gmx wrote: ↑Sat Feb 10, 2018 8:17 pm
Unknown persons, reasons and audiences does suggest a lot of silence / absence of evidence, does it not? Yet somehow, by the fourth century, Christianity is the state religion of the Roman Empire, but we can't get much of a read on it before that point in time. I think silence is a fair description. You obviously disagree.
We are addressing two different types of silences, I think.
gmx wrote: ↑Sat Feb 10, 2018 8:17 pmAnd yes, I can definitely agree that the gospel writers found inspiration for their narrative in the OT, but that doesn't contradict historicity (in my view). It is compatible with the traditional view of a historical Jesus, whose followers believed him to be the messiah, and subsequent generations sought to evidence that claim via fullfilment of the scriptures.
I see the OT as clear evidence for the source of episodes in Jesus' life. It's not really "silence" as to the origin of the story. Example, Matthew's nativity story comes from the story of Moses. That's clear.
But you are quite correct that that OT source of stories about Jesus does not prove he was nonhistorical and entirely made up. Correct.
The point, though, is that if all we have are stories that we can either trace to OT or other literary precedents or stories that can find no corroboration at all in independent contemporary sources then we have no reason to embrace the historicity of Jesus.
That does not mean Jesus had no historical existence, however. He might have. It's just that the only evidence we have cannot be corroborated in any way or it can be sourced to something other than historical events.
So the default position is that we have a literary and theological figure of Jesus. We simply cannot know on the basis of the above that Jesus was also historical. There is no unambiguous evidence to support this claim.
I can live with not knowing. I don't think the question matters too much because if Jesus' historical life and sayings really did have the historical impact of the power to change lives and history then I suspect we would find unambiguous evidence to that effect. Instead, we only find "faith-documents" without historical corroboration and stories derived from other fictions.
Maybe the historians are just unlucky in that the most interesting evidence has simply not survived. That's possible, too.
gmx wrote: ↑Sat Feb 10, 2018 8:17 pm
Neil, I am interested in your view of one of the other points / questions in the OP.
If the epistles are unaware of Jesus' life of earth, because it hasn't been invented yet, then who wrote the deutero-Pauline epistles and why? What was the purpose of pretending to be Paul in the pre-historical-Jesus/pre-Gospel era? Or are we saying that there was genuine Paul, then Gospels, then deutero-Paul, and deutero-Paul was so expertly forged as to resist the temptation to include "evidence" from the gospels?
I think from your other reply, I can infer that your answer is "we don't know and we have no way of knowing", but anyway...
We don't know and we have no way of knowing.
I generally assume that there was an early first century Paul for the sake of argument. To what extent the canonical letters bearing his name, even the so-called 7 authentic ones, very likely do not look like what he originally wrote, however. We have good reason to believe they have been added to in the theological disputes of the second century. I don't know if we have any reason to think that any of the "deutero-Paul" letters were composed earlier than the very late first century (more likely second century?). But I have not checked my notes and may be forgetting something crucial.
Dennis MacDonald has an older book discussing the various struggles that appear to have been fought over claims to have Paul's authority for this or that teaching. Paul's original letters were added to in order to use the authority of Paul to justify new teachings; Acts of the Apostles was written in part to demonstrate that Paul was really on the side of "orthodoxy"; Ditto new epistles written in his name (possibly the author of Acts in some cases) to support a certain church authority by using Paul's name; then Acts of Paul and Thecla....
It looks as though "orthodoxy" was attempting to co-opt Paul (who had long been the "apostle of the heretics") in order to win some sort of ideological warfare against those "heretics".
As for the "forged" letters of Paul not including gospel material, the most likely reason is that the gospels were not known by the forgers or not widely enough regarded to be "authentic" and of any use. The Gospel of Mark, if written around 70, appears not to have been part of the "orthodox" establishment until well into the second century (it had a reputation for being associated with Basilides) -- and Mark itself as we know it (its canonical form) was almost certainly not what was originally written by "Mark". There appear to have been additions, redactions, etc. to a gospel that at one point was quite Pauline.
If so, and given the allegorical character of the gospel, if the Gospel of Mark were known to any forger of Paul it is likely that they recognized it as a parable and not to be read as literal history anyway.