gnosis92

Voost's Jesus outside the New Testament offers arguments that extra-biblical evidence for Jesus is strong evidence for the historicity of Jesus.

Bart Ehrman addresses these issues, which other posters have alluded to. For example, while some jewish groups were looking for a messianic figure who would liberate israel from roman rule, there is no recorded evidence in the first century of any jewish group expecting a messiah who would be crucified. such a suggestion strongly goes against the expectations of what the messiah is and would do, and hence it is probably historical.

also the mere claim a man name jesus is not particularly extraordinary.

Johann_Kaspar

There is no such thing as "an early xian" writing a gospel. It is Jewish literature.Only guess work. And meaningless. Thank you for proving my point.
"Plausible" : :rolling: :rolling: :rolling: :rolling: :rolling: :rolling: :rolling: :rolling: :rolling: :rolling: Your fantasy only.Strawman. Read better what I wrote. Now of course I can challenge your reading skills also for the gospels...

Johann_Kaspar

Rien.
But here this question does not rise much interest. They are late compared to European studies.

Johann_Kaspar

Nada. Nothing.

Johann_Kaspar

"Presumably?" Who knows? Nobody. Again only guess work.

Hermann Detering: Paulusbriefe ohne Paulus.

These "letters" mean a complete ideological turnover from the gospels. Written by renegate Jews.

Johann_Kaspar

And this link to show to our US friends :
The Denial of the Historicity of Jesus in Past and Present so that they will understand that Doherty brings something new only to those who can't read foreign languages... And it is far from complete. There is a long tradition of myth support here. it is sad that they seem not to be aware of it focusing all on Doherty. Did he only bring something new from the previous myth treatments?

Toto

discussion on the pericope of the adulteress has been separated out here

EarlDoherty

Richard Carrier has recently declared himself a mythicist. In fact, I thought it was on this board that he did so. I’m not necessarily taking the credit for that, but I understand that his own studies on the Gospel of Mark pushed him over the edge. He appealed to Bayes’ Theorem and comes up with a figure of 80%+ in favor of no HJ, which he regards as virtually equivalent to certain. At least, that’s how I understood him. As for Price, between Deconstructing Jesus and the Incredible Shrink, I think he is a mythicist in all but tattooing it on his forehead. (I won’t tell you where I’ve got mine tattooed.)

This is a misconception, or at least a distortion. I have never said that kata sarka means, literally, the sublunar realm, as though Paul uses it as a place name for some spiritual dimension below the moon. As Paul himself uses it, sarx is a term with a wide range of meaning. Kata with the accusative of that word can mean (among a lot of other things) “in the region of” or “in relation to,” which are two rather different applications. The first represents spatial aspect, and since the realm of “flesh” was synonymous with change and corruptibility, and encompassed even spiritual entities like the demons, it could be applied to the entire area below the moon; I maintain it could refer to a descending deity’s state or activity when he was in that area. (Some of the remarks I quoted from the TDNT would support that.) The second is not spatial, but a marker of relationship. It could refer to the deity’s activities in regard to, how they affected or intereacted with, what relationship he bore to, that realm of flesh. The two applications overlap in such a case, and the question is, could that have been Paul’s thinking in some of his uses of kata sarka? If he did regard Jesus as a descending deity who stopped short of the surface of the earth, how else would he have expressed the nature he assumed, and the effects he had on, humanity and the human realm? I simply suggest that sarx would have been the natural choice.

Ramsey demands some kind of proof that Paul actually thought this way. I have supplied all sorts of indicators. I have shown how his (by which I also mean his imitators and other early epistle writers) language and imagery shows Middle Platonic elements (Hebrews is a perfect example). And I have argued that my interpretation of certain terms, as laid out in the preceding paragraph, cannot be demonstrated to be impossible or even unlikely. (Which isn’t the same thing as saying it has to be right.) When this interpretation is combined with other factors in the mythicist case, with other documents such as the Ascension of Isaiah, with the period’s heavy, if not exclusive, reliance on scripture for info about Christ, and the portrayal of scripture as some kind of mystical world from which Christ “speaks” and makes himself known—taken of course with the utter absence of oral tradition and historical events in the epistles: even the one supposedly clear Gospel event (1 Cor. 11:23f) is compromised by being spoken of as something revealed to Paul directly from the Lord—then you’ve got good grounds for interpreting things as I have.

Ah, but the problem is, your latter alternative is simply conjectural, and is entirely dependent on introducing Gospel preconceptions into the equation. It is not based on any indication in the texts. This is clear in everything from Paul to Hebrews to 1 Clement. They do not compare scriptural elements to historical elements. You need two sides of an equation to justify a consideration of your latter alternative: pointing to scriptural indicators and comparing them with historical tradition. No one in the epistles does this. Not even Barnabas, who has a foot in both camps, does it, showing that he had the barest of concepts that Christ had been present on earth, but virtually no details of that life. (I suggest looking at my article on Jesus in the Apostolic Fathers.)

Nor does 1 Cor. 15:3-4 fill the bill, since we can’t be sure that Jesus died, buried and risen kata tas graphas is “in fulfillment of the scriptures” or simply “according to the scriptures” in the sense of ‘as the scriptures tells us,’ “on the basis of” (another lexiconal meaning) what the scriptures say.

Your argument reminds of the “interpretation of Jesus” claim: that the hymns, Hebrews, Paul’s ‘transcendent’ treatment of Christ is in fact an interpretation of the Gospel Jesus by early writers and thinkers. This is simply a case of reading the Gospels into the epistles, since in this alleged interpretation, the figure of the Gospel Jesus is never mentioned. We have no indicators that such a figure is even in these writers’ minds.

The turn of the era was a philosophical soup. Platonism, while dominant at the time, competed with other systems. Judaism had multiple expressions with varying degrees of absorption of Hellenism. Paul came from the Diaspora, and virtually his entire activity took place outside Judea. It’s simply not legitimate to try to lock him into any one school of thought, or try to prove anything thereby.

A careful analysis (actually, it doesn’t even have to be all that careful) of how Paul uses the term sarx (along with “body”) in relation to Christ is a good indicator that a simple human man was the furthest thing from his mind. I have drafted a lengthy discussion on that matter which I will be incorporating into the second edition of TJP.

By the way, I misinterpreted what I read online about a book at one of our local university libraries. I was not able to find a text by pseudo-Ocellus as recorded by Stobaeus. But since GakuseiDon has departed the precincts to devote himself to historical fiction (perhaps following in the footsteps of Mark & Co.), perhaps no one is too concerned that I can’t supply Ocellus’ text after all. And it doesn’t seem to be traceable on the Internet, at least that I could find.

All the best,
Earl Doherty

RUmike

It is either Jewish Christian or Gentile Christian literature.

Unfortunately, you have NO plausible explanation as to how such a saying entered the tradition. Yet you laugh at me for some reason.

You wrote, "it means there is about nothing historical in them as a matter of facts". For all intents and purposes I didn't misread you at all.

Doug Shaver

I'm not offering it as a rule. I'm offering it as observed usage. It is how I have seen the words used. If you are advocating that they should be used differently, I'm not quarreling with you on that point. I'm just saying that as far as I can tell from what I have noticed, people are not called mythicists unless they believe that there was no real man on which the gospel stories were based, loosely or otherwise, directly or indirectly.

Of course my reading in this area has not been exhaustive. Far from it. Maybe the words are in fact used by some people as you say they should be used. If so, then I am in error and it won't bother me to admit it.