Toto

I'm only quoting Bart Ehrman and RT France, and every other Historical Jesus scholar. Paul's letters may indicate to you that there was a historical Jesus, but Paul doesn't tell you anything significant about his life or teaching or why anyone should care about him.

I don't think Jesus was crucified. I think the gospels show him being crucified because that was a plot element, because the nation of Israel had been crucified by the Romans.

I don't see any evidence that Paul would have been in any position to persecute any early Christians. He claims to have been a Pharisee, but that wasn't in the job description of the Pharisees.

TedM

4700 google results on that phrase show that it is used. Perhaps I should have said this: Using gospel references in such a way tends to have an undeserved psychological effect in favor of Doherty's view. Whether that effect is intentional or not I cannot say.


LOL. Good example of 'intentional manipulation'--pairing me with aa in such a way!


I don't agree. If they are strong enough they could convince even me that Jesus never was historical.

There is a reasonable in-between. First, there may be things one might expect if Jesus had been a Jewish man who recently lived--even if he had done nothing at all. And, Doherty could present reasonable hypothesis for a historical Jesus that differ from the gospels, or that remove specifics: A popular teacher, a healer, believed to be the Messiah, etc.. Doherty does do this but often throws in the gospel references which muddy the picture.

Bottom line: It makes his position sound more anti-orthodox/pro-mythicist than anti-historical/pro-mythicist.

avi

death and taxes, right?

a. Paul was a Jew;
b. Paul was well educated;
c. Paul was very knowledgeable;

In my opinion, it is unreasonable to ASSUME that Paul did not know the distinction between a man universally admired by the entire Jewish community, i.e. one deserving of the accolade: "Cristou", and one who had been executed by the Romans as a criminal on request from the Jewish leadership.

In my opinion, it is very reasonable to assume that a century or more after the epistles had been written, someone came along, someone who perhaps had instructions to embellish the resume of Jesus, and that someone then added "cristou" to the text.

a, b, and c, above, may not have applied to that particular individual......

oops.

brick wall with icon, showing head beating wall, mercilessly;

to no avail.

Where to begin? How to respond?

Seems like two steps forward, and then two miles backward.

Archibald, let's go slowly, maybe I write too quickly.

NO.

NO.
Cristou DOES NOT CORRESPOND, in any fashion, to "messiah".

Please try to absorb that fact. This is not avi's opinion. This is not a question of what do you think, well, what does she think, well, what does that guy over there think?

This is ABSOLUTE. It is Linguistics, not politics, not sociology, not history, not physics.

SIMPLE LANGUAGE FACTS.

You cannot write such a paragraph, Archibald. The earliest Christians COULD NOT HAVE THOUGHT he was a messiah, because he wasn't one......

avi

archibald

Then we are just disussing semantics, because there is a difference between 'the only historical Jesus that we know about' and 'significant detail about his life' and if you meant the latter (which wasn't clear) then I agree. Though I can't agree that Paul doesn't tell anything about why anyone should care about him. Quite the opposite.

But, surely, even Paul has him crucified, but in a different location? So, I'm nonplussed by your reply.

So you are citing two more interpolations, or that Paul was over-egging? I might buy the latter and leave it at that. The former I might ask for a better case for interpolation a la the 1 Cor 15 thread.

archibald

Avi,

In the first instance, it is simple, plain fact that you do not know, and yet you still claim to be certain. That's a contradiction in terms.

However, I already said that I am not averse to your idea that the word itself, Christou, could have been a later usage and that the original term was something else.

And of course, it's true that 'Christou' and 'Messiah' are not the same word.

But oddly, in your last paragraph, you are saying something further. You are now saying.....that it couldn't have been 'Messiah' either?

So I have to ask you again, how do you know when the followers first began to think of him as a Messiah?

That, I hope, is a simple question.

Because the blunt fact is similar to 'Christou'. In that case it was a term used, despite your correct it seems observation that he never was annointed in the real world, so whether it happened in the real world or not is irrelevant.

In the former case (messiah) it also happened, despite him not being the sort of Messiah that some appeared to be expecting, so that 'fact' is again irrelevant.

So your reasoning is stuck in a contradiction. You know both happened. You don't know when. But you are certain it wasn't early. :huh:

Finally, I already also said that you can keep it to just 'Jesus' if you want. It seems to make no difference to anything major for me. Maybe you want to change that too? In fact, since I believe it means 'saviour', I can see that it might be consistent for you. Same thinking process perhaps. We don't know when anyone came to think of him as their saviour, so it was later. Maybe Paul's original word was 'Aaron'?

But really, I'm not sure why we're arguing, because you may use an alternative term if you wish. So long as you are talking about a change in title, and not extending to suggesting interpolation of passages containing a title, that does not present me with an issue.

aa5874

Please, please, please do not ever try to manipulate what I write by claiming that I have language problems.

It is YOU who have problems.

I used SOURCES of antiquity so you have PROBLEMS with the SOURCES.

I SHOW that in the Pauline writings and in the NT Canon that Jesus, the Child of a Ghost, (Mt 1.18) the Word that was God (John 1.1-4) God's own Son (Galatians 4.4) was NOT CRUCIFIED in the SUB-LUNAR but in Jerusalem AFTER supposed trials with the Sanhedrin and Pilate.

What is it that you DON'T understand?

You MUST come clean.

I am waiting for you to come clean and tell us what you don't understand when I quote passages from the Gospels which show the Ghost Child was NOT CRUCIFIED in the Sub-lunar in the MYTH fables called Gospels.

The Ghost Child was riding asses in Jerusalem, not in the sub-lunar, before he was crucified. See Matthew 21.

Matthew

Toto

A lot of this is semantics. Everyone except bible believing Christians admits that the gospel Jesus is a myth, but the historical Jesus guild claims that there is a historical core to the myth, which they call the historical Jesus. But how close to the gospel story does this guy have to be? If he lived 100 years BCE or wasn't crucified or didn't have anything to do with founding or inspiring the Christian church, is that really the historical Jesus?

And Paul clearly does not care about any aspect of Jesus except his crucifixion and resurrection.

One obscure and ambiguous verse in Paul has Jesus crucified by "the powers of this age" at an undisclosed location. Another claims that the Jews were responsible, but almost everyone things the latter is an interpolation.

Doherty's theory is that this crucifixion was a drama played out in a different sphere of reality.

What is over-egging?

I think that roughly 50% of Paul's letters were added by a later editor, so what's two interpolations?

aa5874

Well, if what you claim is true then Doherty's theory about the sub- Lunar crucifixion of Jesus is the product of obscurity and ambiguity or the product of "GIGO" garbage in garbage out.

I simply cannot understand why one would want to develop a theory on a single obscure and ambiguous verse.

If "Paul" claimed Jesus was crucified in the Sub-lunar then he was an HERETIC and there is NO evidence that the Church would have Canonised KNOWN HERESY or the writings of KNOWN heretics when the Church writers have IDENTIFIED the heresies and heretics against the Church.

Jesus was MYTH based on the NT, the Church writings and non-apologetic sources. See Matthew 1.18-20, Luke 1.35, Mark 6.49, Mark 9.2, John 1, Mark 16.6. Acts 9.2, Romans, Galatians 1.1-12, 1 Cor 15. and hundreds more verses.

archibald

Maryhelena,

Do you have a citation for 'crucified'? Your quote said 'slew'?

dog-on

Roman History, Dio Cassius