GakuseiDon

I suppose it is possible. At the least, Paul seems to have believed that Jesus was crucified in Jerusalem, regardless of where that knowledge came from.

dog-on

Why "in Jerusalem"?

GakuseiDon

Fair enough, on both points.

GakuseiDon

"Zion" seems to suggest "Jerusalem".

dog-on

If Paul meant Jerusalem, why didn't he just say it? I always thought of Zion as some mythical Israel in the sky type of place, kinda like heaven...

"I am like a lion in Zion" - Marley

GakuseiDon

Sure, it's possible Paul had in mind a non-earthly location when he quoted from the Hebrew Scriptures. But "Zion" is associated strongly with "Jerusalem", so Paul seems to have believed that Christ was crucified in some kind of "Jerusalem", regardless of its location.

aa5874

Well, if that is the case, Paul was also equally convinced that Jesus ROSE from the dead and ascended to the right hand of God in heaven.

The most reasonable explanation, based on your reasonning, is that Jesus actually ROSE from the dead and ascended through the clouds to be in heaven .

Ephesians 1.19-20 Paul's "knowledge" of Jesus, all he "received", are revelations from the DEAD and RISEN.

PAUL preached MYTH.

neilgodfrey

What I find intriguing is how little of Jesus' life even Justin actually cites.

He's big on the birth and death of Jesus, but if by Jesus' life we are thinking about that in between bit then even Justin is starkly cursory.

If Jesus' ministry begins with John's baptism, then the only thing Justin says about this life and mission that was supposed to have so shaken and overawed people that they refused to believe he stayed dead and was really a god being is the following:

• Only a few Jews and Samaritans recognized Jesus; others hated him and did not recognize him at all (First Apol. 53,31,49)
• Jesus renamed three disciples (Trypho 100, 106)
• Jesus always confuted the Pharisees and scribes and all Jewish teachers who questioned him (Trypho, 102)
• Jesus came to the Jews, healed the maimed, deaf, lame from birth, blind, raised the dead (Trypho, 69; First Apol, 48,31)
• He was accused of being magician and deceiver (later a Galilean deceiver) (Trypho, 108)
• He was acquainted with bearing sickness (Trypho, 13)
• Jesus was obscure and inglorious and dishonourable and had no comeliness (Trypho 13,14,32,85,100)

This is all very general and cloudy. One is pretty hard pressed to find evidence of Justin's knowledge of a single healing or "raising the dead" pericope, for example. And Justin supports these details about the life of Jesus for most part directly from the Jewish scriptures.

If we weren't so accustomed to reading the canonical gospels into Justin, one might almost think there could be room to argue that Justin's writings stand as evidence of a time when a biography of Jesus was for the first time beginning to be formulated. Certainly when Justin discusses the details of the birth of Jesus he both overlaps and falls outside what we read in Matthew, and explains all his "detailed knowledge" is derived directly from his "spiritual" interpretation of the LXX.

A more comprehensive list of everything Justin says about Jesus' biography (as opposed to his sayings) can be found here.

Of course it can be argued that Justin is merely summarizing parts of the gospels. But to do so is to be arguing on the presumption of the standard models of gospel trajectories, which may not be the most economical explanation of the evidence.

I'm not doubting that there were gospels of sorts before Justin, but they were certainly not "canonical" or authoritative in the slightest, and possibly represented guesses as good as Justin's. They were narrating or (as in Justin's case, and the author of the epistle of Barnabas) philosophically and apologetically discoursing on the life of Jesus, and all doing so by presenting their own interpretations of how the Jewish scriptures revealed the details to them.

If what they were building on was the bare-bones doctrine that the Son of God became flesh/or entered in the world in some human form and then died and was resurrected, then it is understandable how the first parts of the story to garner the most detailed bio narrative would be his birth and death. Which is what we find in Justin in particular. The middle bit was still to be fleshed out and be settled among competing allegorical views of the OT.

gstafleu

There is a difference between "necessarily" and "most likely." We're trying to find if we can label one scenario "most likely," "necessary" is probably an unfordable luxury.

Again, I'm not arguing necessity, just likelihood. We agree, I think, that the people most likely to have transmitted the docs are the believers. But, ex hypothesi, they didn't do that (or hardly did that). So, apart from the (very, apparently) odd extra-Christian transmission, we don't have anything. How, then, can historical details end up in the gospels, many decades later? Memory and oral transmission seem both equally unreliable. Hence my position: if we see any historical details in the gospels, they are most likely "invented" (i.e. they do not represent factual history).
No, it does not preclude it. Neither does it preclude that the Martians observed everything from afar and then beamed it down into the minds of the gospel writers. The issue, in other words, is not if something is precluded or not, it is if there is evidence for it. And, if there is evidence for two competing scenarios, can we label one scenario more likely than the other?

Given that we know that a "faith mechanism" (which "invents" historical details) exists (I don't think anybody would argue against its existence), and we also do not see any (or see hardly any) evidence for an HJ in the early docs in general, I think it is reasonable to call the "faith based" scenario more likely than the HJ one (the faith-based scenario is of course what we usually call MJ). The faith-based scenario uses something that everyone agrees exists (faith-based inventiveness) and does not postulate something for which there is scant evidence (an HJ). Surely, then, while we cannot exclude the possibility of an HJ, the faith-based hypothesis, aka MJ, is the most likely of the two?

Gerard Stafleu

gstafleu

That is an interesting position to take for an HJer. Let's say you are right. Then you have even less evidence for an HJ than I thought you thought you had (if you get my drift). That means that the HJ scenario, while not logically precluded, must fall even lower in likelihood below the MJ scenario (which uses the known-to-exist mechanism of faith-based inventiveness).

(BTW, when Mark tells us that Jesus gave the disciples shit for forgetting the bread, that is usually seen as a historical detail--one can of course argue if it is an accurate (really happened) historical detail).
Possible of course, but there is no evidence for it (plus we have telephone-game problems). This posits something for which we have no evidence, while we already have an explanation with a known mechanism (faith-based inventiveness). Hence nous n'avons pas besoin de cette hypothese (we do not need that (HJ) hypothesis), to paraphrase La Place.
Agreed, hence exit HJ hypothesis through the stage door on the left marked "least likely."

Gerard Stafleu