mg01

I picked up on these things as well. In particular, how by his own defintion from Part 1, all New Testament writings are "forgeries", though he never used with respect to them, but does so repeatedly with non-canonical works. Hypocrisy or careful not to offend?

In discussing the heresiologists, he almost becomes one of them. Hindsight of course makes the claims of any winner seem serendipitous. However claims of "our ways is right, theirs is wrong" echoed from every camp. There are repeated references to the "strange beliefs" of the Gnostics who thought the "proto-Orthodox" views were simply incomplete. In that sense, many parts come off as one sided in failing to mention had things worked out differently we would be be studing the writings of an entirely different set of Church fathers.

GakuseiDon

How I've always answered it: (1) There is very little evidence to conclude that there was a HJ, but it does seem to be the best fit for the evidence we do have, and (2) a well-formed MJ theory would overturn that conclusion.

mg01

I'm not sure what you are getting at here. Messianic expectation underlies much of Jewish thought. Different groups attached different degrees of divinity: from YHWH's earthly anointed king, to divine redeeming messenger, to spiritual emissary to our unrecognized, true, hidden self. There were probably more diverse versions of Jesus in the first few centuries then there are today.

aa5874

This is just mind-boggling.

A person who claims not to know if there was an historical Jesus still believes he has a strong case for his beliefs.

Believers do not need evidence, they just believe.

mountainman

Like a Special Theory of the Relativity of "Christian origins" and the archaeological record according to (future!!!) masses of C14 citations very late. And the General Theory of the Relativity of "Christian Origins" according to the C14 all very late. Technology cannot be dismissed as puller-out of the lynchpin in the field of ancient history in the 21st century.

Its kind of a reverse sort of thing. Einstein took space and time which were presumed to be disparate and independent and showed that they were connected by a relativity into a "space-time continuum. With the modern history of "Jesus Christ" studies, it seems that the opposite is going to happen. The Jesus and the Christ - once considered inseparable - are going to become independent identies. The historical "Jesus" as a person or any of his followers and their writings cannot be found early. However the concept of "Christ" ("annointed" - to do with the end of long involved yoga and/or ascetic practices; or "truth"?) business was around BCE, related to ideas and concepts of the Hellenistic civilisation -- it was not a personal thing, but a term applied, like the term "chrestos" which was also extremely popular, but having a different meaning entirely. 2c. no change req'd.

Doug Shaver

That depends on how narrowly you define intellectual honesty.

Myself, I prefer a rather broad construal. I doubt that there was a historical Jesus, but I do not believe that everyone who disagrees with me is being intellectually dishonest.

ApostateAbe

You may have me mixed up with someone else. For as long as I remember, it is the first time I have brought up this argument. It strikes me as a strange way to think that characters like Socrates and Muhammad may not have existed. Socrates may be just a myth? Shoot. What about Pythagoras? I guess he could have been a mythical figure, very analogous to Jesus, the leading figure of a cult. Things seem to fit together much more adequately when I imagine those people as humans. Yeah, Augustus Caesar as myth would be really stretching that viewpoint.
Yeah, Paul doesn't talk about the physical life of Jesus much. But there is Galatians 4:4, where Paul claims that Jesus was born of a woman. There is also Romans 1:2-4, where Paul says, "the gospel he promised beforehand through his prophets in the Holy Scriptures regarding his Son, who as to his human nature was a descendant of David, and who through the Spirit of holiness was declared with power to be the Son of God by his resurrection from the dead: Jesus Christ our Lord." Plenty of spiritual stuff mixed in for sure, but the physical human stuff is also very clear--human nature, descendant of David, resurrected from the dead. What do you think?

ApostateAbe

Yeah, that is a good point. There have been many living men who have been turned into gods. I can't think of any man-myths who turned into god-myths.

Toto

Quite a few people have brought up this bogus argument, and it is always refuted and debunked. I assumed you had been around long enough to have seen that.

Hercules as a myth? Zeus as a myth? What's the difference between that and Jesus as a myth?

The physical side is not very clear. We don't know when Paul's Jesus was born or died, where he lived or preached. We don't know his mother's name. "Seed of David" and "born of a woman" are formulaic (and might well be interpolations - but even if they aren't, give us no real information.)

And Paul's source of information about Jesus is either revelation or reading the Scriptures.

There are many examples of mythic personages who have been historicized. William Tell never existed. The Jesus Project has been discussing Ned Ludd, a similar historicized "person." And there are people who are convinced that Sherlock Holmes was real, and spend their time harmoninzing the various works about him.

Of course, when you go back more than a few centuries, you often do not know if a minor figure in history was real or legendary. For most of these figures, historians are willing to live with the uncertainty.

mg01

However the "Messiah concept" is without question derived from Jewish scriptures, so much so that the one true thing we can say concerning the origin of "Messianity", is it began with a re-interpretation of what the prophets were saying in relation to the Messsiah and the "day of YHWH". Isn't the real question then what is the origin of this concept?

In fact, so little is left when you peel away the layers of tradition all you need for a founding figure (FF) is someone to articulate the already discussed "scriptural messiah" into a "yet to come, end of eon, redeeming, spiritual figure". Toss in a group of followers (splinter group?) and you have a movement within a movement. Add the idea that belief in the "gospel of the messiah" means trancending death and you have a revered figure who survived the grave. All that's left is for latter followers to associate the FF as the Messiah who made an appearance to deliver the gospel (of himself) but will return again for the appearance prophecised in scripture. Mix in other groups with their own interpretations and different degrees of identification of FF with scriptural messiah and you've set the stage for several centuries of debate leading to a formal orginization of one particular interpretation.

So what may be likely is the historical founder achieved divinity a bit differently than his compatriates, by being associated with a prophicised heavenly being.

I tend then to agree with mountianman's idea of the two being seperate but later associated. This seems to solve the dilemma of "how the proclaimer became the proclaimed".