gurugeorge

Hi, and welcome to the boards! Lots of people here are more knowledgeable and qualified than me to answer this question, but FWIW here's an answer from somebody who has no academic qualifications, but is (hopfully!) rational and interested in the subject, and has made a decision based on reading lots of relevant stuff. I'm not very good at, nor do I have the time for, giving cites and stuff (although my view is basically Doherty, with a few minor variations from other sources), so I'm afraid you'll have to be content with a quick summary!

The main thing, for me, is the "silences" - principally Paul and Josephus. Secondly, the fact that there seems to have been a lot of doctoring of Christian texts. Thirdly, the apocryphal and Gnostic literature, and comparison with other religious movements of the time.

The "argument from silence" is tricky - of course, just because something isn't mentioned doesn't mean it doesn't exist. But where one could reasonably expect something to be mentioned, and it isn't, then the argument has some weight. For example, I find it impossible to believe that someone who knew of a living human Jesus would not have quoted that living Jesus' words in cases where it was apt, in letters purporting to give Christian guidance to nascent Christian churches (Paul's letters).

To me, if we start from a neutral position, what we have are some old texts that ostensibly show the existence of a historical figure. It doesn't make sense that you'd just take those texts' say-so that this purported character existed. You'd look for evidence outside them to corroborate them.

If the purported "Jesus" created as big a stir as the texts say, it is beyond belief that he would not have been mentioned independently, and those mentions not preserved by literalist Christians.

But when you look, there is no indisputable evidence for the existence of that figure outside those texts. The oft-cited Roman mentions are either too vague or too late to provide contemporary evidence. In Josephus we have what one might expect to give excellent corroboration - a literate, historical work about exactly the times and places "Jesus" is supposed to have lived. And yet the Testimonium Flavium has - to me convincingly - been shown to be an interpolation.

As I said above, where you'd expect a mention and it isn't there, the argument from silence does carry weight. Taking the Testimonium Flavium as a forgery, as above, Josephus didn't mention the Christian Jesus - and yet he mentions several Messiah-like figures, even "Jesuses", who were far more trivial than the Jesus of the Gospel narratives in their doctrine and effect.

To me that makes Jesus' existence seem highly unlikely.

OTOH, if the Jesus of the Christians is based on someone so obscure in his effects that Josephus doesn't mention him - i.e. if he's more obscure than the penny-ante rabble-rousers Josephus does mention - then it's hard to see how a movement like Christianity could have developed so quickly around such a character.

So: since no corroboration can be found for the existence of "Jesus" outside the partisan texts that mention him, the new fact to be explained is the existence of this bunch of partisan texts. i.e. to me, the non-existence of the historical Jesus is disposed of easily - there is no proof of his existence - outside partisan texts. What then requires explaining is those partisan texts.

It is this that the MJ position explains beautifully. In fact, I'd go so far as to say, the MJ position is less an explanation of "Jesus" than it is an explanation for the existence of ancient texts about "Jesus", and it is a better explanation of the existence and content of those texts, as they stand, than the "internal" HJ explanation.

(Admittedly some variation on the MJ position, or some explanation using many of the tools of the MJ position, could also explain the last scenario I mentioned - that he existed but was so obscure he wasn't mentioned by Josephus, yet a religion developed around him. But, as an aside, this "obscure Jesus" scenario, which seems to be so popular in liberal theological circles, is so far from the full-blooded, old fashioned Jesus of traditional Christian religion it often surprises me how easily accepted it can be by those who seek out trying to shore up the existence of the foundational figure of their faith, fail to find any substantial shoring-up timber, yet still try to salvage something historiclaly solid for the basis of their religion. Such an "obscure Jesus" simply isn't a solid enough foundation for the kind of religion Christianity purports to be. For these reasons, I prefer the "clean break". It wouldn't surprise me if the "obscure Jesus" story was true, but it seems to me to make more sense to see what can be mined from a "clean" MJ position.)

spin

Don't need or want to. As you don't know anything (much) about them, you can't use them for much either.

Messianism was relatively popular in the 1st century. How do you distinguish that which we call the Jerusalem sect from any other messianic bunch? We don't know what they believed. Did the sect believe in the christ Paul called Jesus, or did it have its own christ, or wasn't it so clear on its christ?

Check out the "blessed" stuff in a christian approach to the scrolls.

Let me assume your grammar here is just a typo. Your response is a waste of time.

Your claim in the form of a rhetorical question: But is not legend history layered with, refracted through, and embellished/distorted by fiction?

This apparently trivial generalisation needs some attempt to give it a modicum of credibility -- you know, what makes you think there is necessarily any history in a legend, etc. --, otherwise it just rings out "cliche".


donkey hoatey

Jayhawker Soule

I understand.
Would you please reference those sayings "attributed to Jesus [but] found in the DSS"?

John Kesler

The key is that I don't think both explanations deal with the "same set of manifestations equally well." Supposing that a real man lived in an obscure village and that his followers felt the need to explain how he could still be the Messiah seems to comport better with the facts than supposing that a city was created from a strained interpretation of "prophecy," and then apologized for (John 1:46; 7:41-42).


I agree that the connection between the "prophecy" and the town is tenuous, and this harmonizes with what I'm saying. The gospel authors had to take the hand that was dealt to them, and Jesus' Nazareth connection was one such item. Claiming that this "handicap" was actually a fulfillment of prophecy was Matthew's stategy. John chose to deal with matter head on, as indicated in the verses I referenced above.

Julius Africanus wrote in the third century, and as The Epistle to Aristides makes clear, he had access to Matthew and Luke. See this section. I think that "Nazara" is more likely a variant spelling of Nazareth rather than indicative that Nazareth didn't exist.

spin

You're right of course, the historical data is totally lacking.

You're doing all the work. I guess you don't need evidence at all.

This doesn't make sense.

You have a term which early christians were trying to understand nazarhnos, so they parse it as an ethnonym, and create Nazara by removing the gentilic ending. Nazara then becomes part of the larger community's store of christian ideas and thus becomes available to the writer of Matthew. At some later stage, they check up on Nazara only to find that it is probably (Heb ncrt and it's too late to get the spelling right and use the sigma and not zeta, so this becomes Nazareth, rather than Nasareth. That zeta is such a thorn in the side.

This doesn't fit the data. Why does the gospel of Luke have Nazara at 4:16 and Nazareth only in the later added birth narrative? Obviously because Nazara needed correcting, ie Nazara came first.

As I pointed out there is good early attestation for Nazara in Mt 2:23.

Crap.

And nobody said anything about Nazareth not existing, just that it wasn't part of the earlier gospel traditions. Nazareth is not in the earliest synoptic stratum nor is it in the hypothetical Q.

Interestingly, J. Africanus, having access to gospels (which I had no doubt about), testifies not to Nazareth, but to Nazara. Origen is also well aware of Nazara. In fact Goulder tries to make a minor agreement between Mt 4:13 and Lk 4:16 over their use of Nazara, arguing amongst other things that Mt 2:23 definitely had Nazara, as 4:13 is a reference back to it. (See Stephen Carlson's 2nd item here .) I don't accept with Goulder's minor agreement, but I think he's right about Nazara in 2:23. This makes only one reference to Nazareth in Mt. Nazareth in 2:23 can be seen as scribal intervention, perhaps even at an unconscious level. So, why use Nazareth at all?? That also suggests scribal intervention.

There is no clear relationship between either nazarhnos (h = eta) or nazwraios and Nazareth. You form the gentilic by adding a suffix onto the town name, eg nazarethnos -- there is no justifiable reason for omitting the "-et", even if it is a feminine ending. Neither nazarhnos nor nazwraios come from Nazareth, yet are earlier in the gospel tradition than either Nazara or Nazareth, nazarhnos being earlier still than nazwraios.

I think your views about Nazareth are simply unreflective of the data, especially the notion that Nazara must be a variation. Nazara was in both Mt and Lk before Nazareth. One needs a more realistic approach to the existence of Nazara in the two gospels.


spin

andrewcriddle

One maybe possible explanation would be that nazarhnos was in general (ie pre-Christian) usage the gentilic of Nazareth with the "-et" for some reason omitted.

As a consequence Nazara originated in general usage through back formation as a variant form of Nazareth.

ie Nazara is genuinely a back formation from nazarhnos but a/ nazarhnos itself is in origin an authentic gentilic of Nazareth and b/ Nazara as a variant of Nazareth is a pre-Christian usage.

(I put this forward tentatively mainly because it probably requires several quite possible but somewhat unlikely linguistic events.)

Andrew Criddle

Joan of Bark

I've said this a dozen times before but it bears repeating. Jesus believed he was going to heaven when he died, which means he was going to a better place. Where is the heroism in dying when death brings a better 'life'? It would have been more heroic of him if he had used his miraculous powers (assuming the Biblical view) to save himself and suffer on Earth with his disciples.

krosero

Out of these few replies so far it wouldn't be justified to generalize, but let me grab at one available straw. The unreliability of the HJ methodologies (presumably the criterion of embarrassment, coherence, multiple attestation, etc.), was mentioned at least twice. And I've just finished reading in James Dunn's "Jesus Remembered" that scholars questing for the historical Jesus cannot even agree on the methodologies, much less apply them and get a consensus picture (see p. 97).

(John Meier begins his volume, A Marginal Jew, by proposing a picture that can attain consensus from scholars of all backgrounds and viewpoints; I doubt sometimes that such a goal is realistic).

So this may be a leading question, but is that what makes HJ models so unconvincing? Their lack of agreement on which criterion to use and how to apply them? Their wild disagreement and lack of consensus?

Kosh

It's simpler than that. More like an utter lack of evidence or logic.

freigeister

Absolutely. Traditionalist Christians are really caught out in this whole MJ/HJ debate. For them, any argument against the MJ must preserve traditional Christology. They cannot avail themselves of arguments that lead only to a human Jesus. They would rather have the MJ grow and spread than fight it if fighting means abandoning the god-man. This is the final and complete betrayal of Christ by Christian religion: complicity in the denial of his existence.