Doug Shaver

In this context, a dependable source is a writer for whom there is good evidence that whatever he wrote was probably the truth.

Except for Q, I disagree with the "undisputably" in "undisputably first century work," but I will stipulate for the sake of this discussion that the original versions of the four gospels were probably written during the first century. To your question: Yes, I imply, and now I explicitly state, that unknown authors should not be considered reliable historical sources, especially when those authors' sources are themselves unknown.

I said: overlooked in his own lifetime.

That is the Christian party line. It is not the way I read the facts as best I can discern them.

I don't see much of what I consider philosophy in either the New Testament or the patristic writers, and what little I do see is clearly of pre-Christian origin. Not one word of it is obviously attributable to any charismatic rabbi who might have traveled around Palestine during the early first centuryl.

No, it's not automatic. I agree with you there. It takes some serious thinking to sort the facts from the dogma.

I believe I do.

Yes, there are. Each case needs its own evaluation.

I think historians have been insufficiently skeptical about the existence of some of the people they talk about. One of the reasons they can get away with it, though, is that nobody has any emotional investment in whether those people really lived or not. How many people really care whether Thales was a real man, for just one instance?

Doug Shaver

According to the earliest records we have, that isn't all they came to believe. They also came to believe that he was either a god or very like a god. What might he have done to give a small group of Jews an idea like that?

jjramsey

Why should we assume that the small group of Jews who followed Jesus did nearly deify him? We know Paul's thoughts on the matter, more or less, but we don't have nearly as good a feel for what, say, the pillars in Jerusalem--who knew Jesus in the flesh--thought about it.

Doug Shaver

To put the question that way assumes that there was such a man and that the first Christians were his followers.

Paul's writings are the only record we have of what the pillars believed. There is no other contemporary evidence for what any Chrisitians were thinking during the early to middle first century. We have only the assertions of second-century Christians concerning the beliefs of their religion's founders -- or the people who they thought were the founders. There is no extant document in which the writer makes a credible claim to have known either a founder or someone who knew a founder.

(The only possible exception is Irenaeus, who knew Polycarp, who according to Irenaeus knew John. However, Irenaeus was writing in his middle or old age and reminiscing about his youth, and Polycarp himself says nothing in his surviving writings about having met John. I think it improbable that a document containing such a reference would not have survived, so I don't think Irenaeus's claim on this point is credible.)

And so, what did Peter and his colleagues in Jerusalem believe about Jesus? We know nothing except what Paul tells us, and Paul tells us that except for their disputes about gentiles having to conform with Jewish law, they were more or less in agreement. That might or might not be true, but it is the only evidence we have that comes even close to being firsthand evidence. It is pointless to speculate about how the pillars might have thought Paul's thinking about Jesus was totally wrong. Maybe they did think so, but nothing in the contemporary historical record says they did.

That assumes your conclusion. Paul does not say they knew any Jesus in any flesh -- and it is exceedingly strange that if they had, he would never have mentioned it.

The Bishop

Now, re-read what you wrote before: "In this context, a dependable source is a writer for whom there is good evidence that whatever he wrote was probably the truth." I would state that contextual clues are reasonable pointers to whether the author wrote the truth or not. I would suggest that, two thousand years on, our personal inability to identify the author has no bearing on whether he wrote the truth or not. But you extend not knowing who he was, as a good reason for not trusting what he says.


Pardon me, but I simply do not think we would have Christianity in the world-dominating strength it has today if it were not the case. The earliest Christian missionaries appeared to have no problem whatsoever in getting swathes of populations to convert. It hardly requires any Christian "party line" to see how quickly and successfully Christianity obliterated all pagan pantheistic worship throughout Western Europe.


What does that have to do with anything? People weren't converted in hordes to Mithraism or Aton-ism (my knowledge of the pre-existing Christian philosophy is sketchy, I'm afraid), but to the story of the man who came from one God, talked about getting into God's house, talked a whole new concept of love and unification with ones enemies, and who was crucified for his pains, in a place called Jerusalem (and as you'd expect from the only son of God, came back to life). No matter how pre-Christian the philosophy may appear to be by poring over old records of BCE religious history, it was the Jesus story that did the trick for the vast expansion during the first two centuries CE.

Ah, tut tut. All of it is obviously attributable to the one charismatic rabbi - the MJ case is that unobviously there was no such person.


Indeed. In fact it is an ever increasing demonstration of dogmatic thinking that I continue to see from MJ proponents, but let's not get into that.
But the reason historians behave in a way that might seem, to you, to be "insufficiently skeptical", is that perhaps you don't really learn anything if you routinely discount everything that is written on the grounds that it might be fictional.

My emotional investment is in the maintenance of good sense in ones skeptical thinking. I will come back to this later.

I continue to reject MJ precisely because of the hopeless headspinning arguments that have to be propounded in its favour, alongside denial of patently obvious fact, in order to maintain the concept that one man was a fictional construct. The speed of the spread of Early Christianity is the "Christian party line"? There isn't any massively new philosophy in the New Testament? The more you say stuff like this, the less sense the whole case makes.

Amaleq13

He appeared to them after being killed.

Toto

You seem to have come into this in the middle of the discussion and missed some key points.

Only some Christian apologists at this point claim that early Christianity spread with some astounding speed. Rodney Stark (who is now a Christian) wrote a book on precisely that subject - The Rise of Christianity (or via: amazon.co.uk) - and demonstrated that the best historical evidence shows early Christianity spreading at a nomal rate of growth that would be expected for a new religion that spread through personal contact and family growth. Later, of course, Christianity was spread by the sword and by government decree.

And the philosophy in the New Testament is very similar to Jewish Phariseeism and to Hellenistic Cynic philosophers. If you disagree, please explain why.

jjramsey

Excuse me, but you were the one who asked, "What might he have done to give a small group of Jews an idea like that?" with the implication that you were temporarily assuming that Jesus existed (in order to attempt to expose the absurdities of that conclusion). Of course my responses are going to follow along that assumption.

The Bishop

I found this in a review:I just love a like-for-like comparison between the first three centuries CE (or, well, any period prior to about 1850), with the 20th Century. In addition, one might actually wonder if he got his figures for Mormon membership from the Church itself, and whether that actually only included living people who specifically joined the LDS, or whether it includes their famous posthumous ancestral baptisms!

And in the context of a missionary evangelical religion, this is relevant how, exactly? The Pharisees were still exclusionist Jews as far as I'm aware, and the Cynics were solitary wandering hermits who lived on their wits. But the spread of Christianity certainly did not involve hordes of people, well, becoming Jesus. We are not talking about a movement in which up to six million people abandoned all their worldly possessions and wandered around speaking aphorisms, after all. Jesus may have been a Cynic, but Jesus didn't necessarily envision being worshipped as a God.

I do apologise for coming into the discussion at a late stage. I'm afraid I just do not see the spread of Christianity being an element of apologetic propaganda. Christians view it, I've no doubt, as miraculous and of evidence of the power of God. I view it as evidence of a powerful new idea. I do not subscribe to the idea myself, I assure you, but it just seems silly to pretend that Christianity wasn't something very new and very powerful in the 1st Century Hellenistic world in order to bolster an argument that Jesus was a fictional artefact.

Toto

Stark is a sociologist who specializes in the study of religious movements. His work is subject to peer review. You can't just blow away his data and his conclusions because they conflict with your preconceived notions. You can challenge the data, but you need more than your personal sense of incredulity.

Wait a minute. You say that the explosive growth of Christianity is evidence of a powerful new idea, but you can't identify that new idea, and you won't deal with the hard evidence that there was no particular explosive growth, and very little undisputable evidence of the existence of Christianity in the first century.

The question of whether Christianity was a new and powerful idea in the first century is entirely separate from the question of whether Jesus was mythical. In fact, I could argue that a mythical Jesus could be an even more powerful idea that a messy real Jesus would have been. The mythical Jesus can be custom made to fit exactly the needs of the movement.

I identify this as an apologetic argument because I spent a long time arguing with one particular Christian apologist who claimed that there must have been something unusual about Jesus to spark the growth of Christianity. Apologists would like to use this as evidence of the supernatural inspiration of the Christian religion, or how God works through history. But social scientists who look at the history of Christianity do not see anything unusual.