ApostateAbe

A point I hear time and again is that the act of deriving a historical Jesus from the gospel accounts is no more than "cherry picking." The gospels are filled with miracles and other unlikelihoods. Why not discard all of such information as unreliable?
The refusal to cherry pick, I reckon, depends on the premise that it is more likely that either all of it is true or none of it is true than that only part of it is true. But, does this really fit our expectations? Specifically, does it fit the patterns of history? If the dichotomy of either complete truth or complete falsehood fits our expectations, then it may be better not to cherry pick. But, if the pattern is that historical characters really are a mix of trustworthy history and unlikely myth, then it is frivolous to make a derision of cherry-picking since it is the only reasonable choice.

I would give examples of Muhammad, Rastafari, St. Nicholas, and Joseph Smith. There are some historical characters that ancient writers have described close to first-hand in an almost entirely believable manner, such as the Emperor Vespasian. Well, except for a few healing miracles wielded by Vespasian, testified by two otherwise seemingly trustworthy writers.

And, I think mythicists may give examples of Odysseus, Hercules, Horus, Krishna and Mithra.

So the situation is that we have TWO different historical patterns, and the issue is which pattern fits Jesus.

As you may expect, I favor the pattern common to mythologized humans. These are the reasons:

• The character and details of Jesus emerged very quickly in history. If myth, his seeming birth was in the first century CE, the same time as reputed, and he came with a very elaborate set of details, much like a real human being.
• The character of Jesus was reputed to have direct human contact with verifiably historical people, including John the Baptist, Herod, Pontius Pilate (via Josephus and Philo), Peter, James and John (via Paul).
• The earliest biographical material of Jesus (Mark and Q) details him as more like a normal human being than as a character with a legendary nature as in the later material.

The merely mythical characters do not seem to have these patterns, but the humans-turned-myths do typically have them. So, knowing nothing else about the rest of the evidence, it would seem more parsimonious to believe that Jesus started as a human being, not just a myth, even with the various accounts of miracles that accompany the only testimony to his existence.

All by itself, this argument may be insufficient to establish a firm conclusion of an actual human Jesus. When we really get to the details, then we may see even better reasons to cherry pick, and the conclusion becomes stronger, but I will leave those details out of this thread. The point is that it really isn't such a bad idea to cherry pick to get to Jesus given the relevant pattern of history.

show_no_mercy

The problem that I think dog-on is alluding to is that historical Jesus scholars assume the Jesus that they're looking for and arbitrarily remove sections from the gospels that don't fit the Jesus that they assume. Neil Godfrey points out in numerous posts on his blog (like here) quite cogently that wantonly removing the supernatural or theologically motivated parts and leaving only the parts that are naturalistically possible makes the narrative itself as a whole nonsense (also see Michael Turton's website). Then comes the part of actually determining what was theologically motivated and what wasn't. There doesn't seem to be a consistent methodology to determine that (such as the money-changers temple incident).

The circularity of assuming the Jesus you're trying to find also leads to the multiple "historical" Jesuses posited by various historians (as pointed out by Hoffman and that more recent post). There very well could have been a historical Jesus, but there doesn't seem to be any sound methodology for determining which "Jesus" reconstructed by historians is the "historical" one without getting dizzy in the circularity.

In the end since just about every part of the gospel narrative can be argued -- and has been argued by various differnet scholars -- to have been theologically motivated, all you're left with is a theologically constructed Jesus. Of course, believing Christians would have told you that from the beginning. Mythicists (I assume) agree with believing Christians.

bacht

As far as I can see, the desire to believe in an historical Jesus is stronger than the actual evidence.

Virtually nothing in the NT stories, including the main characters, can be confirmed by external (non-Christian) material. The fact that the gospel Jesus embodies so much OT prophecy hints at the artificial construction of his identity.

Thus the default position should be "we don't know" or "probably not a real person but there's no way to prove it".

spamandham

...but the earliest 'biographical' material is a minimum of decades later than the earliest nonbiographical material, in which Jesus is portrayed mostly in mystical terms, with no more than a handful of phrases to possibly pin him down to earth, and hundreds/thousands which identify him as a spiritual being/concept.. I'm not sure why you're so focused on the 4 canonical gospels to the exclusion of everything else.

Steven Carr

What is the biographical detail in Q?

The earliest biographical material of Jesus says he was a rock in a desert.

The earliest material about Jesus claims he has now been revealed through scripture.

Romans 16
Now to him who is able to establish you by my gospel and the proclamation of Jesus Christ, according to the revelation of the mystery hidden for long ages past, but now revealed and made known through the prophetic writings by the command of the eternal God, so that all nations might believe and obey him....

Of course, historicists can explain away the evidence, but prefer usually just to ignore it.

dog-on

• Not any more quickly then any other literary character.
  
  Oh, I forgot that you are assuming he is not.
  
  
  Quote:

  The character of Jesus was reputed to have direct human contact with verifiably historical people, including John the Baptist, Herod, Pontius Pilate (via Josephus and Philo), Peter, James and John (via Paul).

  Since we know that no fictional character ever interacts with actual people.
  
  
  Quote:

  The earliest biographical material of Jesus (Mark and Q) details him as more like a normal human being than as a character with a legendary nature as in the later material.

And Peter Parker is very much like a normal person, except of course that secretly he is not.

Really? Do they or don't they? I ask, because the conclusion you wish to draw does not necessarily follow from "seem to have these patterns".


So I suppose you agree that you are simply picking the cherry that you like and ignoring those bits that you find distasteful.