Gamera

It isn't surprising he doesn't mention it, since in his epistles he isn't preaching the gospel. He already did that in every case and he is writing communities who he already preached to (for the most part) or who alread had the gospel from somebody else.

What's telling is that in mentioning in the epistles the gospel he did preach, he refers to biographical elements that accord with the synoptics. That suggest he preached a biographical gospel. Tradition supports that. The content of the synoptics (which came after him) support. That suggests it's what happened.

spamandham

Your point is invented from thin air.

In the authentic writings of Paul that we have, Paul makes no biographical claims regarding Jesus - where Jesus was born, when he was born, his lineage, his background, when he died, where he died, his key sermons, miracles, ...nothing. It's absurd to claim this is an oversight on Paul's part, intentional or not, if Paul shared a vision of Jesus substantially similar to the synoptics. Paul's writings are copious, and some of these details would have come up in passing. Dreams/visions don't result in that level of detail.

Even if you argue that Paul omitted biographical data in his letters because the recipients would already be familiar with them, that does not explain why Paul never once appeals to the authority of Jesus to make a point. He never quotes from Jesus, he never recalls any parables or stories to make a point - nothing. Instead, Paul appeals to the OT for authority. This makes no sense whatsoever if Paul was familiar with a biographical narrative akin to the synoptics.

You are simply assuming that Paul taught details similar to the synoptics. But the synoptics are glued together with the authors' imaginations, based on prior traditions (including Paul's vague ideas), not the other way around. They necessarily contain more detail than whatever Paul taught, since they had to syncretize Paul's ideas with other traditions.

I doubt any reputable modern historian shares your perspective that Paul taught a gospel narrative substantially similar in detail to the synoptics.

cajela

As a complete ignoramus on the subject with no preconceptions, I have to say this thread makes the MJ side look very much more plausible than I had previously thought.

I always kind of assumed some sort of wandering preacher was at the bottom of it all. There were so many on the Life of Brian. Monty Python would not mislead me

Chris Weimer

That's because you, as you admit, are uninformed. It ignores the trajectory, it ignore the hundreds of other Christian gospels that weren't included in canon, it ignores the various groups that all had one thing in common - Jesus Christ who was crucified (or was appeared to be crucified) a nobody who has as much evidence for him as the Egyptian, Judas the Galilean, or any number of other minor figures who hardly made a dent on the Roman world during his lifetime.

dog-on

The trajectory seems, based on the evidence, to have started with a divine sacrifice somewhere and sometime in the mythical past. The knowledge of this event was extracted from then-existing works. This is evidenced by the facts that (a)the vast majority of the Jesus life story is simple midrash and (b) the writings of Paul, (presumed to be the earliest works), have no real biographical details as the writer seems to have no knowledge of anything other than a spiritual Christ.

The hundreds of Christian gospels (relevant to fleshy Christ) all look like simple yarns which build on the idea of an earthly incarnation and spin some quite amazing stories about the boy king. Even the early church, (in their zeal to apply a corpse to the story), couldn't stomach much of the garbage included in the tales.

Looking at the evidence, it appears to scream for the conclusion of a myth based religion. Referring to other lesser attested to individuals in history does nothing to diminish the strong evidence pointing away from a historical person known as Jesus Christ.

rlogan

Not much has changed in the four years I've been here.

The most cunning approach from a fraudulent hypothesis-testing stance is to assume there was an HJ and construct the one that is most difficult to reject when "tested" against nothing. So you describe one without the miracles and suggest he was really an itinerant preacher, develop intricate apologetics for why it isn't until Eusebius that they can even get any kind of story straight. You also fail to impeach the Christians in general as fabricators despite the whole thing being based on a stupid re-animator myth and numerous egregious forgeries.

In that context the endogenously determined "Historical Jesus" then looks pretty good against the hypothesis that the words written about him appeared magically on paper during a lightning storm.

But that isn't a Jesus that is anywhere recorded, testified to, or capable of having positive evidence produced. It is largely a reversal in the logic of statistical testing: choosing the hypothesis by successively removing the things that can be rejected rather than building one up from what evidence actually exists.

If we did it that way then we have almost nothing more than the proposition that "long long ago an itinerant preacher existed". But not one that can be identified through evidence as the linear progenitor of what we have today: Jesus -> disciples -> church fathers -> christianity

It is another story to test some particular version of the "HJ" hypothesis against a complete competing hypothesis such as Doherty's or Vork's pretty well thought-out version or whatever.

Now we're talking argument from best explanation. When you account for the fact that almost everything about Jesus was mined from the HB, then there is little to do with these HJ folks but pat them on the head and say "there there little fella...don't cry"

GakuseiDon

Really? Can you point to threads where someone has expressed that there is just such an abundance of evidence for the HJ that the MJ position is absurb?

I'm utterly bemused by this. Are you not confusing the HJ with the Gospel Jesus? There is a quite a bit lot evidence for a HJ, from passages in Paul and elsewhere. That you regard those passages as interpolations is suggestive that you recognise this (otherwise why care if they are interpolations or not?), but IMHO your denial of them is along the same vein as Mountainman's denial of evidence for a Christianity earlier than Constantine.

If Paul **really did write** that Jesus was born of a woman, and a descendent of David and a seed of Abraham (just like Paul was), would you say then that Paul probably believed in a historical Jesus?

gurugeorge

Dionysus, apparently, was born of Semele.

And Hercules:

Through his mother Alcmene and his father Amphitryon, [...] was descended from Persus, since his two grandfathers, Alcaeus and Electryon, were both sons of Persus and Andromeda. So he is of pure Argive blood, and it was by accident that he was born at Thebes.

Why should Paul's reference be any more properly historical than those mythical references? Why would you expect it to be - unless you look at Paul through the lens of orthodox Christianity as it developed later? And why on Earth should one do that?

cajela

I'm confused as to why we should take the bible as evidence for the existence of a real person. I don't take the saga of Beowulf as evidence for Beowulf or Hrothgar, nor is the Odyssey evidence for Odysseus, let alone Poseidon.

I really have no axe to grind. Whether Christianity started as an ancient mystery religion with a slightly later retconned founder, or an ancient mystery religion started up by some random Jewish preacher makes no difference to me. That is the argument, right? (Except for the ones saying the actual/retconned dude was truly divine.)

spamandham

An interesting question!

But if we also accept that Paul really did write that he received his revelations directly from the christ through a vision (do any qualified historians doubt that claim is genuinely Pauline?), then it hardly matters.

Paul either has legitimately had an epileptic vision, or is lying about all this for personal gain. I don't see a middle ground, and in neither case would his writings provide anything definitive (or perhaps even substantial?) toward establishing the fact of a historical Jesus.

Worse yet, Paul might be making these as mystical symbolic references, where Jesus is a character that represents someone/something else. The Jewish race perhaps? Maybe Osiris? Can we possibly know? It seems that agnosticism about a historical Jesus is the only defensible position at present.