Julian

It is certainly an inference. It is on fairly solid grounding, though.

Paul never speaks of an earthly Jesus in terms of anything he did or said (1 Cor. 11:23 being an exception and IMO a forgery). He shows no interest in the places Jesus preached, lived, died and was buried. He shows no interest in talking to people who knew him. And so on and so on.

One would think that a christian who was early enough to get some first hand knowledge would have been very interested in doing so, yet Paul never does.

The main proponent of a mythical Jesus is Earl Doherty who posts here and has written a book about it called The Jesus Puzzle.

Whether one believes in a mythical Jesus or a real one, there is no denying that Paul's silence on all these issues is highly puzzling.

Julian

Julian

It is very true that there are about a zillion different theories out there. They are important should be evaluated. The reason why I didn't mention any of those issues is simply that this is supposed to be an overview thread with short-ish answers that a majority of scholars would agree with.

You are correct, of course, in all the things you state, however, I do consider them too advanced to discuss here. I also don't want to turn this into a discussion thread but rather keep it a question and answer session. That is the reason why I ignored some provocative posts in this thread.

One thing I encounter a lot on chats and elsewhere is that people find BC&H daunting. Many lurk but don't want to engage, which I can understand. I was hoping that this thread could be a place where people could ask questions that they would otherwise not 'dare' to post in a technical discussion thread. Many are not experts in this field and do not necessarily want to become one but would still like to know a bit more. Hence this thread. A good place to ask those 'stupid' questions, which are never stupid, of course.

Julian

TomboyMom

Oddly enough, this actually makes the Jesus = divine or at least special MORE credible to me, rather than less. (Bear in mind I am an atheist and have never been, nor do I expect ever will be, Christian.) I mean, if lots of people were going around talking about the guy, it makes it seem as if he did exist and did something special.

Also, it sounds a bit like Mohammed. More of an oral tradition that gets collected long after death.

TomboyMom

Could it be that Paul did his thing, which was a very weird thing, and meanwhile people are talking about this Jesus guy, and then someone else stuck the two, possibly unrelated things together? That Jesus is a combination of Paul's guy and Mark/Q's guy? Who may not at all have been the same person? Even that Paul's guy was a myth (hallucination) and Mark/Q's guy was a real person that they attached Paul's vision to?

TomboyMom

At what point did someone start collecting the Paul material, Mark material, etc., and call it one book? Wasn't some stuff thrown out as well? How much do we know about this?

Julian

If, by one book, you mean like a modern bible then the answer becomes very long because that happened over the course of centuries. Early bibles varied in terms of what books they contained.

However, one of the first canons that we know about and also the first collection of Paul's letters was by the heretic Marcion, an anti-Judaism (not anti-Jewish) docetic from Aisa Minor. He first comes on the scene around 140 and quickly becomes a major threat to the orthodox, in some places being even more popular than they.

Marcion's collection of the Pauline letters did not contain all the letters that the bible today ascribes to him, which is one of the many reasons why only the seven I mentioned above are considered genuine.

As for Mark, we are not sure when it was written. The first unambiguous mention of it is in 180 (there are likely earlier mentions, but all 2nd century) and after that it appears regularly in bibles. It was the least popular gospel in the early centuries.

The final decision on the western canons (as opposed to the eastern church) came in 1443 at the Council of Florence.
Lots of stuff was thrown out and we know a great deal about it. The stuff in the bible is just the top of the iceberg. Much has been lost because the christians no longer made many (or any) copies of it.

One intersting story, for example, is about the Nag Hammadi scrolls. In the 4th century all Gnostic writings were declared heretical and should be destroyed. This happened with great efficiency with the result that we knew very little about their writings. We only knew what the orthodox had quoted in their attacks. Apparently, some monk in Egypt couldn't bear the thought of destroying all those books so he went and buried them at Nag Hammadi. Skip forward to the 1940s when some Egyptian farmer finds the jar with the scrolls and promptly lets his wife use them for starting fires on the stove!!! Luckily, they found out that they were worth money and eventually, through much bullshit, they made it to scholars and that is why we today have more than 50 gnostics writings.

Julian

Julian

What you are talking about is the quest for the historical Jesus and much has been written about this topic. All of those ideas are possible. We have no way of knowing, however, you can be assured that every possible scenario has been thought of and explored, yet we are not much closer now than we were back when people started looking into this. It should be pointed out the Mythicist position represents a clear minority of scholars. This does not make it wrong, of course, but it does make it develop very slowly. Or maybe it has nowhere to go.

Julian

Dean Anderson

That combinaiton of two different traditions to form what we recognise as Christianity is basically what modern Jesus Mythicists (like Earl Doherty) propose.

Although they go a step further and propose that "the Q guy" was not a necessarily a single guy but a whole group of philosopers leaving a trail of collected sayings.

Also, Mark is seen in the Mythical Jesus theories as being the person who puts the two together.

So rather than starting with Paul at one side and Mark/Q at the other, according to Mythicists we have Paul at one side and Q at the other.

Mark puts them together - writing an invented biography of a person into whom Paul's mystical Christ/Spirit enters during his Baptism. He then goes around saying some of the sorts things that the Q guys say, and ends up getting killed - whereupon the Christ/Spirit returns to heaven. This biography is not intended as a fraud or hoax - it is not a "fake" historical account. It is designed as a morality tale/parable for teaching purposes.

Matthew and Luke expand on this later - both of them fleshing out the story with more sayings from the Q guys - but by now the combined version has grown and had extra elements added, so they both also add a virgin birth and resurrection to Mark's story, and both make their version of Jesus divine from the start (rather than receiving his Divine spirit at his baptism).

Still later, the origins of the combination have been lost, and people start take the Gospels at face value and assume that they are talking about a single real person who was Christ.

That's basically a (very brief and simplistic) summary of the "Jesus Myth" theory. As Julian says, it is very much a minority position (although we have many proponents of it on this board) - but how much of that position is due to the strength of arguments for and against it, and how much is political/religious (obviously, many Christian scholars are automatically going to dismiss a theory that contradicts their beliefs as being impossible) is open to debate.

TomboyMom

Yes, yes, yes, thank you Pervy, I am really starting to understand what you guys have been arguing over all this time. That is so clear.
Now I'm wondering, how can I put this, that there is a HJ position and MJ position that are not really very far apart? What I mean is, you take everything in Pervy's very clear and helpful post, and you just add that there was a real guy in there somewhere, anywhere, but everything else is just like what Pervy said, about Mark and Q and Paul and all that, the only difference being that Qs were talking about a real person they had heard about or even possibly some of them seen, and just twist it a bit to say that Mark meant it to be real--would that be something close to the predominant position in modern scholarship?

In what year did we first have something approximating the modern New Testament? Surely not 1443?

Another thing, are any of these scholars Christian? I mean, it seems like when someone starts studying it with any kind of objectivity, they conclude nothing like what modern Christians think, so do they still believe it, or what? Very weird.

Also modern Christians seem completely ignorant of the actual origins of their church. Also very weird. It's like, "Just ignore that little man behind the curtain. I am the great and powerful Pope/minister/church."

I still think the whole Paul thing is totally weird. He was just a guy! Even Christians agree he was just a guy! He doesn't even claim to be related to God in any way! Why do they listen to him any more than any other crackpot with a hallucination? Maybe cuz it fit in with their beliefs? And didn't he really say a lot of things that basically established the foundations of what Christianity as a practicing religion would look like? What would Christianity look like without Paulism?

RUmike

The predominant position in modern scholarship is that Paul and Mark are writing about the same historical person.

The first list containing all 27 books of our New Testament appeared in 367 C.E.

I think the exact same thing! I would say most scholars in the field are Christian. I, too, find it amazing that anyone can honestly and objectively study the evidence and conclude that Jesus is still "God". Realistically, though, it seems to be the majority position that Jesus did NOT claim to be the messiah, and he certainly did not say the ridiculous things attributed to him in the Gospel of John (e.g. "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one gets to the father except through me", etc.).