bacht

hi ercatli

I'm an amateur coming from an evangelical background

The first problem with Jesus is that the four gospels contain contradictory descriptions (how was he born? when did he die? what is the kingdom of God? does it include gentiles? etc)

The gospels don't actually claim to be history, they are writing about the "good news" of God's revelation.

The epistles have no biographical data about Jesus and don't mention most of the gospel characters like John the Baptist or Pilate.

There is no external evidence for Jesus' existence. The passages in Josephus, Tacitus et al are problematic. The purported references in Jewish literature are late.

The people who need to believe in the historical Jesus are those with theological interest in the matter ie. Christians. The presence of God on earth is a key part of the tradition, supposedly making it distinct from other religions.

Finally, the NT witnesses are believers in miracles, demons, resurrection etc, all of which are scientifically untestable. For me their testimony is suspect because of their gullibility and/or superstition. For the same reason I'm dubious of the reports of believers in seances or Bigfoot. Even modern educated people are susceptible to irrational notions, so clearly our ancestors must've been also.

aa5874

But where is the evidence?

You have constantly mentioned experts not the evidence.

You just claimed you have looked at evidence but you appear only to look at numbers. You only believe the majority, you only go with the flow.

Do you not understand that dissenters cannot initially be a majority?

I do not based my views on numbers. I do not do head counts.

And, I am actually with the majority, that is, the MAJORITY of the information in the NT and Church writings suppoprt a mythological Jesus.

Virtually all the information about Jesus, from conception to ascension, could have only been believed or intended to be believed for the Jesus story to make any sense.

If people today can believe Jesus existed without any physical evidence, anyone at any time could have believed Jesus did exist when he did not.

Marcion proved it.

Marcion claimed, since the 2nd century, that Jesus only seemed real, and many believed.

And there is NO historical evidence outside of the NT and the Church writings of a physical Jesus only a belief.

show_no_mercy

Well, again, it's not like history is locked away in some secret vault by scholars and historians. You have access to all of the same documents that they have. You can simply read the literature of the time period that the gospels were written in to get a feel for the sociological context -- like Josephus, Pliny, Philo, the Dead Sea Scrolls community, etc.

I admit it takes knowing a little Greek to understand my conclusion. The word "Peter" comes from the Greek word for "rock". In Mark, Jesus preaches his word to The Rock. The Rock receives the word with joy, even going so far as to proclaim that when persecution comes, he'll die with Jesus. But in the end The Rock runs away at the first sign of trouble and is never heard from again. This was "predicted" by Jesus in his parable of the Sower:

Mark 4
3 "Listen! A farmer went out to sow his seed.
4 As he was scattering the seed, some fell along the path, and the birds came and ate it up.
5 Some fell on rocky places, where it did not have much soil. It sprang up quickly, because the soil was shallow.
6 But when the sun came up, the plants were scorched, and they withered because they had no root.

[...]

13 Then Jesus said to them, "Don't you understand this parable? How then will you understand any parable?
14 The farmer sows the word.
[...]
16 Others, like seed sown on rocky places, hear the word and at once receive it with joy.
17 But since they have no root, they last only a short time. When trouble or persecution comes because of the word, they quickly fall away.

Matthew refutes this by using another pun on the word "rock":

Matt 16:18 And I tell you that you are Peter [The Rock], and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it

Notice that this line is only in Matthew, the first gospel that grants Peter et. al. a resurrection appearance.

We have the documents -- which are just writings. Writings express people's beliefs, nothing else. If we had some writings from the man himself, then we could say what he thought. As it is, we only have the thoughts of the people that wrote about him.

There's no archaeology that confirms Jesus' place in history any more than the existence of NYC confirms the existence of Spiderman.

The point of me bringing up John was what he was refuting. Which is just beliefs about Jesus. I don't see why you're bringing up the synoptics, since none of them depict Jesus as a spirit being that only looked human. That was the belief of the sect(s) of Christians who lost and were eventually wiped out by the Catholics... like Marcion's Jesus.

I'm saying we should treat them the same. We should treat theological texts as theological texts, whether it's theology about Jesus or Zeus. The DSS community had an agenda too, which means we shouldn't treat everything they write as 100% factual reporting.

This is where you would question their methodology. It's not some super-secret, esoteric methodology. The Jesus Seminar concluded that only 18% of the sayings of Jesus that arrive to us today were said by him. But how did they arrive at that number? They assumed the Jesus they were looking for and only accepted the sayings they thought this Jesus would have said. I hope I don't have to point out that this is simply circular, and is why every time some scholar or popular writer tries to find the "historical Jesus" we end up with a different Jesus every time. All based on the assumptions used to winnow that Jesus from these theological writings.

spin

This is closer to reality than "In my previous discussion, I argued a case..."

So, you're back to this, well, here:

1. Would you trust analyses of Palestine and Palestinians written by most Israelis?
2. Would you trust analyses of Israel and Israelis written by most Palestinians?
3. Would you trust analyses of Soviet actions and motivations written by Cold War era Americans?
4. Would you trust analyses written by Turks about Armenian events at the start of the 20th century?
5. Would you trust analyses of Jews written by Europeans in the centuries before WWII?
6. Would you habitually trust analyses of your progressive politicians by your conservative politicians?
7. Would you habitually trust analyses of your conservative politicians by your progressive politicians?
8. Would you trust analyses of the experts who tried Galileo?
9. Would you trust analyses of the experts who banned books such as Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Ulysses, or Catcher in the Rye?
10. Would you trust analyses of the history between catholics and protestants written by protestants?
11. Would you trust analyses of the history between catholics and protestants written by catholics?
12. Would you trust analyses of early christian heresies written by early "orthodox" christians?
13. Would you trust documents you cannot date, cannot place geographically or culturally, of which you cannot say who the authors were and cannot support with any contemporary evidence?

Look at them this time, so that you think more about the issue of bias. You cannot simply trust good intentions. You need perspective, which means you have to do something actively to learn more, to get perspective, not just trust the trusted. When the early church writer Epiphanius wrote about the founder of the Ebionite movement, Ebion, he trusted his received tradition, handed to him by his older colleagues or found in trusted writers (such as Tertullian), but we know the Ebionite movement got its name from the Hebrew (BYWN, meaning "poor", and that Ebion was a tradition engendered phantom. He is a prime example of how the non-existent can be believed to have existed.

Your task is, and always will be, to know how to extract evidence from "documents you cannot date, cannot place geographically or culturally, of which you cannot say who the authors were and cannot support with any contemporary evidence" and which were preserved by the workers of the religion.

I wasn't after their reasons, but evidence. You've already shown that they've got none.

I've already indicated this is flawed. Would you ask a biologist about physics? You are asking text scholars and religious scholars about history. You are asking people who are generally committed to the religion to make unbiased calls that may impact on the religion. You are the trusting asking to be led by the trusted.

Ducking and weaving. This is par for the course.




spin

andrewcriddle

The word used in this parable for rocky places by Mark (and Matthew) is PETRWDHS rock-like. This is a different though closely related word to PETRA rock from which Peter's name derives.

If Mark had wished in this parable to allude to Peter, he would in all probability have used rock PETRA as Luke does in his version of the parable.

Andrew Criddle

Solo

"There is a case for telling the truth; there is a case for avoiding the scandal; but there is no possible defense for the man who tells the scandal, but does not tell the truth."

G.K. Chesterton

Minimalist

Regarding Ehrman, perhaps you should start. There is a myth that these documents are somehow unchanged and we have thousands of examples showing that there have been errors in the copying process. We also have virtually complete copies of the Codex Vaticanus and the Codex Sinaiticus which differ from modern bibles. Ehrman wrote over 200 pages detailing nearly 300 years of biblical scholarship. I cannot give that to you in a few pithy comments on a message board.

The Gone With The Wind reference is simple. Any character in any novel exists within the pages of that novel. If you were to go looking for historical references to Scarlett O'Hara outside GWTW you would not find anything indicating that she was real. So, by concentrating on the gospels and looking for "jesus" you will find exactly what you want to find. It is when you start to look outside the gospel that he becomes more fictional.

spin

Running with good company.


spin

ercatli

Hi DNAR,

There are some good thoughtful comments there for me to interact with. Thank you.

Let's start here. Strictly, we cannot really know anything. We may be brains in a vat or victims of the Matrix for all we know. But most of us assume life is real. So I don't have any illusions about having historical certainty or belief certainty. The best any of us can do is probability, and I am happy with that.

So of course I agree with you here. But (1) we can still assess what we think is most probable, and that is what we all do, on both sides of the debate, and (2) "Jesus is a myth" is as much a definite statement as "Jesus is historical", and both require evidence. Without evidence, we should all be Jesus-agnostics.

What would you regard as "scant" vs "reasonable" evidence for a historical matter 2 millennia ago? How do you think the evidence for jesus rates compared to the evidence for other writings, other persons, other events of similar location and age?

Of course. But it could also be right - in fact "probable" obviously means it is more likely to be right than wrong.

I think this is an important statement you have made, and I agree with you. So you see we agree on quite a lot. That was the premise I began this thread with. I start with the historical probabilities, I agree that he probably existed and that we can know with probability that he said and did certain things - that's what the historians tell us. My belief is then based on those conclusions and takes me beyond the purely historical conclusions. But of course I have no way of being certain, any more than anyone else has.

But I thought we had agreed there isn't an absence of evidence, just an absence of certainty? The historians tell us there is actually good evidence by historical standards, but not enough for certainty. So how do you personally resolve the matter?

Thanks for your comments. We have agreed on a few things, I would like to see your answers to my questions plus whether you would suggest any further things for me to think about. Best wishes.

ercatli

OK. But I'm not sure what you want me to do with that comment, nor what comment you have on my conclusions. Can you give me a little more to work with please? Thanks.