Juststeve

Spam:

Answers to your questions in the order you raised them?

Jesus was a minor figure until it was alleged that he returned from the dead. That made him seem a big deal, and a reason to get religious.

Paul is the earliest writer because it is not likely that the close followers of a peasant preacher could write themselves. It in fact appears that they didn’t although some folks, not me, would aregue for John and Matthew.

I don’t see Christian ideas arising in 1st century Judaism. If course I was raised a Jew.

Jesus’ family was represented by his brother James, instrumental in the early church and killed per Josephus.

Based on known Roman crucifixion procedure Jesus body was thrown into a common grave and allowed to rot. I wouldn’t expect to be able to find or identify it.

Everything about Jesus is not symbolic or drawn from preexisting sources. In fact some of that is written about him is even inconvenient and are certainly not in line with Messianic expectations.

Steve

spin

First sidesteps, then backsteps.

You have to run fast just to stand still.


spin

spin

I do love blanket dismissals that show lack of knowledge in the field just to stick with your initial overgeneralization.

More throwing out of babies with the bathwater. When you remove the encrustations of French minstrelry and the politics of Geoffrey of Monmouth from your imagination, you start to come closer to knowing what the reality was. You can't use popular culture to give you knowledge of the past.

This response is just more of your hyperbole. Nuance will allow you to make more learned comments about the past. And healthy agnosticism will help you not to say things you know nothing about.

When you put aside the crap we have floating around in our brains we have the hope of being more reliable in our judgments. Mixing Arthur with apocryphal traditions is very easy to do because they are so frequently presented premixed in popular culture.

There are three positions a scholar can be in regarding the existence of past figures/events:

1. X existed,
2. X didn't exist, and
3. we can't say one way or the other.

You blithely ignore this third position because of your easy but simplistic approach. The religionist usually goes for the easy and simplistic. You should be out of that trap. A dictum you should remember is "lack of evidence is not evidence of lack". And you might like "what you don't know can come back to haunt you." It is more scholarly to talk about what you can and what others can't.


spin

spamandham

Claims of the miraculous were commonplace at the time, including rising from the dead. In addition to being pure speculation, it does not address the problem.

There is no reason to presuppose a real historical Jesus would have been a peasant, and every reason to presume he would not have been. This is more speculation.

I'm guessing you weren't raised a 1st century Jew. At any rate, messianic expectations, apocalyptic ideas, the son of god idea, the teachings of Jesus - all of these were commonplace.

This has been discussed to death, but at any rate, even supposing James was a biological brother of Jesus, his role is very minor in the history of the church. What about the other brothers of the lord you claim were also blood brothers? What about the brothers listed in the gospels? What about their children? What about Jesus' own children?

Josephus records a story of the body of a crucified man being turned over for burial, and this is exactly what the gospels record happened in the case of Jesus. How could the story that Pilate turned over the body for burial even take root if this was an unheard of practice? Recall that in the story, Jesus was turned over to a wealthy man - a man of political influence. There is nothing implausible in the least with that. What is the basis of presuming that the choreographed crucifixion is historical but that the turning over of a body for burial is not?

The gospels were not written with the intent of accurately recording history. They are religious texts first and foremost. The idea that they contain facts that the writers found inconvenient is absurd and needs to be demonstrated before being accepted, rather than simply assumed.

In regard to symbolism, we could discuss whatever you think is not symbolic and not drawn from preexisting ideas, and not a rip off of someone else's theology.

Sheshbazzar

The Jesus Christ god/man as presented within the NT texts is certainly a mythical creation.

IF there ever was an actual flesh and blood 1st century teacher/rabbi that served as the nucleus of the Christian created mythology, he was not that Jesus Christ depicted in the NT, but only a person about which nothing at all can be known with any certainty.

IF by some chance, some actual valid archaeological or documentary evidence ever did turn up that provided indisputable evidence for the existence of this individual, it would still not validate the mythological claims presented within the NT, that individual could never have been the 'Jesus Christ' that is presented within the texts.
IE. there were many 1st century Jewish teachers wearing sandals, with nothing particular to identify one from another, 'he' could have been any one of them, or an amalgamation of many.
Whatever 'he' really was, or was really like, he certainly was NOT that miracle-working character created by the Christian writers.
And thus, if 'he' was not born of a virgin, did not raise the dead, did not ascend into the clouds in the sight of men, then this unknown individual most certainly is not THE 'Jesus Christ' of the NT texts nor of the Christian religion.
He could not 'save' or 'help' anyone, nor even so much as save himself from being transformed by the Gospel/church writers into an overdone parody.
I say unequivocally that the Jesus written about in the Christian Cannon and idolised by Christians does not exist, and never has existed.

As a Hebrew I say, if they had known haShem 'YHWH', then they would also know 'YAH-hoshua' and no other, (and knowing these, would have never had need of all the lies they wrote)

stephan huller

What's this all about? The oldest attested form of the name Jesus is Irenaeus's Yeshu. I suppose the Marcionite Isu was already in existence then. I don't think that the earliest Aramaic speaking Christians referred to him as יְהוֹשֻׁעַ‎ All evidence (rabbinic, Irenaeus) points to Yeshu. That doesn't mean that a historical figure named Joshua could have had his name contracted subsequent to his birth. But even the Marcionite Isu seems to go back to an Aramaic rendering of Iesous. I see no signs of anyone calling Jesus 'Joshua'

spin

You can't replace dogma with dogma and what you've said here seems to me just as dogmatic as any religionist you try to respond to.

Talking about proper hypotheses might be fine in theory, but what is at stake here is a relatively clear issue: did Jesus exist? You like anybody else can wave hands and claim one way or another. The issue can only be decided on evidence. My understanding of the available evidence is that no-one can show sufficient evidence to demonstrate the existence of Jesus. That should end the discussion and one should quit while they're ahead. However, there is a cultural fallacy that we need to say more (which I guess in this case is in reaction to the long establishment of christian hegemony). But that's where a lot of people get into trouble. The naive use of the argument from silence is a classic example. It only works when you can demonstrate that the silence is unexpected in the relevant conditions. Nobody goes the extra yard to show that it is--they merely claim it, as you do here. (Spot check: how many Roman historians can you cite who were writing in the 30s and 40s of the first century?? There is a gaping hole until the 2nd c.) We are yet again left with the fact that "the lack of evidence is not evidence of lack".

We have inherited a tradition that people take to represent a past reality. It is in itself not a hypothesis. The historical Jesus as we have the term today is a post hoc hypothesis to try to give modern order to the inherited cultural artefact. It's just another cultural artefact. Shooting at it doesn't really deal with the underlying issue: did Jesus exist? There is nothing strange about the simple question. We have traditions about Jesus that portray him as having lived in this world, suggesting he existed. However, traditions are not evidence of history in that one cannot test the veracity of the content of the tradition. That does not mean one can simply dismiss the tradition as though none of it has any veracity, even though it may be the case. However, the scholarly position doesn't need to deal with it substantively, for as I said the onus is always on the substantive case. If one goes over the line and claims that something does not exist, that is in itself a substantive case, which needs evidence. No amount of handwaving will allow one to dismiss the position they have put themselves in by claiming too much.

Jesus has not been shown to exist and no amount of assumptions that he did will change his status. At the same time Jesus has not been shown not to exist and subterfuge won't change that. But it is not necessary to posit this non-existence of Jesus: one can't say anything meaningful about history until the matters can be shown to have historicity.


spin

Sheshbazzar

Its about what it is about. I do not believe in 'Jesus' Christ, nor that there ever was a man with some other spelling or pronunciation that did those things written in the Christian texts.
How Marcion, Irenaeus, or the earliest Aramaic speaking 'Christians' may have written or pronounced Jesus or Joshua is of little application to me, as I most certainly do not believe the things they wrote.

As far as 'Joshua' the son of Nun, (along with Moses) he also is a nonentity to me, a 'Jewish' 'historical' figure wholly fabricated by the leaders of 'Judaism' for political/social propaganda purposes.

I do NOT call Jesus 'Joshua'. I do not believe a man by either 'name' (or by any other name) ever born did those things that are written in the Christian cannon.
Lies and fabrications in any other name, would still only be lies and fabrications.

haShem YHWH is not a man. And that 'YAH-hoshua' of which I write is not a man, never was and never will be.

stephan huller

But there is no evidence his name was ever written out in the 'full' form of יְהוֹשֻׁעַ‎ It was either (according to Irenaeus Book Two Against Heresies) a two and a half letter Hebrew name yeshu or (according to the Marcionites) Iesous (I assume that the form Isu in Ephrem represents an attempt to capture the Greek in Syriac.

I don't see what relevance your line of reasoning brings to the conversation. As far as I can see there are only two interpretations for what the original name Christians identified 'Jesus' by - Ἰησοῦς which has a numerological value of 888 (and thus is related to the opening words of the Song of the Sea 'then sang' cf. Mimar Marqe Book Two and has something to do with baptism) and ישו

I can see no numerological significance to the name ישו which equals 316 (although the adding of another shin makes the number of the beast according to some manuscripts of revelation. That interesting bit of nonsense aside I see no evidence for identifying Jesus with the long form of the name Joshua.

Sheshbazzar

We are talking about two entirely different things. It is entirely irrelevant to me how early Christians chose to write the name of their imaginary diety.
A rose by any other name would still smell the same.....
A steaming pile of shit by any other name still smells the same, call it a pile of shit or call it gospel, it still stinks just the same.
Simply changing the spelling of the name of the protagonist doesn't remove the stench.

I am not engaged with 'identifying Jesus with the long form of the name Joshua.' YOU are the one doing all the talking about names for Jesus.
I'm talking about something much older.