Ben C Smith

I am not sure what you are saying.

Independently... of what?

Perhaps if you gave an example or two of what you are talking about....

Ben.

gurugeorge

Well I don't know enough detail about things like this to give concrete examples, my query is more about the logic of what's going on. Say with deified emperors, we know from other parts of history and archaeology, that the emperors existed as human beings. So, when presented with a fantastical story about the emperor being the saviour of the world and a god-man and all the rest of it, we know the story isn't just a made-up story about a mythical entity because we know there were real human beings who were emperors and that they were subsequently deified.

Or say, with my Spiderman example, we have fantastic stories about Spiderman, set in a real historical setting, New York City, with occasional appearance of real-world characters. The real-world historical facts and characters in the story, however, do not in any way give the slightest logical reason why we should look for a "historical Spiderman". OTOH, had we found that there was some real vigilante who used something like Parkour techniques to defeat thugs, and we learnt that Stan Lee or Steve Ditko (Spiderman's creators) had heard of this guy and been inspired to create the Spiderman concept by him, we might say "ah yes, that was the "historical Spiderman".

IOW logically, the reason to suspect a real man behind a fantastic myth is an independently-identified real man who "fits the bill" in some relevant sense.

You don't look at a fantastic story and just because of the presence of historical details in it, immediately think, "ah there must be a real person behind this myth", do you? There's no logic to that, what kicks that line of thought off has to be the noticing of a real person who one can then match to the myth.

Clivedurdle

Ben you are desribing what sounds like may have been painful experiences. Imaginary friends - like Jesi - are a common way of coping with the stresses of life.

Before we get anywhere near an hj there are several layers of undergrowth to clear away:

human psychology, human pain and dreams
religious structures
effects of parents and key figures
analogous stories - spiderman.
imaginary friends


http://www.cyberhymnal.org/htm/w/a/f/wafwhij.htm

Warning this site has religious music!

Ben C Smith

This is a pitfall that I hope carefully to avoid. I often use the deified emperors as examples of mythicized historical figures, but only as a point of methodology, to prove that a genuine historical figure can have very elaborate legends wrapped around him or her. I also use examples like Romulus and Hercules to show that such deified or legendized figures may not be historical at all.

These examples stake out our limitations; we cannot use legend either to prove or to disprove an historical core. This is why we have to peel stuff back; maybe there is nothing under all the layers, maybe something, but we cannot tell without a process of peeling.

What I refuse to do is to claim that there is as much evidence, and of the hardest kind, for Jesus as there is for, say, a Roman imperator. If some omniscient angel were to tell me that either Jesus or Augustus was a real historical figure, but not both, I would choose Augustus as the real one every time. Same goes for Alexander, Charlemagne, and all manner of other high-profile figures from the past. We know most of those figures from the hardest kinds of evidence (contemporary coins and inscriptions and the like).

That is not the standard I am aiming for. My goal is more modest. I would probably compare the historicity of Jesus with that for, say, Apollonius of Tyana.

We know these things only from ancient evidence that we must evaluate. Josephus mentions a list of messianic pretenders, would-be-kings, and prophetic figures (Athronges, Theudas, many others) that we know only from texts, not from inscriptions or coins. Maybe Josephus made them up, but I say that we can evaluate whether or not these figures existed within an acceptable range of probability, even with no temples named after them and no coins struck in their honor.

How would you find this real vigilante? Surely from written texts (newspaper articles, perhaps) which you have evaluated somehow for probable accuracy. If you have a public building inscription naming this vigilante and his deeds, then you have the kind of evidence we have for Augustus (and even so such inscriptions should be evaluated). But, if all you have is newspaper articles, then you have texts. Newspaper articles can (and have been) incorrect, forged, and proven to be hoaxes. You are evaluating them for their probable truth value whether you realize it or not.

I certainly agree on the independent part. If it turns out that all of our potential knowledge concerning Jesus comes from a single noncontemporary or otherwise questionable source, that all other sources are dependent wholly on that one, then his historicity becomes quite difficult to establish. And I am willing to live with that consequence.

Of course not. Far from it.

Ben.

aa5874

There is no credible external non-apologetic data that supports a real Jewish prophet called Jesus.

The data in the NT SUPPORTS and EXPLAINS much, much better a myth called the Son of God, born of the Holy Ghost.



Matthew 1.23 [/b]

Luke 1.34 John 1.1-14 Acts 1.9 The data from the early Christian writers like Justin Martyr, Irenaeus,Tertullian, Origen and Eusebius SUPPORTS and EXPLAINS much, much better a myth called the Son of God, born of the Holy Spirit.

Irenaeus in Against Heresies 3.21.1 Eusebius in Church History 1.2.1 Justin Martyr in Dialogue with Trypho XLIII The authors of the NT and the early christian writers, like Justin, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Origen and Eusebius did NOT support Jesus as just human.

Amaleq13

Why would anyone expect it?

patcleaver

Historical Jesus is an essential part of the Christ Myth

For Jesus, one of the essential elements of the myth, is that god became man, so naturally there is going to be lots of material within the myth, that was invented to show that Jesus was a man. The material in the myth that shows that Jesus was a man is just part of the myth.

You can not peel away the myth to expose the man because being a man is an essential part of the myth itself – you would have to peel away the man part in order to really peel away the myth part because the man part is an essential part of the myth. That is why, in the case of Jesus, it is illegitimate to attempt to peel away the myth to find the man.

Ben C Smith

Augustus being a man is just as essential to the Caesar mythos as Jesus being a man is to the Christ mythos.

Ben.

gurugeorge

I don't think it's necessarily that one would expect it - one understands that historical traces are hard to come by. It's rather that, why would one even conceive of trying to tease out a man from the mythology unless one had reason to suspect, from credible, external, non-apologetic data that there was a man who might have been the man behind the myth?

Why is that so many peoples' first port of call?

I think it's just tradition, and that if non-Christian historians were just presented with these fantastic stories (say in jars in the desert), the euhemeristic approach wouldn't necessarily be what first occurs to them to try, especially given the way the thing looks - that this entity appears in the literary traces at first to be god-like and vague, and only later gets clothed with more and more concrete, man-like details.

patcleaver

No, the pharos were gods on earth, so there is nothing in the Caesar myth that requires that Caesar be a human man. There is nothing in the Caesar myth that makes being a man an essential part of the myth so that material might need to have been invented to show that he was really a man.

We know that material was invented to show that Jesus was a man, for example, when Luke tells us that Jesus sweat blood at Gethsemane Lk.22:44, which was not reported by Mark or Paul. The humanness of Jesus is just as much a part of the Jesus myth as the divinity of Jesus. Jesus is a pure myth.