jjramsey

Except that Mark's not so consistent about the needing faith part. He doesn't show Jesus requiring Peter's mother-in-law to have faith before healing her (Mark 1:29-31). The other NT writers also don't insist that faith is required for a miracle. For example, in Acts 3, Peter and John heal a beggar that isn't even asking for it.

Chris Weimer

True, but it still remains a possibility. We can't close off possibilities like others have done and reach a foregone conclusion like some here without examining the evidence fully and comprehensively. Which is why I purposefully remain ambiguous.

And Mark's Jesus doesn't always require it, but those who lack faith always end up with no miracle.

TedM

I was responding to this from you
I see no reason to assume that it is a choice between a gospel Jesus or an itenerant preacher.

TedM

I'm not sure why you conclude this.



The more widely known his teachings were, the more like a gospel Jesus he was. Q may be seen as evidence of his teachings as having been widely known.


Paul says nothing about miracles, except that he himself performed some, and that the Jews "seek signs" (same thing Jesus said). Q I recall includes the quote by Jesus in response to JTB disciples in which he says the lame walk, the blind see, etc.. Jewish claims that Jesus was a sorceror can be seen as evidence that they accepted the claim that he performed supernatural acts.


Christian writings refer to people who knew various disciples and relatives of Jesus, etc.., and Peter, James, John can be tied back to Paul.


I agree. The Talmud may be evidence for it also, in addition to Hebrews and Paul.


I tend to agree.

The evidence is so debatable that it can all be dismissed as insufficient, leaving one back to the conclusion that yes maybe a Jesus had lived who was a preacher. but that's about all one can reasonably conclude. Others may find the supporting evidence to be strong enough to conclude a few more things about that preacher. The problem with all of these evidences is it seems one can always fall back on the possibility that they evolved over a period of 50+ years--and as such there are reasonable alternative explanations to explain why the alleged evidences are not credible.

ted

Ben C Smith

Thanks for posting to this thread, Jobar.

I have quite a few logical problems with the excerpt you posted (I have not read the work as a whole; I am responding only to the excerpt).

That yet clause seems oddly misplaced, situated as it is right after a claim that Paul should have known much about the life of Jesus and before a claim that he knew nothing about the life of Jesus, since the very fact that he never saw Jesus personally would tend to mitigate how much of his life he might know.

Agreed. In fact, I would go so far as to say that Galatians 4.4 almost presumes quite an ordinary birth for Jesus (of a woman, under the law). But this speaks poorly of the historicity of the virgin birth, not of the existence of Jesus. Shall we deny the historicity of Caesar Augustus because he too was given an extraordinary birth?

I concede that I know of no direct statement to this effect in the Pauline epistles. This is really only a continuation, however, of a separate problem, namely that Paul does not mention very much of anything related to the career of Jesus.

Yes, it is conceivable. I am not saying all those things happened, but, when the genre is epistle instead of biography, yes, it is conceivable.

An argument from silence. Because in our extant writings of Paul we read of no sermon, therefore Paul must not have known about it? Besides, I take the sermon on the mount (or plain) to be a literary device in two of our synoptic gospels anyway.

The same argument from silence again.

The only astonishing thing is the persistence of this argument from silence. I am persuaded that John knew at least two (and probably all three) of our synoptic gospels; how many dominical parables did he include?

That is a whole topic unto itself; but on its face it is false.

Yes, it is quite thinkable. Paul lets us know in Galatians 1 that he is pretty proud of what he did not receive from tradition. It is quite clear that he thinks his vision of the risen Lord trumps, or at least equals, anything the tradition might have to offer.

[Back to your own words.]

Yes, the argument from silence is negative evidence. You are correct that you cannot have positive evidence for something nonexistent; but you most certainly can have positive evidence against something nonexistent, and that is what I am seeking on this thread.

Ben.

Chris Weimer

I seriously think that if Jesus did have larger crowds, than he would have been more notable. Furthermore, the gospels tend to be exaggeration and outright fabrication. We cannot take anything from them at face value. The crowds tend to be a motif of Mark, comparing them to Jesus' growing power, trumping John the Baptist's crowds. Michael Turton has done some work on that end.

This is still very vague and confusing. Perhaps something clearer, something concrete?

I would dismiss the Christian writers offhand. Their accounts are very late and don't hold much water, and for the earliest we only have secondary (and tertiary) sources. As for Peter, James, and John, what direct evidence is there that they actually knew Jesus?

I don't think the Talmud is much evidence for anything. I see it quite late, rather. Yet the Passover symbolism still stands, in my humble opinion.

I totally agree. As I have been saying from day 1, Biblical studies, and really historical studies in general, are matters of probability, subjective interpretation of the presented evidence.

Ben C Smith

Good question. I would seriously weigh evidence of the following types:

1. Early testimony (first couple of centuries, if possible) from either Christians or Jews or pagans to the effect that Jesus of Nazareth never existed. For example, if one of the arguments that the fathers had to answer from Celsus or Porphyry or Trypho (fictional opponent or not) was that Jesus did not even exist, I would regard that as positive evidence against historicity.

2. Sound arguments that the earliest layers of the biography were positively attached to a nonhistorical genre. Take as an analogy the strange case of Lazarus. Some regard the parable of Lazarus and Dives in Luke as a serious argument that Lazarus the brother of Mary and Martha in John never existed because it looks like he started life as the main character in an avowedly fictional literary form, a parable. I myself am not certain one way or another on this issue, but that is because we have so little to go on for Lazarus. For Jesus we have a lot of material to analyze, and if universally the first layers were fictional in genre I would take notice. Vork has tried to show that the gospels are fiction; the problem is that the argument for that is so unconvincing (so far).

3. A wide gap between the alleged career of Jesus and the first documents assigning him historicity. For example, I tend to regard (or at least am wide open to regarding) most of Jewish history before the monarchy as mythical or legendary (and probably vast portions of the monarchy, too, though I tend to think the bare list of kings is mostly historical). We are talking about centuries between the events of the Pentateuch and the Pentateuch itself. I do not have very much faith in the historical integrity of oral tradition over all those centuries. But the case with Jesus is quite different. The gap is much narrower.

I would reword this to say belief in the resurrection, first and foremost. So far as historicity is concerned, it does not matter if he really rose from the dead, but if it can be demonstrated that those close to him thought he did we would have a line of continuity between an historical figure and a later set of biographical materials.

The miracles, while distinctive, are not nearly as important to the historicity of the man as other factors.

The virgin birth is absolutely unnecessary to any argument about historicity, and that is so even if it really happened that way.

Not at all, for me at least. It comes down to offering evidence (proving is such a heavy word) that Jesus (A) was executed with a Roman form of punishment and (B) for some reason was thought by some to have risen from the dead (I might add that the general timeframe has to be early first century). That might seem quite a minimal biography, but look at the implications of B. If we can indeed show that a certain man was thought to have been raised from the dead we have to ask ourselves why this man, out of all the criminals executed in the early first century, was thought to have risen from the dead, and we have to face the fact that we have sources giving us reasons why, and then we have to decide whether or not we believe those reasons, have to modify those reasons, or have to eschew those reasons for others of our own invention.

Ben.

Ben C Smith

I sympathize completely. Back in the days when I was seriously considering G. A. Wells I too was trying to explain a pattern. There are things in the record that are puzzling, at least at first (and sometimes second and third) glance.

The problems that I began to see with my own logic (as well as that of Wells) included genre considerations (should we expect as many biographical details in a letter as in a gospel or biography?), artificial chronology (how certain are we that, for instance, a passion narrative or signs gospel did not precede Paul?), and selective argumentation (should we really ignore Josephus and Tacitus?).

I too sometimes wish the evidence were laid out more like we find it for Francis of Assisi.

Such I would expect arguments are often impressionistic and anachronistic.

Possibly true, but then this microcosm disrupts the pattern as a whole, which would go from Pauline theology to Marcan biography and then onward through Johannine theology. It also tends to overlook the incredibly high christology of, say, Mark 6.47-52 and Mark 14.61-62.

There is another factor that might throw the whole pattern off. The early works in Christianity (especially Paul) seem to be expecting a sudden end to the present state of affairs (the dawning of the age to come). Does this in your judgment mitigate what we might expect from the earliest Christians? Without at all claiming that apocalypticists never write biographies, are biographies what we should expect from them without further ado?

I think you are pulling the right levers here. Paul is the loose cannon. He is absolutely enamored of what he has received without the benefit of human tradition. That simple observation for me explains most of the Pauline silence (at least enough to nullify what was really only an argument from silence in the first place).

It did for me too, for a while.

Ben.

Ben C Smith

Basically agreed. The notion of 5,000 men at the feeding miracle, for example, seems way out of line. The numbers, I suspect, would be the easiest thing in the world to progressively exaggerate in the tradition.

Ben.

Jobar

Ben, let me repeat that I make no claims at all to serious Biblical scholarship. Many of the people who post here regularly have probably read and studied ten times what I have on the subject, at least. My opinion that Christ is mythical is largely influenced by the works of Wells- I have his Did Jesus Exist? open in my lap.

There are things that Paul did say that are extremely difficult to explain if he knew of any historical Christ. In Rom. 8:26 Paul says specifically "...for we know not what we should pray for, as we ought..."; despite the gospel injunction of Jesus to "Pray then like this" before giving the Lord's prayer. Ethical teachings form a large part of Paul's epistles, and he does give many of the doctrines from the gospels, such as "bless those who persecute you"- but he gives them only on his own authority, and not on that of Jesus! Paul regularly appeals to the OT for his ethical teachings, when according to the gospels he could have appealed directly to Jesus if he had been aware of the supposed words of Jesus found in the gospels.

In 1 Cor. 1:17, Paul says "For Christ sent me not to baptize..." and yet in Mt. 28:19 Jesus instructs his followers to baptize men everywhere.

You want positive evidence; for me, perhaps the most glaring positive indication of Jesus' mythological nature lies in the completely different family trees ascribed to him by the gospels. Quoting from Gauvin again:

Then there's the disagreement over just *when* he was born. Gauvin again-


Oh yeah, there's a problem with 'where', too-

Please, do go read that link I gave to Gauvin in my first post. It's not terribly long, and it'll save me quoting all of it eventually, because it's all incredibly relevant to your subject.