GakuseiDon

How many people in history has this been done for? I'm not aware of any numbers for the following statements:

"There probably was a John the Baptist".
"There probably was a Gamaliel I".
"There probably was a Honi the Circle Drawer".
"There probably was an "Egyptian" who lead 30,000 people to attack Jerusalem".

There is about the same amount of evidence for these people as there is for a HJ. Can we be certain that the above people existed, in your opinion?

GakuseiDon

Nothing, from a perspective of the probability of a HJ AFAICS.

mountainman

According to the history of Eusebius (and all christians following for the next one thousand years) we are dealing with apostolic authorship in the first century. Apostolic authorship is now regarded as suspect. Where does that leave everyone who follows Eusebius?

EUSEBIUS, BOOK 3, Chapter XXIV. The Order of the Gospels.

Those great and truly divine men, I mean the apostles of Christ, were purified in their life, and were adorned with every virtue of the soul, but were uncultivated in speech. ..

6 For Matthew, who had at first preached to the Hebrews, when he was about to go to other peoples, committed his Gospel to writing in his native tongue, and thus compensated those whom he was obliged to leave for the loss of his presence.

And when Mark and Luke had already published their Gospels, they say that John, who had employed all his time in proclaiming the Gospel orally, finally proceeded to write for the following reason.

The three Gospels already mentioned having come into the hands of all and into his own too, they say that he accepted them and bore witness to their truthfulness; but that there was lacking in them an account of the deeds done by Christ at the beginning of his ministry.

gurugeorge

Because there's precious little in either of them that could be construed as an eyewitness account, or report of, of a Jewish guy called "Jesus".

(The kind of thing I mean is like, if in "Paul" you had "Paul" reporting, "James told me that Jesus had said X to him" - that would be the sort of thing that could "let slip" that there was a human being behind the story. Here we would have a human being reporting an eyewitness account by another human being of another human being. The chain would be tolerably strong, and you'd have to assign more weight to the HJ idea.)

Absent that, all you've got is a superhero comic (Mark) and reports of visionary experience (Paul).

Clivedurdle

Would a rewrite of Mark in the style of a superman comic be enlightening?

A Japanese comic?

JoeWallack

JW:
This is truly amazing considering how long you have been on these unholy boards. How many times does it need to be pointed out to you that witness testimony is just like real estate. There are 3 important qualities:

1) Sources

2) Sources

3) Sources

What were the sources of Paul? You are pricking against the go ads of historical methodology so I'll give you some hints. What does Paul explicitly tell us were his sources? What does Paul explicitly tell us were not his sources?

Comparisons with sources for other questionable figures is good. How does Paul compare to them?

What were the sources of "Mark". What was "Mark's" attitude towards historical witness?

This is historical methodology. Welcome it and give up your theological approach.



Joseph

http://www.errancywiki.com/index.php?title=Main_Page

Solo

What I find "truly amazing", Joe, is that you would choose to believe that Mark badmouths "the historical witness to Jesus" (and I am with you on that, as you know) but then you want to believe also there was nobody to be a historical witness to.

You can't have it both ways: if Mark was purely allegorical phantasy, and nothing in it referenced a historical figure, then the disciples were not "a historical witness". They would have had their own invented Jesus competing with Paul's and you would have to explain why Mark's Jesus constantly "fools" them and why they do not minister to Jesus in the hour of his trial and why they do not receive the good news as a consequence of their denial (which they receive only in the LE). What were they denying if the cross was Paul's late metaphor as you believe ? What was that a metaphor to ? Any ideas ?

Best,
Jiri

gdeering

Dear GakuseiDon,

I usually stay out of more advanced arguments, but I can not resist adding basic questions about your premise.

From my vantage Paul is totally "about" projecting outward with his gospel, there is little knowledge or interest in an historical Jesus. There is no historical Jesus necessary, outside of the assumption that Paul had to learn about the cult and the assumed timeline would not have been advanced enough to allow for a word-of-mouth mythology to evolve. I think it's unwise to accept this timeline (the of date Jesus' public ministry or the dating of Paul) uncritically.

I see Paul's message as wholly in the realm of the supernatural, and like turtles, it's supernatural all the way down.

For me, Mark works just as well as a collection of folk tales. The writer of Mark was removed from Palestine in distance and language, two important qualifications for recording first hand sources.



Gregg

DCHindley

If you think about, even a single historical event, say the death of Michael Jackson, can be written as a comedy, a tragedy, a romance or a satire. Just because these same plot devices are used in fiction does not detract from the historical reality of Jackson's death, nor does employment of plot prove his death was a mere fiction. Plot is present in all historical narratives, whether fiction or a historical explanation. The same thing can be said of style (if American comic book or Japanese hentai representations of things qualify as style, as even they employ plots in an abbreviated and visual form that relies heavily on contrasts and distortions).

DCH

aa5874

For the purpose of a discussion, the assertion that it is possible or probable Jesus of the NT existed is just as valid as the claim that it is possible or probable that Jesus of the NT did NOT exist.

But, other than the assertion of the possibility or probability of his existence there is not really any support for the claim.

Based on the extant sources of antiquity, the probability or possibility Jesus of the NT did not exist is far stronger.

1. The supposed contemporaries of Jesus did NOT claim that they personally observed, talked to or accompanied Jesus.

2. The supposed contemporaries of Jesus claimed they SAW him in a resurrected state.

3. Non-apologetic sources that mentioned those who supposedly met Jesus, contemporaries like Pilate and Herod, did not mention a character named Jesus the Messiah, King of the Jews, who was crucified for blasphemy and then deified and worshiped by Jews as a God.

4. Non-apologetic sources that mentioned christians in the 1st century did not associate the name Jesus with those Christians.

5. Even an apologetic source wrote that people called Christians in the 1st century did NOT have to be associated with the name Jesus. There were christians in the 1st century associated with a magician.

The probability or possibility that Jesus of the NT did NOT exist is FAR STRONGER than the probability or possibility of his existence in the 1st century.