Robert Tulip

Why is that? What more? You seem to be using 'historical' in a technical (or even personal?) sense that conflicts with ordinary usage.

The conflict between the Historical Jesus and the Imaginary Jesus is a trope going back to the Biblical claim that many denied that Jesus Christ appeared in the flesh. It is misleading to confine this debate within an academic theory of historiography.

spin

Otherwise you don't say anything more than "thought to have existed/happened in the past", which is of little value. The word is debased in common parlance, but you are at BC&H, where the H stands for history. It should suggest to you that the term will have a specific use here And so the term "historical" will convey a related adjectival notion, the result of the pursuit of history.

Many terms are abused in ordinary communication and we need to overcome the colloquial, the everyday misuse of terms otherwise we just don't communicate in a serious manner. It gets to a stage when people can say either "hot" or "cool" and mean the same thing. In a forum focused on history you should be using terms related to the subject in a formal, yes, technical, manner.

Well, umm, some notion related to what the study of history is about.

Ya don't say! The hairdressing salon is across the street.

As corrected I'd be more inclined to agree.

It depends whether you are interested in getting beyond making noise or not.

Robert Tulip

The point of this thread, the distinction between the Historical Jesus and the Mythical Jesus, is that there is a debate as to whether Jesus actually existed. In comparative mythology, it actually is of value to assess how much of a story “actually happened” and how much was invented. I am still not getting how your theory of history relates to “what actually happened”. Facts become seen as history through interpretation, and interpretations differ, but the point at issue here is whether the existence of Jesus Christ is a historical fact at all. It is an empirical threshold question prior to any analysis of why a historical Jesus may have been important.

The debate about the historical Zeus is settled in the negative, although there is still uncertainty about how the myth of Zeus evolved. The Indian Sky God Dyaus Pita is argued to be an etymological source for Zeus Patera, Jupiter and Deus Pater, but there must also be other historical sources for these myths. Similarly, Jesus Christ has an origin in the Jewish concept of the Anointed Saviour, and the debate is whether the Gospel depictions combine this ideal source with information about an actual person, or whether the purported historical details are actually fictional. It is not an abuse of ‘history’ to assert that the term refers to what actually happened, even while we admit we are uncertain about many facts. Within this encompassing definition of history we can still see that historiography is highly debatable, partial,inconclusive, subject to interpretation, etc. Nonetheless, there is a valid conceptual distinction between history itself (what happened) and historiography (how the past is understood). Serious historians strive to remove subjectivity from their writing and provide an objective account. The Gospels of course are not objective in the slightest, given John’s admission at 20:31 that his purpose is to inculcate belief in Jesus as Messiah, and his failure to claim that he wants to explain what actually happened. Luke is little better. Verse 1:2 says he wants to set down the things that have been fulfilled “just as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the word”, giving undue reliance on hearsay and manipulated accounts based on a theological rather than historical agenda. He then says his goal is “that you may know the certainty of the things you have been taught”, indicating a dogmatic rather than objective intent. With no corroborating extra-Biblical sources, to suggest this historical Jesus is real is highly dubious.Your amendment indicates bias. There is no good evidence for your assertion that the alleged historical Jesus is real. It appears that you wish to beg the question as to whether Jesus existed because you believe he did.

Clivedurdle

Robert, I agree with spin here? Why? Because this "real" Jesus incarnated is a matter of faith - the one you have still has the Holy Spirit as his dad, is incarnated.

A historical Jesus is an ordinary bloke, there are various possibilities, rabbi, revolutionary etc.

The child of a centurion idea may mean the concept of an hj is much earlier, but the modern one is definitely around the time of modern biblical criticism, which is only a couple of hundred years ago. Starter with Hume?

Clivedurdle

Maybe it is not an hj v mj distinction. Maybe we need to describe a continuum of jesi and or christs, with clear dates attached to them.

Starting with Cyrus and ending with "he's just a man" ?

spin

You're wasting my time, trying to score woodchuck points. If you don't know what's going on, find out.

Robert Tulip

Oh well, I find spin's comments incomprehensible. Here is how I read this discussion - grateful any clarification if I have misunderstood

It appears that spin believes in the historical Jesus, since he says the relevant distinction in the Bible is between the "real" Jesus and the imaginary one. He presented this idea of a "real" (non imaginary) Jesus in his critique of my argument that the imaginary Jesus is the only real one.

And now spin refuses to defend this obscure traditional belief in Jesus that he has apparently advanced. His withdrawal from the debate is apparently because clarification of his obscure ideas on the meaning of history and the "real Jesus" is beneath his dignity, for unstated reasons.

Cesc

You seem to be arguing that Paul doesn't have a HJ, and Paul is the origin of Christianity, and therefore the question of HJ's existence is irrelevant. Is that correct?

Robert Tulip

For anyone wondering why this debate is so difficult, Clive's comment here provides fertile material.

The term 'real' has changed considerably in meaning over the ages. For the medieval scholastics, "realism" was what we now call "idealism", the religious claim that ideas are real things. The conflicting modern theory was that ideas are just the names of entities, the Ockhamite philosophy known as nominalism. As science advanced, the tables were turned on the scholastics, and only material things were considered real. That is the modern view, asserting the mind-independent existence of a visible real world.

Now Clive seems to be saying not only that faith can reveal reality, but that the second person of the holy trinity is the child of the third person, in a novel trinitarian twist. Bringing faith into the picture makes Jesus dependent on mind, hardly a realist picture in the modern sense.

Clivedurdle

The second person is the child of the third person according to both Matthew and Luke!

This is the "real" Jesus - Mary as his mum and the Holy Spirit as his dad. Of course there is then another russian doll here, is Mary immaculately conceived to carry the holy child, and is she now as "mother of god" a member of the godhead quaternity?

Turtles and myth all the way down! (and up!)

Were there at least two inventions of an historical Jesus? One the son of a centurion, and the later eighteenth century one, thinking there was some residue left after cutting away all the miracles?