Agemegos

Should I take it from this that for you, the defining quality of an historical Jesus is solely the continuity of the account from his acts and sayings to the written gospels? Or would you hold that there is some point beyond which distortion of and addition to the story make the person not an historical Jesus after all?

For example, suppose it turned out that the story of Jesus could be traced back to the trial and death of Socrates, with various retellers over the centuries deleting or adding a saying at a time, adding a miracle here and there to credulate the credulous, changing the setting and the character's religion to build sympathy, forgetting the wife, children, and affairs with younger men because they didn't suit the theme, and finally slathering on a thick coat of Messianic stucco; but suppose that each person in the chain who told the story felt that he was telling in essence and important particulars the same story. Would you then say that Socrates was the historical Jesus?

Afghan

Well I'm no historian and I haven't really had a good look at the mythicist argument but my position goes something like this...

• There once was a religious teacher called Yeshua
• In 1st Century Roman Judaea
• Who was executed in or around the prefecture/procurate of Pontius Pilate
• And whose followers carried on the movement
• Of which Paul later became part.

As I say, I'm no expert but that is my amateur understanding. But it could at least open the bidding.

Vorkosigan

Hmmm....well, I doubt there was an historical Jesus. So if you propose one to me, I am going to ask about how you recovered any history from the texts. I don't consider that there is any valid methodology for peeling back the "embellishments" and finding the HJ there; the contention of a historical core looks like a variant of Popper's conventionalist twist, at least to me.

That said, I really cannot say offhand what an HJ would look like. It is a good question you've asked, as I said above. It would depend on the particular piece of evidence and its relationships. It would probably be entirely ad hoc. It would have to be some excellent "hard" evidence from archaeology, or a new text that could be demonstrated to have minimal or no tampering, that supplied copious detail and could be effectively shown to be commenting on the same figure depicted in the Gospels. The problem is that if the historicists are right and the Jesus of the Gospels is the result of history + embellishment, then perhaps no Jesus recovered out of more reliable history can be plausibly linked to the Gospel one.

This is important because there is at least one Jesus that can be plausibly shown to link to the Gospel one. As I noted above, several scholars have noted that Jesus ben Ananus of Wars can be shown to be a plausible model for the Gospel Jesus. Lawrence Wills noted in The Quest of the Historical Gospel, as has Craig Evans, Robert Eisenman, and most recently, Ted Weeden, that there are many points of contact between the two Jesus-s:

*he enters Jerusalem for a pilgrimage festival (Sukkot)
*he delivers an oracle against Jerusalem, the Temple, and the people
*he is seized by leading citizens
*he is beaten, later scouraged
*he offers no answer to interrogators
*he is taken by them to the Roman procurator
*he is considered a madman (exestokos; compare Mark 3:21 exeste, and also John 7:20)
*he prophesies his own death
*he dies

and of course, his name was Jesus. Weeden has laid out some two dozen points of contact between the two stories, but I cannot say more as he has not published his book yet. But no one, including Weeden, has pitched him for an HJ.

So....why?

I've made this exact point before -- that actually many mythicists propose an historical Jesus like the Teacher of Righteousness, who used to be a popular one in some quarters. But by HJ scholars typically mean the one in the Gospels, stripped of the theological embellishments. So the problem is that the proposed HJ is not an approved one....

No, in your hypothetical. I don't think I'd say that Socrates was the HJ. I think I'd say rather that Socrates was the source of the Jesus story.

Michael

doubtingt

So, you don't see how explicating what a "historical jesus" actually constitutes is absolutely necessary prior to concluding that Jesus of the NT is more than just a character discussed in these stories, but refers to a "historical jesus"?
That is one of the most fundamental principles of all reasoned inquiry.

I do not assert the existence of a historical jesus, so I don't need to define what such a thing would be and what available criterion would be used to establish its existence. In fact, as with any existence claim, one major and rational reason for failing to accept the things existence is the lack of sufficient criterion to establish it. On the other hand, to accept the claim on any rational basis means you MUST have established what the thing is, what the criterion for its existence are, and determined that the whole of the evidence suggests those criterion have been met. The latter tasks can't be attempted without completing the prior tasks and failure to do all of them but still accept the existence claim is the very definition of a non-rational, unreasoned belief.

We all probably accept the existence of a story about some character called the Easter Bunny, but let's say you make the added claim that an actual Easter Bunny existed and this story is in reference to it. Guess what? ALL of the burden is upon you to specify the criterion for what would constitute an actual living EB and for providing all the evidence that this EB existed in a manner similar enough to the one described in the story, that we can conclude the story refers to this historical EB.

I claim nothing more than that there exists a written story whose central character is named Jesus: A claim that everyone agrees with. Historicists make the added assumption (actually a massive constellation of assumptions) that something beyond the story existed, namely an actual living man whose life, death, actions, words, and actions done unto him were to some unspecified degree the same as those of the stories character Jesus and upon whom this story was based.
The host of additional assumptions and claims being made by the historicists means it is wholly and solely their responsibility to specify what their claims of an HJ mean and how one would differentiate such and entity from what is already known, namely a character Jesus in a written story. It is also the historicists sole burden of proof to provide the evidence for these added assertions.

RUmike

The question in the original post is, and I quote, "What is the minimum requirement for someone to be an historic Jesus?" What this essentially means is, if it can be shown conclusively that a person existed during a specific time period, A, and place, B, and did X, Y, and Z, would does A, B, X, Y, and Z need to be to convince you that he is indeed the historic Jesus at the heart of the gospel stories? The question has nothing to do with by what criteria were used to determine X, Y, or Z, but instead it presupposes these things to be true, but YOU must explain what they need to be.

You wrote:

Yes of course it is absolutely necessary, and that's why the OP asked it! But you went on a tangent about criteria and other things that have nothing to do with that question. No one's asking you to conclude anything about the Jesus in the NT.

Agemegos

Specifying the criterion is not a burden, it is an opportunity.

Suppose that I define 'the Easter Bunny' to be my mother. It is then relatively easy to prove that she bought chocolate eggs and hid them in the garden. But calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg, and calling Socrates an Historical Jesus doesn't make him one.

When I am trying to prove something in general, the burden is on me to do so according to a criterion that is generally acceptable. It is up to the people who are going to judge the claim to establish the criterion on which they will do so.

doubtingt

The “criterion� is not the set of qualities A,B,X,Y,Z, but rather the minimal degree overlap in qualities between the historical person and the Gospel character that would justify the conclusion that the two are the same or one is intended to refer to the other.
Any claim that the a historical person is the character of Jesus in the Gospels necessarily presumes that a historical person X had qualities (A,B,X, Y, and Z) that overlap with corresponding qualities in the Jesus of the Gospels, and that this degree of overlap surpasses some reasonable criterion for presuming that the Gospel character is a depiction of this actual person.
Thus, historicists must not only show that a historical person had qualities A...Z and that these qualities were shared by the Gospel character, but they must also show that this overlap in some subset of qualities surpasses some “minimum requirement� (i.e., “criterion�) degree of overlap that is needed to conclude they are the same person. Historicists cannot possibly do this without specifying what the overlapping qualities between the person and the Gospel character are AND what the criterion level of overlap needs to be (and why this is a reasonable criterion), beyond which the historical person and the Gospel character can be concluded to be the same.
Without a criterion level of overlap to compare to any actual level of overlap to, the historicist theory is untestable.

Historicists are going beyond the fact that the Gospel stories exist and asserting both a real person and a particular identity relation between that person and the Gospel character.
They (and not those who aren’t making such added assertions) must do any and everything necessary to show that these additional assertions and conclusions are reasonable.
That is the way of reasoned inquiry and the description of “Biblical Scholar� only applies to those who abide it.


As I explicated above, there is nothing tangential about it. The "minimum" requirement" of a historical Jesus refers to some explicated criterion of overlap and similarity needed to conclude they are the same or one is a reference to the other.

doubtingt

O.k., I'll bite. It is an opportunity. In fact, it is necessary in order to have the opportunity to rationally evaluate any claim that X meets this criterion, which is what any historicist is claiming. Thus, historicists who have not specified what criterion they are using cannot possibly have even taken the opportunity to rationally evaluate the claim themselves and are polluting the intellectual discourse with baseless, untested assertions.

Correct, and claiming that any person X is an HJ, without specifying and justifying the criterion by which this conclusion was reached, is just as silly and meaningless a statement as your examples. Which is why all historicists' claims that are not preceded by the specification of the criterion are essentially meaningless and baseless assertions.


I would hope anyone claiming to be a scholar would bother to "judge the claim" themselves before reaching the conclusion and before asserting it to others, otherwise they have not reached their conclusion on a rational basis.
Yes, your criterion must be defensible and based upon the principles generally accepted in historical and literary scholarship. Others who evaluate your claim must understand what criterion your conclusion assumes, and part of their evaluation must be an evaluation of the criterion itself.

If all you are really saying is that anyone interested in evaluating the historicist hypothesis should help develop the needed criterion so the hypothesis can actually be tested, then I agree. However, without such a criterion the character of Jesus in the Gospels cannot rationally be concluded by anyone to be anything beyond a written story.
What this means, and what my first post was about, is that if the Jesus Seminar and others who have already concluded and assert a historical Jesus have not already specified and justified the criterion they are using, then we all can definitely conclude these people are not abiding by basic principles of scholarship and have not reached this conclusion rationally.

RUmike

Sorry, doubtingt, the source of my misunderstanding was your use of the word "criteria". I took it to mean traditional criteria used by HJ researchers, i.e. multiple attestation, embarassment, dissimilarity, coherence, etc. Now that I see it was not meant that way, I apologize.

Vorkosigan

We,, that's wrong. They have reached their conclusion rationally -- by the application of logic working on premises. It is the premises that are wrong.

Michael