jgoodguy

The point of my exercise is to show that outside of the hypothesis that there was a historical Jesus, there is little agreement about what that historical Jesus was among HJers.

I try not to assume motives. I understand that many HJ scholars are employed by theist organizations and that where one's economic welfare is concerned there is a bias. After all who wants to be a Price or Doherty having to make a insecure living.

aa5874

That is EXACTLY what I have been saying for so long now. ApostateAbe is SPREADING propaganda and is NO longer involved in a rational discussion.

1. The true CONSENSUS among HJers, MJers, and perhaps even Agnostics is that there is LITTLE or NOTHING from antiquity for the "historical Jesus".

2. The true CONSENSUS among HJers, MJers and perhaps even Agnostics is that there is an ABUNDANCE of myth information from antiquity for Myth Jesus.

3. The true CONSENSUIS among HJers, MJers and perhaps even Agnostics is that the NT is historically UNRELIABLE.

The claim by HJers that Jesus was from Nazareth, was Baptized and Crucified MAY all be EMBELLISHMENTS since Jesus was the Child of a Ghost when those things happened in the NT.

discordant

Admit it, Abe. Your talk of "scholarly journals" was just rhetoric. You derive your knowledge from the very sources you earlier maligned: "the bookshelves of public libraries or bookstores" and "the Internet". Your first citation was of a book, one that wasn't even published by a university press. Your second was also just a book.

And neither of them help your point, by the way. At best you've demonstrated consensus on two points: the baptism of Jesus by John, and that Jesus was an first-century Jewish apocalypticist. But guess what? Mythicists have a consensus on both those points as well. The consensus is that neither are true. I made this point in an earlier post, but it seems not to have had any effect on you.

ApostateAbe

I think that's a fair criticism. I don't actually do a meta-analysis of all of the relevant scholarly articles to see what the consensuses are. I take shortcuts and rely on what the qualified scholars say that the consensuses are, according to whatever I find on Google Scholar (books and articles, but mostly books). The reason why I maligned the bookshelves of public libraries and bookstores as a way to get an idea of consensuses was that such bookshelves are not actually a reflection of the scholarly consensuses. They are a reflection of whatever the public is willing to buy. So, you will find one book saying Jesus was black. You'll find another book saying that he was a Marxist revolutionary. You'll find another book saying that he was a feminist. You'll find another book saying that he was an offshoot of earlier myths. And each of those theories represent only one or two scholars out of the thousands that are in the field, but they each also represent a significant portion of the public.
Mythicists have a consensus that it isn't true, but they don't have nearly a consensus on the source of the myth nor how the myth came to be accepted among Christians, despite the many different sources and variations of the myth found in the early Christian writings. If their only consensus is that, "It isn't true," then it really isn't saying a lot, and I think that goes to the point of Schweitzer, just as true today as it was 100 years ago--all hypotheses which have so far been put forward to the effect that Jesus never lived are in the strangest opposition to each other.

By the way, if you need evidence for an HJ consensus on any other historical point, then I am game.

aa5874

You did NOT provide any EVIDENCE at all that Jesus was Baptized by John. You MERELY BELIEVE the story was TRUE because you think it was EMBARRASSING.

The very same argument can be used to claim Jesus was the Child of a Ghost. The author of Mark was EMBARRASSED that Jesus was the Child of a Ghost so he LEFT it out but because it was TRUE the author of gMatthew had to INCLUDE the Holy Ghost conception and the author of gLuke found out it was TRUE when he did his investigation.

Even the author of gJohn seem EMBARRASSED by the Holy Ghost conception but STILL claim Jesus was BEFORE anything was made, was GOD himself, the Creator of heaven and earth BEFORE he was later made FLESH.

It is simply not accurate at all that you presented any evidence that Jesus was baptized by John.

You simply presented the stories in the NT and completely FORGOT how Jesus was described and what happened when Jesus was baptized by John.

It was a GHOST that baptized by John and it LEVITATED straight out of the RIVER.

See Matthew, Mark and Luke when the GHOST called Jesus was baptized.

Once the NT is an UNRELIABLE historical source then every event MUST be EXTERNALLY corroborated BEFORE it can be accepted.

Not one story about Jesus and his disciples can be credibly externally corroborated by historical sources of antiquity.

Steven Carr

Look at what that consensus is built on.

JP Meier, for example, says that John baptised Jesus and part of the evidence for that baptism really having happened is that the baptism has been 'erased' from John's Gospel.

In what other field of history, is an event considered as confirmed because there is a source which never mentions it?

This is pseudo-history, theology posing as history.

In the same manner, we know that aliens landed at Roswell, because the alien believers have now removed some elements of their original story....

discordant

It's saying that your metric is faulty. If you can't measure mythicists by it, then it's not useful.

Since we've agreed that books are okay to cite, I'd like to try it.

The title of the present volume, The Missing Jesus, provocatively suggests that modern scholarship (not to mention popular literature) is having difficulty finding the historical Jesus. This difficulty manifests itself in the bewildering diversity of portraits. We hear of Jesus the prophet, the rabbi, the shaman, the exorcist, the Messiah, the king, the revolutionary, the magician, and more lately the Cynic. (The Missing Jesus (or via: amazon.co.uk), page 1)

an increase in knowledge of Palestinian Judaism from archaeology and intensive study of Jewish texts has brought not more certainty about Jesus, but more possible Jewish contexts in which to place this Galilean holy man (Vermes), charismatic (Hengel), eschatological prophet (Sanders), rabbi (Chilton), pharisee (H. Falk), revolutionary (S. G. F. Brandon), social reformer (Horsley), peasant (Crossan), or cynic (B. Mack and F. G. Downing). Perhaps Jesus fits neatly into none of these categories. How his central theme, the kingdom of God, was intended remains disputed, and with it how eschatology and ethics are related in his teaching. (The Oxford Handbook of Biblical Studies (or via: amazon.co.uk), page 44)

Historicists don't appear to be speaking in one voice. At least not in the way you imply they do.

ApostateAbe

OK, fine.
Right. I think, more than any other aspect of the life of Jesus, there is disagreement over the content of his teachings, most likely due to that point being the key ingredient to any given activist agenda. That isn't to say that there is no majority opinion. The word that I get somewhat consistently from those who know the field is that the "apocalyptic prophet" model of Jesus is generally accepted among the critical secular scholars. The bare list of models of Jesus that exist within the scholarship is no more useful for getting a handle on the consensus as the bare list of models of theories that have been proposed to compete with the big bang theory.

ApostateAbe

The omission from John's gospel is very much revealing of the motivations of the early Christians because it is especially focused--you have John the Baptist, you have him heralding the Jesus as his superior and prophet, and you have John telling of the Holy Spirit alighting on Jesus like a dove--you have everything associated with the baptism account except the baptism itself. It is a somewhat bizarre narrative in comparison to the other gospel accounts, and it can be very plausibly explained as the baptism itself being embarrassing. The Gospel of John more than any other gospel thought of Jesus as being without sin and the superior of John the Baptist, but the Baptists were using the point of Jesus being baptized by John the Baptist as a rhetorical point that proves the superiority of John the Baptist. The gospel of John was written at the same time as Josephus, who attested to the popularity of both cults in Judea.

The focused omission in the gospel of John is just one of the many lines of evidence that seems to strongly indicate the historicity of the baptism event. In my opinion, in order for the mythicist position to be taken seriously by people who are trying to find the most probable history, then mythicists needs to explain the data just as fittingly, not with mere hand waving. For example, tell me how you explain the focused omission in the gospel of John, and you can do so in the thread on that topic:

The awkward fact of the baptism of Jesus

discordant

Your earlier criticism was that mythicists "don't have nearly a consensus on the source of the myth nor how the myth came to be accepted among Christians". The HJ model substitutes the figure of Jesus to account for the origin of the cult, but gets bogged down in disagreements over what Jesus actually said and did. One would think these details are vital for explaining why people joined the cult to begin with and why it developed the way it did -- every bit as vital as mythicists explaining "the source of the myth" and "how the myth came to be accepted among Christians". I just don't see that historicists have any huge advantage here.