squiz

Hi Jeffrey,
Could you please point us to some other examples of greco roman biographies (I assume that is what you mean by bioi) that might illustrate what you mean by this genre.
Thanks.

Jeffrey Gibson

This material has been set out by Richard A Burridge in his What Are the Gospels: A Comparison with Graeco-Roman Biography which can be read on Google Books here.

For a summary and review of Burridge's book, see the Bryn Mawr Classical Review's discussion of it at http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/bmcr/2005/2005-05-31.html

You'll also want to look at A Preface to Mark: Notes on the Gospel in Its Literary and Cultural Settings by Christopher Bryan, a relevant snippet of which is here:

I wonder if Malachi has read either of these works.

Jeffrey

DCHindley

Tammuz,

Are you assuming that ALL Christian literature did not exist? You would pretty much have to if you are asking whether non-Christian literature provides enough detail to reconstruct the Jesus proposed in the NT.

That being said, and assuming you are asking us to assume that all Christian literature did not exist, I think the passages that survive now (but which may not have survived had they not mentioned something that Christians thought referred to their Christ) would stand out as "odd" enough to cause scholars (and there would be such, although all modern western scholarship has been heavily influenced by Christianity and its dogma) to propose that they were glosses of some type.

Most especially the passages in Josephus, for reasons I doubt I'll have to enumerate here:

"Now, there was about this time Jesus, a wise man, if it be lawful to call him a man, for he was a doer of wonderful works, a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure. He drew over to him both many of the Jews, and many of the Gentiles. He was [the] Christ. And when Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal men amongst us, had condemned him to the cross, those that loved him at the first did not forsake him; for he appeared to them alive again the third day; as the divine prophets had foretold these and ten thousand other wonderful things concerning him. And the tribe of Christians, so named from him, are not extinct at this day." [Antiquities, 18]

"[Ananus] assembled the Sanhedrim of judges, and brought before then the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ, whose name was James, and some others. And when he had formed an accusation against them as breakers of the law, he delivered them to be stoned." [Antiquities, 20]

But also in Tacitus, although there we would only know him as "Christus":

"Nero fastened the guilt [for the fire that burned does much of Rome] and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judaea, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their centre and become popular." [Tacitus, Annals 15.44]

Similar perhaps is Suetonius, although we would know the name as "Chrestus" (or even perhaps as a drug or substance as I have proposed elsewhere, an option that would be a little bit more likely to be proposed had scholars not known of the Jesus Christ of the NT and Christian literature):

"As the Jews were making constant disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus, he Claudius expelled them from Rome." [The Life of Claudius 25.4]

I think that pretty much exhausts the list!

So, from the accounts of Tacitus and Suetonius (which are odd but not crazy odd), we would know about some Christus (or perhaps Chrestus) who "suffered the extreme penalty [inferring crucifixion] during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators [actually a prefect], Pontius Pilatus", the superstitious followers of whom, called "Christians," practiced abominations that originated in Judaea but later caused troubles in Rome itself.

I am not sure how Josephus' account would be received, other than perhaps filling in the pieces about this Christ, namely, that he was named Jesus, and that he held the title of "Christ" (whatever that term was supposed to mean, since he otherwise only uses the word to refer to stucco on the roof of Solomon's temple), had followers among gentiles as well as Jews, that Pilate executed him by crucifixion, and that Jesus "showed himself alive" to his followers three days after his death. It might be reasoned by our hypothetical scholars that his followers at least thought they saw him alive after his execution, and this may account for what Tacitus called their "superstition". They may also come away thinking this Jesus had a brother who was executed by the Judaean high priest Ananus for breaking Jewish law around 62 CE. As for date, they would also know Pontius Pilate was ruler of Judaea between 26 & 36 CE (well, actually, the equivalent dates in the reigning dating system in use among our hypothetical scholars), and that the account in Ant 18 is placed among events that can be otherwise dated to around 35 CE (Mundus & Paulina, I think), and would thus likely date him toward the end of his governorship.

DCH

Tammuz

I posited that the New Testament was never written, that all that was aivailable was stuff from other sources.

As for Tacitus, I don't think he provides evidence for a historical Jesus. He writes what he heard from Christians, not based on information in Roman docuements (then he would have written "Jesus" instead of "Christus").

Jeffrey Gibson

OK. So who cobbled all of that "stuff" together into the form it has in, say, Sinaiticus, and when did he/she/they do it?

And what sources in particular was all that "stuff" that now appears in Matthew to Revelation available in?

Jeffrey

mountainman

Constantine, The Boss, between 312 and 324 CE, and then followed through by its lavish publication. He had the absolute power to mock the empire with an imperially devised fiction, and since he was the Pontifex Maximus from 312 CE.

Pagan wisdom sayings abound - the rest is fiction. The Logos got a new sponsor and a new name. Divinity was rebadged under the Boss.


And what if your man Justin Martyr was just another obvious part of the later fabrication.

Best wishes,


Pete Brown

Jeffrey Gibson

Gee. Whoever would have thought that you'd give us this answer!

But the question was not directed to you, so I'd be grateful if you'd keep your opinion to yourself.

Jeffrey

squiz

For what my opinion is worth, I must side with Jeffrey on this one. It is all a bit repetitive. I am getting tired of hearing him called "the Boss" too. Which Roman leaders weren't like a mafia Boss? The whole system ran on patronage.

lpetrich

If we only had non-Xian sources for the first few centuries of Xianity, we would not have much to work from. Tacitus, Josephus (if genuine), Pliny the Younger, Lucian of Samosata, Apuleius, Fronto, Celsus, etc.

The earliest sources say hardly anything, like Pliny the Younger's describing people who worship "Christ as a god", while later ones get more detailed, like Lucian's describing the followers of a "crucified sophist", and Celsus arguing that Xianity is not as great or as original as it purports to be.

And the criticisms range from the relatively level-headed ones of Celsus all the way to mudslinging about drunken orgies and baby-eating like Fronto's.

ETA: archeologically, there wouldn't be much either; some of the main archeological evidence of early Xianity is the Alexamenos graffito, which shows a man worshipping a crucified man with a donkey's head, captioned "Alexamenos worships god".

mens_sana

Thank you for the referral to Burridge, Jeffrey. The Bryn Mawr article is an excellent review. For some time now, I've been thinking of the Gospel authors as latter-day Deuteronomists.