LegionOnomaMoi

How so? We don't have any evidence that supports the claim that anybody was arguing against the claim that Jesus did in fact exist. From what we can tell, anti-christians/anti-"orthodox" authors were either arguing that Jesus was nothing special (or less than nothing special, e.g. a product of adultery rather than miracle), or that his followers offered nothing. We have volumes and volumes written by early Christians designed to refute those they disagreed with. Yet although the refuted claims ran the gamut from "Jesus was a nobody" to "Jesus only appeared in the guise of human flesh" (docetists), they don't seem to have included "Jesus was never around." Christians seem not to have cared about convincing anybody that Jesus existed but that he was the resurrected Christ sent by god (as early as Paul, we hear that if he didn't rise from the dead, then all faith in him is in vain). Nor do they seem to have ever needed to refute a claim that Jesus was pure fiction.

How so?


umm... what? Eusebius uses the dates Josephus gives as a back-up to support his refutation of the Acta Pilati (not the forgeries of this work we now have), using the dates given by Josephus: "It has often been claimed that Eusebius used the Testimonium as proof of Jesus' messiahship, which led to the idea that he had himself written this testimony. But I would argue that this view is mistaken, considering that Eusebius' purpose is very different: In the Historia ecclesiastica he uses this passage to counter the Acts of Pilate, an anti-Christian pseudepigraph which Maximinus Daia had spred in the schools of the Empire. The Testimonium was thus used in a pagan-Christian polemical context, and not a Jewish-Christian one."

from Sabrina Inowlocki's Eusebius and the Jewish Authors: His Citation Technique in an Apologetic Context (Brill, 2006; vol. 64 of Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity), p. 208.

Whether or not Inowlocki is correct, and Eusebius actually used the TF not to claim that Jesus was the Messiah but for other reasons, the most relevant point is what Eusebius was refuting in the passage you refer to. He wasn't using Josephus to say anything about Jesus' historicity, but to refute the Acta Pilati.

A specific work no longer extant.

Vorkosigan

No one ever claimed, then or now, that Jesus was pure fiction.

Vorkosigan

LegionOnomaMoi

Whatever term you would prefer, then, for those who claim that there was never a historical individual (whether human, appearing to be human, god, supernatural, or whatever) who actually walked the earth in the 1st century CE, engaging/interacting with living, breathing humans.

This view appears to have no ancient promoters. The anti-christian crowd, from the early interactions between Jews/christians to the pagan/christian polemics, don't seem to have ever claimed that the Christians were worshipping someone who didn't live, but rather someone who was nothing special.

aa5874

Well, the same sources thar mentioned the anti-Christian crowd also claimed Jesus was Born of a Ghost and was WITHOUT a human father.

Quite Remarkably, Christians were ARGUING for a NON-HISTORICAL Jesus.

Examine "On the Flesh of Christ".On The Flesh of Christ You very well know that Marcion, the Christian Heretic, claimed the Son of God had no birth and No flesh according to the SAME Christian sources.

Christians were arguing that the Son of God was PURE MYTH--No birth and No Flesh while others were arguing that Jesus was the Son of Ghost with FLESH.

In antiquity Christians BELIEVED God made ADAM and Jesus without a human father.

tanya

But, in my opinion, we have really, a paucity of genuine manuscripts:
Tacitus: one document, with an obvious forgery,
Irenaeus: zero documents in his original Greek;
Marcion: not even one little scrap;
Mani: only his final composition, in middle Persian.

So, now consider someone who ACTIVELY sought to refute early Christianity, by claiming that Jesus was a fictional character, akin to Herakles: How many copies of his/her treatise would have survived the fires lit under Constantine?

If there were "promoters" of the theory, to which I adhere, that Jesus is 100% fictional, zero percent historical, then, what would have happened to their manuscript evidence/opinion?

In those dark days, how could a rational thinking, skeptical, atheist author promote his/her composition, without risking execution as an heretic?

:huh:

JoeWallack

JW:
This reminds me too much of the classic episode of The Adam Family where they decide to give Cousin Itt a haircut and when they finish there's nothing left. Marcion would seem to have been the main historical competition for the orthodox. His beliefs:

1) Jesus appeared out of thin air (literally) at the start of his career.

2) Jesus' career consisted largely of the Impossible.

3) By implication Jesus career lasted less than a year.

4) Some fellow Gnostics believed that Jesus did not die but vanished...into thin air.

So per Marcion Jesus did not exist for most of his life (I confess I am not exactly sure what the precise term is here). So regarding the simple position that no ancient ever questioned HJ, as that great Middle Age philosopher Treebeard said, "Wizards(Bible scholars) should know better!"



Joseph

ErrancyWiki

The Christian Bible, noun. Scripture that claims it is the truth by being based on predecessor Scripture which was not the truth.

LegionOnomaMoi

We don't have a paucity when it comes to the "orthodox" christians arguing against claims they disagreed with. We had enough about so-called gnostics to have a very good idea what these groups believed and said before we had virtually any actual texts written by them. While we haven't recovered anything like the Nag Hammadi scrolls which are filled with works like those of Celsus or Julian, we still have volumes written by christians designed to refute a very, very large number of claims they disagreed with. Yet despite this wealth of material written to counter views christians disagreed with, not one contains any portion written to refute a group, author, or individual who claimed that Jesus was a myth. We don't have adequate textual representation for non-christian views, but we do have a very large representative sample of non-christian views christians objected to/argued against. If there were a number of people arguing that christians were worshipping someone who actually was nothing other than myth, or that there was no historical person behind their religious tradition/sacred writings, we have a quite suprising silence where we have an otherwise copious amount of attestation.


Not a one. But that isn't the issue. If you read something like Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker you find an enormous amount of fragments of various historians and historical works we know only through references, quotations, etc., by other authors whose works survive. Yet this is nothing compared to the number of works, authors, and views we know solely through works written by christians. This includes everything from non-canonical "gospels" to works like Adversus Christianos. Many of the works referenced we know only through a brief mention, while others we have large portions which survive through quotations. But either way, while through what survives we don't have a good idea about the nuances of some anti-"orthodox" thought, we have a great idea about the central tenets. We know of so many authors/works which are not extant today at all, only because some "church father" mentioned something about the individual or text. Yet despite intricate, detailed, and extensive refutations of anti-christian views, no christian we know of, and no work we know of, ever attempted to refute the view that Jesus never existed. It's highly unlikely that this view was ever around. Nor is this suprising. We have almost no historical works from Jesus' time period at all, and nobody other than christians is likely to have said much about Jesus until long after he was dead. By the time we would expect anti-christian works to start appearing (which is when they do), both christians and non-christians alike were depending for the most part on one or more of the gospels we have, as well as a few other traditions circulating around (like, for example, the view that Jesus was the product of adultery with a roman soldier). If, somehow, the gospels were all written and managed to gain believers despite the fact that there was no historical person behind them, we have no reason to suspect that these accounts would be subject to great scrutiny, while people had been talking about legendary accounts of individuals like Pythagoras, Socrates, Euripides, etc., for centuries. The problem for the mythicist case has nothing to do with the lack of voices from later centuries which argued that Jesus never existed. It's unlikely that such a tradition would survive while four lengthy accounts were widely disseminated and read. Oral traditions can survive (even survive largely unaltered) for decades, even longer. But rarely if ever do they do so while textual accounts exist, and even though pieces of a tradition can exist alongside textual traditions, rarely do they do so for long independently of the textual tradition.

The same thing that happened to the rest: some christian author would have written a treatise opposing it, and we would have at least some reference to this.

For the first few centuries, christians were the heretics. They (and Jews) were called "atheists". So were certain philosophers and thinkers living long before Jesus was said to have lived. "Rational" thinkers almost never believed that magic or gods or miracles or similar sorts of things didn't exist at all. Myths and the literal nature of the mythic traditions were questioned long before and after the gospels. But the gospels don't resemble these. Not so much in that they are necessarily different in form (after all, the greco-roman historians fashioned historiography from the art of myth and story-telling), but in that they are not writing about some ancient individual said to have lived in some place in some unknown time centuries earlier. For an ancient "rational" thinker, these don't read like myths, but are similar to legendary accounts of historical people, from emperors to various wonder-workers. Even someone who doubted that magic, gods, etc., existed wouldn't have any trouble believing that someone went around and was believed by followers to work miracles and so forth. After all, any "rationalist" living at this time was probably aware of someone around living at that time whom people claimed had worked wonders. From what we can tell, it appears that legal codes made witchcraft and magic illegal from the time of the Greeks through the Roman period (the largest two witchtrials in the history of the world occured in pre-christian rome, in which more witches were executed at one time than were executed in all of europe during most years of the period of witchtrials). We also have large numbers of "voodoo" dolls and curse-tablets we have dug up from long before christianity. So why would a "rational thinker" living in the 2nd century or later have a problem believing that this figure Jesus actually lived, but that the legends about him were false? History is littered with accounts of people who were known solely for their alleged ability to do the impossible, yet who were living, breathing humans.

Vorkosigan

The early Xtians believed in a savior figure who was a myth and whose saving actions took place in some cosmic realm between earth and heaven, not a fiction.

Vorkosigan

aa5874

You don't seem to understand the HJ argument at all. The HJ argument is that Jesus was a HUMAN BEING when he existed.

Are you NOT familiar with Greek/Roman Mythology?? People of the Antiquity and even up to now Believe Gods and Sons of God EXIST.

Jesus was a God--A myth.

Jesus was a Son of a God in Myth Fables called Gospels COMPOSED in the 2nd century and people BELIEVED Jesus existed just like people today BELIEVE that Jesus EXIST and is the Son of the God of the Jews.

We have gone over the TF so many times. It is a BLATANT forgery for many, many reasons.

It was so EASY to detect that the TF was forgery.

If he did live Jesus was supposed to be AN OBSCURE preacher man NOT Christ.

Josephus would have NEVER claimed an Obscure preacherman was Christ.

thief of fire

The infamous Tim O'neill spoke to this point elegantly here

"The final fatal flaw in Doherty's thesis is his contrived idea that there was a "mythic Jesus Christianity" that existed alongside the better known "historical Jesus Christianity" until the latter won the battle for dominance and wiped out any reference to the former. Until Doherty came along and became the first person in about 2000 years to realise what happened.

This is completely implausible. While the idea of Machiavellian early Christians completely erasing all trace of earlier forms of Christianity may appeal to zealots and conspiracy theorists, it simply doesn't square with the evidence. It's true that later "orthodox" forms of Christianity were happy to burn the books of their "heretical" rivals to keep them infecting the faithful. But this doesn't mean they were also happy to wipe out all trace or mention of these "heresies". On the contrary, they were keen to write long and detailed books explaining why their heretical rivals were wrong and why the orthodox view was right. They often distorted their rivals' ideas when they did this and sometimes the heresy in question had been dead for so long they were confused about precisely what the heretics in question had believed (they just knew they were wrong), but they certainly didn't erase all mention of them. They felt it was important to refute even minor or long dead heresies in as much detail as possible, just in case they rose up again (as some did occasionally).

It is difficult to understand why, amongst all this apologetic, anti-heretical literature, there is NO reference to what should have been the biggest and most threatening heresy of all - the heresy that the historical Jesus never existed. Not only would Doherty's supposed "mythic Jesus Christianity" have been a major threat to "historical Jesus Christianity" even after it had declined and vanished, it would actually have been THE major threat by merit of the fact that it was the original form of Christianity. Yet we find not a whisper about it in any of this literature. Doherty would have us believe that these writers bothered to condemn tiny and long-extinct heretical sects, yet ignored the elephant in the room and made no mention of this primary threat to their interpretation of Jesus.

This silence makes no sense.

Unless, of course, this whole "mythic Jesus Christianity" is a figment of Doherty's speculations and didn't exist at all. Then the silence about it in the sources makes perfect sense."