Toto

I know this was intended as a parody, but it makes as much sense as Yuri's thread does for me.

The key here is that there are actually two competing groups of HJ believers - what JoeWallack calls the Supernaturalists = Christians who believe that Jesus was God, and those he calls the "Naturalists". The picture of Jesus that we are familiar with from Sunday School is actually a contruct made by Enlightenment Rationists who thought that they could find a historical real person behind the myth. This search for a Historical non-supernatural Jesus is referred to as the "Jesus Quest." It is done primarily by people who discard the supernatural miracles in the Bible (at least as far as proving the existence of this HJ). But it is questionable whether they can in fact re-construct this alleged historical being.

So far, so good. The "Naturalists" have not been able to produce a coherent picture of Christian beginnings, to explain the gap between the alleged death of their savior and the first notice of Christianity by Roman officials.

So the problem for a secular historian is to explain how Christianity grew without resorting to a supernatural explanation.

You might think that a mythicist would have the same problem, but mythicists have no problem seeing early Christian history as a literary construction, written well after the fact.

At least, that's the best sense that I can make of this.

Jayhawker Soule

That was funny. :notworthy

Amaleq13

Doesn't an appeal to a belief in supernatural events provide that explanation?

The disciples didn't know what happened to his body but believed he appeared to them and later converts believed the risen Christ had appeared and that the apostles were capable of performing miracles.

Toto

Does this mean they were too stupid to know the difference between a spirit and a real body?

I think that during the Roman persecutions of Christians, the gnostics, who did believe in a spiritual Christ, quickly agreed to sacrifice to the Roman gods (crossing their fingers behind their back, one presumes). It was the "literalists" who were willing to go to their deaths.

So (playing along with the OP) - how do the Naturalists explain the willingness of Peter and, say, Paul to be martyred if Jesus was just a wisdom teacher who never rose from the dead in a supernatural fashion? The only way out of this dilemma is to recognize that there were no martyrs among the earliest Christians. It was only later Christians who started to believe in a resurrected Christ who were willing to die for their beliefs.

Chris Weimer

:rolling: I didn't even catch it at first. Bravo!

Amaleq13

No, it means that the disciples' claims of seeing a risen Christ were no different from Paul's (ie apparitions) and that the Gospel depictions are later elaborations depicting those appearances as increasingly physical.

Yuri Kuchinsky

Do you accept that Peter and Paul were historical, Toto?

So this makes it all the more important to specify the time frame for the earliest Christian martyrs... If you want to be considered as a real historian, that is...

Yours,

Yuri.