lpetrich

There's a spectrum of possibilities:

1. Jesus Christ was 100% mythical.
2. Jesus Christ was 100% human and 0% god and had worked no miracles, but the non-miraculous parts of the Gospels are as close to accurate as one might expect from some ancient history.
3. Jesus Christ was a miracle-working god-human hybrid, and the Gospels are entirely accurate.

Most secular scholars who have evaluated the question have come to conclusions in between 1 and 2, with some of them coming very close to 1 while maintaining that there had been a historical Jesus Christ. I once saw someone compare Jesus Christ to Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie and how Rastafarians had made a divinity out of him (Against Mythicism: A Case for the Plausibility of a Historical Jesus). It's almost as if going all the way to 1 is too big a leap for them to make.

Liberal-Xian ones vary, some of them seemingly being between 1 and 2, and some of them between 2 and 3, as far as one can tell from their writings, which can sometimes be very difficult to interpret.

Traditionalists and fundies are all pretty much at 3.

Turning to how mainstream scholars views other ancient people, their views tend toward 2 for those who are close in time to their chroniclers, and to 1 for those who are far in time. For instance, Livy's History of Rome is usually considered fairly close to 2 for the Scipios and 1 for Romulus and Remus. I mention the Scipios here because their tombs have survived, complete with epitaphs for them.

So I think that the burden of proof falls on anyone who claims 1 for Jesus Christ, perhaps also 2, and certainly for greater than 2.

gdeering

Why? TBoP (to coin some letters) isn't a hot potato, in this case I don't see 3 as the default position - except by the faithful and their accumulated superstition. Both 1 and 3 have little evidence to support their positions. In fact 3 is more troublesome intellectually than 1.

Yet, for 2 there is absolutely no evidence, and also can not be a default. It's a compromise masquerading as common wisdom (half-measures often do until scrutinized). Furthermore, the 1-2-3 designations are not really a spectrum, the more proof we have to support 1 the less convincing the arguments for 3 are; yet this has only a glancing effect on 2.

We may end up with the "Jesus of the Gaps" as so much of the NT is shown to be Midrash, but even we could prove that the Gospel writers made the whole thing up - we could still not show the there was not an historical source to what they recreated and padded.

I assume TBoP will always reamain what the other person has to prove first.



Gregg

mountainman

Do you or others see any difference between the statement that
Jesus Christ was 100% mythical, and
Jesus Christ was 100% fictional.

Chili

So is fiction real?

The argument from their point of view wherein we never die is that myth is real. And don't forget that we are temporal only because eternity is real and death only can be conceived to exist because life real and we are alive only in life itself, which then is why some people are more alive than others and they can talk about fully alive or life to the fullest etc.

Others will argue that 'the unexamined life is not worth living' and the concept God is native to us in that potentially all humans can be God through realization . . . and also by way of rapture whereof it is said that 'when the ego raptures that which remains is in heaven.'

lpetrich

I was thinking that the mainstream secular opinion about Jesus Christ is in the range 1.5 to 2, and that anything outside of that range must have the burden of proof.

I do agree that 3 is less supportable than 1.

No evidence???

What would you consider acceptable evidence?

Would it be the sort of evidence that you'd consider OK about any of his contemporaries?

How so?

I think that it's a spectrum in the amount of historicity.

Not really, since they both agree on how historical JC had been.

dog-on

Of course, position 1 could simply be position 3 minus faith.

gdeering

What would satisfy me as evidence, for a historical Jesus? For starters it would have to be non-religious, and not tampered with (like Josephus). I would not expect coins or monuments. Any simple reference or corroborative tidbit. A negative contemporary reference would be great. It would have to be about Jesus himself, I accept that people believed in Jesus and that they could have left some record.

Plus - if there is an historical core, your #2 - then we don’t even know his real name, only a possible translation into Greek, and if I’m not mistaken, that name could be either Jesus or Joshua? Was he an “end of days” fanatic, a wise man of peace or a rebel, there is no consensus on what we might be looking for, so how is there any consensus that he existed, other than the Gospels must be based on something?



I accept the possibility that there might have been some one fairly insignificant individual who is lost to history. I also accept that this person need not have existed to generate the level one fiction that superstitious people easily believe is level three; and it is because of two thousand years of level three that we now have people asserting level two as fact. Make sense? I dunnno….

I hoped I was clearer in my previous post; if, by weight of example, we are eventually able to show #3 is a fabrication, like all the other religious stories, it still has no effect on the question of whether there was a real (mortal) Jesus. It can only eliminate the stories. So if 3 becomes 1 than it will still leave 2.


Gregg

lpetrich

Why would the Gospels be unsatisfactory as evidence?

It's true that telling fact from fiction in the Gospels can be awfully difficult, but I don't think that that proves that the Gospels are totally unhistorical.

The case of King Arthur is an analogous one, and I think that it illustrates how the historical-Jesus debate might have gone in the absence of doctrinal commitments. There have been lots of arguments over who the historical King Arthur might had been, if he existed at all, without any clear conclusion.

I agree that that's a big problem with the Gospels.

The first three broadly agree, but they contain word-for-word copies. It's usually though that the authors of Matthew and Luke had built upon Mark.

However, John is so different that I've seen it called a Platonic dialogue rather than a literal biography.

Chaucer

On the contrary, those who adopt position 1 have a very strong faith. It takes strong faith to buck such a wide range of circumstantial details, each of which works in tandem with the principle of consilience, since each of them as a group point to the distinct _probability_ of an historical entirely human Jesus. To choose to adopt instead so many different case-specific hypotheses, each of which works in utterly individual and case-specific ways with each of the separate details, is to entertain such a staggering series of coincidences, ignoring so completely the parsimonious principle of Occam's razor, as to leave faith the only plausible reason possible why anyone would stick with position 1 at all.

Chaucer

ApostateAbe

Your standard certainly leaves you no choice but to reject the position that Jesus was historical, and I think the reasons you give represent the general thinking among such advocates: "For starters it would have to be non-religious, and not tampered with (like Josephus)." Yes, there are no contemporary non-religious accounts of Jesus. The original Testimonium Flavianum probably reported on Jesus, and it was either neutral or negative (Origen reported that Josephus did not believe that Jesus was the Christ, though the TF as it is today stated that Jesus was the Christ). But, the The Antiquities of the Jews was written in 90 CE, and Josephus never saw Jesus--he was only commenting on the Christian myths. Probably the earliest known non-Christian writer on Christianity was Thallus, around 50 CE. We have knowledge of it only because of a paraphrase of a Christian of a quote of another Christian--two generations of repetition of the isolated quote were permanently lost and only the third generation survives. But even Thallus did not meet Jesus, nor do we know that he ever mentioned Jesus--he was only criticizing Christian myth. He thought that the darkness at Jesus' crucifixion was due to an eclipse.

In that time, writing did not survive unless it was copied continuously from generation to generation. The only people willing to do such a thing were religious scribes. Most of our knowledge of any ancient history is due to them. Otherwise, the writing disintegrated into dust.

Jesus-mythers tend to take their own position as the default position. Until evidence is provided to the contrary, they see it as reasonable to believe that Jesus was mythical or otherwise non-historical.

But, the way I see it, there should be no default position.

So what is the alternative? It is most reasonable to simply choose the theory that best explains the available evidence. There is not consensus among historical scholars on exactly who Jesus was, but they do have consensus that he existed, which is for good reasons. Similarly, there is no consensus among physicists on exactly what gravity is, but they do agree that it exists. I am sorry if the comparison comes off as insulting, but my point is that what should matter the most is evidence and probability, and there should not be a default position. There is strong evidence that Jesus existed. The evidence is excluded to Christian writings, but it is strong evidence all the same.

Paul in his letter to the Galatians reported on meeting James and Peter (Cephas). James is given the identifying title, "the Lord's brother," and Peter is identified as a strong leader of the Christian church. James is mentioned only in passing and Peter is mentioned in opposition with the author Paul. James is reported as a brother of Jesus in the Christian gospels and in the writing of Josephus, and Peter is identified as a direct disciple of Jesus in the gospels. There can be many explanations for these things, but the most probable explanation is that there really was a man named Jesus who had a brother named James and a disciple named Peter, both of whom met Paul.

The idea of excluding religious literature from the line-up of evidence is based on what can be a good way of thinking. You would much rather trust the unbiased sources. But, when you have nothing but biased religious sources, then it is responsible to make do with only those biased religious sources rather than discard them and think like you have no information at all. A similar problem exists for the Prophet Muhammad. There are no non-Islamic writing on Muhammad until centuries afterward. Since the earliest sources are Islamic, we must find the most likely theory using those Islamic sources to reconstruct the original character of Muhammad.