stephan huller

Along the same lines, we should also say that those who argue for the historical Jesus play tricks too. There is no Church Father who argues for a completely 'mundane' Jesus. All of them see him as a God-man, albeit a historical God man of flesh and blood. Yet the supernatural element is here too. Protestant scholars just close their eyes and pretend that if we squint hard enough we have a historical person. The evidence however plainly manifests a mythical/historical fusion even here begging the question again - which was original? Were the orthodox throughout the late second and early third century guilty of 'jazzing up' a historical figure or 'demystifying' a supernatural being? I think the evidence suggests the latter. The further back you go, the more intensely the mythical qualities of Jesus come out.

JonA

[HR="1"]100[/HR]
Ehrman in The Bart Ehrman Blog:

And my writing is very focused.

[HR="1"]100[/HR]

Not true.

Say what you will about his theories and his opinions, but Ehrman has a very annoying tendency of skipping around what he is trying to say, as if he just can't find the right words and so trails on trying to explain himself like someone trying to speak a foreign language.

Ehrman's writing style doesn't impress me.

stephan huller

I disagree. I give the Devil his due. Like Trobisch and a few notable others, Ehrman is at least readable for the average layman.

aa5874

No, No, No!!! What A LOAD of BS.

It is HJers who have constructed their Jesus by "CUTTING and PASTING" the Bible.

HJers MUST Cut and Paste to fabricate their HJ.

The very HJ argument is that BIBLE Jesus is the Historical Jesus with Embellished Crap that must be CUT.

LegionOnomaMoi

No, actually, not a response. The idea I wished to express in that post is too complex for a response, and so I have been writing something for a new thread. The difficulty is my tendency to write as if I were writing a paper or a mini-"textbook" for my students (i.e., a 20-50 page explanation) which is clearly too much even for opening a new thread. But I appreciate your response and will try and incorporate my own responses to your criticisms in what I write.

LegionOnomaMoi

I freely admit to the second two, and acknowledge that I can come off a pretentious, but the last criticism...well, we'll see. In any event, I just realized that in order to address some of what you stated in what I am writing I need more information. So I'm going to skip over most of what you wrote here, but understand that whatever I skip is just something I can address in a new thread, rather than something I think is irrelevant or otherwise not worth responding to.


I'm a little unclear here about your response. I don't know if I simply didn't explain what I meant well enough or something different. Rather than stick to the more contentious example of Jesus, allow me to explain what I meant using another ancient person whom I have studied in at least as much detail: Socrates. While for him we have contemporaries (supposedly) who wrote about him along with other sources, after several hundred years there is still no real agreement about how these sources can be used to reconstruct a historical Socrates. Plato obviously uses him as a character to be a mouthpiece for Plato's ideas, so much so that even within Plato's works Socrates espouses fundamentally contradictory philosophies. Moreover, the character in Plato is too different from the character in Xenophon for us to readily use the latter, not to mention the fact that Xenophon seems to model Socrates after himself in some ways. Aristophanes' Socrates is adds another character distinct from both, and Aristotle says little other and what he does say contradicts Plato's depiction. Diogenes Laertius adds more, but he isn't simply writing later, he's also clearly using legendary accounts for his Lives.

So according to some historians, the "historical" Socrates is inaccessible. We have no way of extracting any reconstruction of a Socrates of history from our sources. But this does not mean the man didn't exist. Simply that apart from the time he lived and a few extremely basic facts (his death, his students) all we have are literary works which may contain historical elements or capture aspects of Socrates' philosophy/beliefs, but we can't tell which elements do and which are inventions by the authors.

So when I said that the methods for reconstructing Jesus may all be hopeless, and that in fact it may be that no reliable methods do exist, I meant this in the way that those who argue it is true of our sources for Socrates mean it. That is, it is clear that the individual behind the literary creations had a historical reality, but beyond that we can't say much else (e.g., we cannot use X criterion to determine that Y teaching goes back to the "historical" Jesus").

My question, then, is whether the distinction between the hopelessness of methods for reconstructing the historical Jesus and the conclusion that Jesus is mythical is clear. The former simply acknowledges the impossibility of sifting through our sources to exctract historical components of Jesus' life and teachings, while the latter is a determination that the sources do not simply bury the historical figure under myth and legend but were created by individuals, traditions, or groups which never had any historical figure to attribute legends and myths to.



Such as? It would be extremely helpful to have specifics here. Especially if by recent times you mean centuries after Jesus.

aa5874

Once the "historical" Socrates is inaccessible then it MEANS no argument can be made for an "historical" Socrates.


Again, once the historical Jesus is historically hopeless using the present information then it means NO argument can be made for an historical Jesus.

But, that was the EXPECTED outcome according to MJers--the reconstruction of an historical Jesus would be hopeless.

MJers have WON without question.

The argument for an historical Jesus is hopeless and was known to be hopeless in advance.

LegionOnomaMoi

You like legal analogies to understand history, so I'll try that. Imagine that a man is on trial for murder. 5 witnesses saw the man kill someone, put the body in the trunk of a car, and get into the back seat. The driver of the car was caught shortly before the murderer, and she, along with the 5 witnesses, all testify that the murderer on trial actually did kill someone. Unfortunately, none of the witnesses agree on anything about the person murdered. According to one witness, it was a teenage boy. According to another, it was an older man. According to a third, it was a woman between 20 and 30. The driver testified that she didn't see the man kill anybody, and was under the impression she was driving him to pick up a the body of someone whom the man had murdered before she drove him there. Nor can anybody agree how the individual was killed: knife, dagger, short club, spike, etc. In short, there is no way to reconstruct who was killed. Not just the identify, but even the size, gender, age, and anything else other than the fact that it was a person.

Now, despite the fact that the prosecution has no way of proving who was murdered, the blood at the scene (although contaminated such that no genetic analysis was possible), the video feed from a nearby ATM, and the witness testimony are enough for the jury to convict the man on trial of murder.

So even though it is impossible to reconstruct who was killed, the fact that a person was killed is certain beyond a reasonable doubt.


The evidence for Socrates and Jesus is (for some) similar. According to some, there may be, or likely are, historical components within our sources for both, but we lack the capacity to ascertain what is historical and what isn't apart from the equivalent of "someone was murdered" in the example above. That is, we can't tell what part of the various depictions of Socrates are even supposed to resemble the actual Socrates, let alone which parts do, but the idea that he was simply invented lacks any plausibility. There is no precedent for Greek authors to invent a purely literary character they claim to know and whom they claim lived and died in a certain region at a certain time. There is no indication that anyone saw him or recognized him as such. There is plenty of precedent for depictions of individuals which disagree. And we do know that actual people were portrayed in more literary (rather than historical narrative) sources. Hundreds of years later, when Diogenes Laertius was writing, it is clear that people continued to talk and write about Socrates, yet nobody seems to have ever suggested that he was a literary invention. And there continued to be no parallels for such an invention.

A far more plausible explanation, which fits all our evidence, is that Socrates was a real person, that he was indeed executed by the state, that Plato and Xenophon (and Aristophanes) did know him, but like all ancient history their works were also literary and artistic creations, and/or had other motivations (e.g., Plato's use of Socrates as a mouthpiece), and thus did not seek to accurately depict the life or teachings of the man himself. So, if the few authors who have advocated this position over the past century or so are correct, we are left with witnesses who disagree about almost everything, and as we can't exactly trust their testimony even when they agree, we can't really know much about the man behind the depictions apart from the basics: he lived at a certain time, went around talking/teaching people, had followers, and was executed.

aa5874

I almost fell out of my chair after reading your most hilarious story.

Now, please get a Bible. You are in for a Big Surprise. The Jesus story has a most AMUSING twist which is quite unlike your comic relief.

In the Bible, the Jews were blamed for causing the death of Jesus by those who claim Jesus was NOT dead as they spoke.

The Jesus story is the BIGGEST JOKE in the history of Mankind.

The people who claimed Jesus was DEAD simultaneously claimed he was ALIVE.

Romans 6:9 KJV Somebody in antiquity should have been jailed for such an idiotic story.

Talk about "bullshit reenactments" according to Diogenes the Cynic.

What is the evidence that Jesus was KILLED???--an EMPTY TOMB!!!

tanya

:notworthy:

My answer: "no, he didn't", why? Because of what is written in Mark: Jesus was the son of God. Since gods are fictional concepts, we then possess sufficient evidence, that no son of a fictional entity could have existed.

The evidence could be claimed as insufficient to make that assertion, if
a. it could be shown that Gods did exist;

or

b. some versions of Mark claimed, contrarily, that Jesus was not the son of God;

As neither condition has been met, then, it is apparent that the notion of insufficient evidence to make a determination, is false.

:notworthy:

Are there extant Aramaic sources dated even to the second century?

To the best of my understanding, our oldest, extant Coptic source dates from 4th century, and isn't there a text of the four gospels written in Syriac, the Peshitta, claimed to have been written at the end of the second century, though, it is my understanding that our oldest extant copy of that text dates from the fifth century?

I deny that an historical Jesus is the only plausible method to explain our extant ancient sources. We have a whole city buried under lava from volcanic eruptions of Mount Vesuvius: Herculaneum. Should we conclude that the only possible explanation for the existence of this city was a genuine Herakles?

:notworthy:

Callisthenes, describing Alexander of Macedonia....

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