outhouse
maryhelena wrote:
Any debate over the historicity or ahistoricity of the gospel Jesus figure that holds that "as evidence, the gospels simply make no difference to the equation" is shooting itself in the foot.
Agreed.
It is evidence. Only the quality of said evidence can be debated.
The failure to provide a hypothesis that explains this evidence, is where all mythicist have severely failed.
To date, nothing explains it as well as a martyred man at Passover that generated mythology in the Diaspora.
Re: Does anyone have On the Historicity of Jesus yet?
Posted: Thu Jun 26, 2014 10:43 am
by outhouse
Blood wrote:
The gospel writers are not historians. They are not collating oral history or reporting eyewitness testimony. They are very carefully writing myth. Not as mythic as, say, Genesis 1-11, but myth nonetheless.
False.
There were writing "their version" of history. Which happened to be steeped in rhetoric and mythology. Metaphor and allegory, song and poem. They are epic compilations, and give us a glimpse of what beliefs people wanted to preserve in different communities.