ApostateAbe

Yeah, I think you are right, thanks for that correction.

aa5874

Just saying your theory has support is meaningless. You need evidence to support your theories.

All your sources in the NT and Church writings claimed Jesus was a God and acted like a God, even Marcion claimed Jesus was a God.

If the all early Christians were honest, then Jesus was really a God. Why would all the early honest Christians lie about Jesus? Why would Mary, the so-called mother, lie about Jesus? Christians were supposed to have been martyred for the the truth and the early Christian writers claimed it was true Jesus was a God and ascended to heaven.

Justin Martyr wrote that Jesus was a God. Based on your theory, Justin Martyr was lying, he knew that Jesus was just a preacher.

Your theory that Jesus was only an apocalyptic preacher may be true if all early Christians were liars, or dishonest and colluded with one another to feed erroneous and mis-leading information to the believers, including Paul and Peter.

ExMormon_Dude

Thanks for the tips guys! I can see where you're coming from Abe & aa5874. Robert Price once said that his fellow Jesus Seminar buddies were not being critical enough in their investigations. As a highly skeptical atheist (thanks to Mormonism) I share some views with critics like Price, Detering & Wells. Most Christian biblicists often see history with gospel glasses then work there way backwards filling in the gaps with scholarship and apologetics oriented towards justifying the reliability of the gospel accounts. I guess it's their optimism vs my skepticism. But it's a circular approach, similar to the claim of independent authorship where the NT is used to prove that the NT is true or that the main gospel characters are corroborated by each other but no-one outside of Christian circles. I once made a point that Jesus was a composite of OT prophets, expectations and sayings from earlier sources - Hellenized for the gentile population. But I was accused of parallelomania. The problem is, if you remove all the parallels, all you end up with is an outspoken rabbi (one who no longer shares identity with the figure in the gospels or the epistles). So even though it is possible that a Jesus-like character existed, I just don't believe the Jesus of the gospels existed.

I will no doubt collect the writings of Ehrman, Mack, Friedman and several others. Cheers!

aa5874

It is the Jesus of the NT that we are looking for. No other Jesus but Jesus of the NT.

The Jesus of the NT was a God. Gods are myths.

bacht

Hello Abe. I'm in the mythicist camp.

First, the evidence we have is only literary, and didn't survive untouched by later editors. As was mentioned, there is no third-party disinterested witness. We only have the works of Catholics (and non-canonical heretics).

Second, if Jesus was special enough to initiate a successful Jewish sect with a substantial following, why was he not special enough to attract attention from anyone else?

Third, the matter of sorting out which NT material is datable to pre-70 authors is tricky. If we accept some of the epistle material as being the earliest extant, then we face the problem that their focus is on the spiritual Christ, not any flesh-and-blood Galilean prophet. No one believes that the gospels were written by first generation eyewitnesses, even if some of the material is 'true'.

Fourth, what exactly did Jesus teach? An imminent apocalypse? A new, inclusive form of Judaism? Peace and love and the brotherhood of man? The gospels are a hodgepodge of instructions, ranging from strict Torah observance and gentile xenophobia to a replacement theology with gentiles front and centre and Jews doomed to judgment.

Was Jesus a cynic philosopher as hinted in the Q material? What would be so special about that? Was Diogenes elevated to divinity during or after his life? Was Jesus influenced by Essene asceticism and messianism? Was he a traditional prophet as described in the Hebrew scriptures?

Fifth, the turn of the era was a time of religious speculation and syncretism. It's possible that Jesus taught some fusion of Jewish and pagan ideas, but do we know what it was? How would that make him different from gnostics or philosophers like Philo?

----

If the epistle material is to be trusted, the early believers found their Christ in scripture and visions. After they were gone, the Son became historicized, possibly as a misunderstanding of Mark's ironic fable. After the final destruction of Judea in the 130s, gentiles were free to interpret the story any way they wished. There's nothing fantastic about such developments, they are consistent with human nature and the style of the times (ie. supernatural and escapist).

cheers

ApostateAbe

Well, I wouldn't necessarily put my trust in cult leaders. If they have an explicit interest in telling a certain lie, then you have good reason not to trust them. If they do not have an explicit interest in telling a certain lie, then it is presumed honest. These sorts of considerations are very important in critical scholarship. You don't just trust or distrust everything.

aa5874

The writers of the epistles place themselves after the physical Jesus was on earth. The letter writers claimed Jesus was crucified and implied the crucifixion occurred during the time of Pilate. The epistles writers claimed Jesus died and was resurrected and would come back for dead believers. The epistle writer claimed he persecuted Jesus believers and acknowledge there were Jesus believers before them.

The writers of the epistles even claimed there were already churches in Judaea.


The author of Acts of the Apostles placed a letter writer called Paul after the the physical Jesus ascended through the clouds, after the apostles received the Holy Ghost on the day of Pentecost, after Peter began preaching and during the persecution of Jesus believers.

The epistles appear to be written after the Jesus stories when the Church structure was more developped than the structure written by Justin Martyr.

ApostateAbe

I wish I had your level of dedication and courage. Good luck in your studies.

ApostateAbe

Lots of good questions beyond my level of research. For now I'll just focus on question number 2 here. You probably should not give too much weight to the idea that references to Jesus are not found outside of Christian literature. As I explained before, writing, except for burials and stone tablets, was temporary, rare and expensive, and it required a line of copyists willing to preserve the information across generations. Jesus was one of many small religious cult leaders, and his identity would have seemed trivial to anyone not part of his following. Many Jesus-mythicists do not really seem to understand exactly what they are asking for when they demand writings of Jesus that are not from Christians. Plenty of trustworthy information about Jesus can be gleaned from the Christian writings, by taking into account religious interests and that sort of thing.

bacht

Well Jesus was more than a cult leader, he was the incarnation of the Creator of the universe, if the NT is to be believed. Why wouldn't Jewish writers of the time have taken notice of him or his followers? Josephus mentions Theudas and the Egyptian as examples of messianic fools, surely Jesus would merit some attention.

I'm not knowledgable about the difficulties or expense of writing at the time (I'm just an amateur). It doesn't seem to have been a problem for the epistles we have, assuming 1st C origins for some of them.

The question is when were the earliest Christian writings composed: before the fall of the temple? before Bar Kochba? Before Marcion (mid-2nd C)? Were the earliest Christians only Jews? Were there any Christians at all before Marcion's canon forced the issue?

The Catholics wanted to retain the Jewish writings, so it's possible that the whole 1st C scenario in Palestine was invented to support the inclusion of the Hebrew scriptures.