Sauron

Good. Then perhaps you can provide detailed discussion of how the concensus for the historical Jesus was reached, as well as list the methodology for testing and examining the evidence.

In science, the investigative methodology is well-known; part of the scientific method rests on the ability to reproduce the results of other people's experiments. That's where publishing the experiments, as well as the testing methodology and the assumptions underpinning that methodology, come into play.

Unfortunately, that seems to have broken down here, in regards to HJ research. We have neither the methodology to examine, nor the assumptions that underpin it.

Layman can't provide them. Would you like to take a stab at it, Bede?

Vorkosigan

Meta, let me know when scholars have a generally accepted, reliable historical methodology for pulling truth out of the gospel fictions.

Vorkosigan

Amaleq13

I replied:
Do you have the full arguments of these enemies? Or do you only have what their Christian opponents chose to quote in their rebuttals?

Metacrock responded:
No, it is still the responsibility of the claimant (i.e. YOU) to provide support for the claim (i.e. YOURS). The unsubstantiated assertion has come from you. Upon what basis did you reach the conclusion that those who taught "another gospel" from Paul's did not deny the historical existence of Jesus?

I see Paul asserting that Jesus was "born of a woman" apparently against this false gospel. Why does that assertion not suggest someone was arguing otherwise?

If no enemies of Christianity questioned the historical existence of Jesus, why does Trypho say the following in his dialogue with Justin?:

"But Christ--if He has indeed been born, and exists anywhere--is unknown, and does not even know Himself, and has no power until Elias come to anoint Him, and make Him manifest to all. And you, having accepted a groundless report, invent a Christ for yourselves, and for his sake are inconsiderately perishing."

Justin clearly indicates he understand Trypho to be calling the Christian gospel a myth when he replies:

"...I shall prove to you as you stand here that we have not believed empty fables..."

If there was no argument against the historicity of Jesus, why would Justin offer this concession?:

"But since I have certainly proved that this man is the Christ of God, whoever He be, even if I do not prove that He pre-existed, and submitted to be born a man of like passions with us, having a body, according to the Father's will;"

Justin is asserting that he has proven Jesus to be Christ by his appeal to Scripture even if he has not proven that he was literally incarnated.

That you have made an unsubstantiated assertion and persisted in refusing to substantiate it makes your closing remark quite ironic:

Since the bold assertion is yours, you should ask this question of yourself.

Archimedes Nacho

I would say the former question. I'm somewhat surprised by all the responses to this thread, but I guess I should've realized this was a hot button issue.

Is being a Jesus-myther taking a radical position? Do others in the field view them in the same esteem as those who think the US gov't staged the lunar landing in the Arizona desert?

From the responses, so far, am I right in conlcuding that it is somewhat of a radical position to take? The next question would be, with the complete lack of direct evidence, why is that such a controversial stance to take? Is it the societal inertia, which has also been mentioned in this thread?

I wasn't expecting everyone on this board to be in total agreement (come to a total consensus). I haven't taken a religion class since high school, so I'm not an expert, but the as far as I can tell, the most important evidence supporting an historical Jesus is the enormous movement that eventually evolved into Christianity.

rlogan

A.N. -

It's good to know who is doing the responding to you as there is a set of differing beliefs here. I see Vinnie's not here yet, but he'll fall on the side of the HJ scale as opposed to myth.

Go to your chairman and ask him how many of these events, in his opinion, actually happened:

- virgin birth
- raising lazarus from the dead
- turning water into wine
- healing lepers
- healing cripples
- the slaughter of the innocents by Herod
- feeding 5,000 people with a box of twinkies
- walking on water
- rising from the dead three days after crucifixion
- dead man appears before 500

Unless you accept all of those things and more, you are automatically in the "part myth" position. The only question is how far along the "myth scale" you fall. It is not an all-or-nothing proposition.

I'm open to new evidence, and I wish to heck something would get dug up, like some early fragments of Mark or a laminated "Q".

You'll find 21st century scholarship coalescing around a lonely, obscure figure from the North proposing the "composite" approach.

Metacrock

[QUOTE]Originally posted by Sauron
Good. Then perhaps you can provide detailed discussion of how the concensus for the historical Jesus was reached, as well as list the methodology for testing and examining the evidence.[/quoqte]


Meta: Well sure. See it was never really reached, it was never in doubt. Snince no one every questioned the historicity of Jesus (becasue they never had a reason to) until the 19th century, then Albert schweitzer shot them down in flames, histoirans have just always accepted it because there never a reason not to. In fact, you still can't give me one!



Meta: Well in history we have to do it a bit differently, it's a little hard to reproduce the results you see; we can't go back in time and investigate the acuracy of our suppossitions.So historical investigation is about documents.. Historians work through a decision making paradigm called historical probability Now that works a bit different than inductive probability in scinece, because it's not mathematical. you can't give a percentage of probability for, say, Davy Crockett being at the Alamo (althoug now days there are some studies that do deal in mathematical probabilities but it depends upon the subject matter).So we use this idea of probablity which depends upon taking the documents as best evidence and extending the assumptions along the lines of most probable conclusions.







Meta: No sorry you are confussed. We can't go back in time and see if Jesus really existed. But what we can do is examine the docs that talk about him and access the probability of his existence. Since there is no reason to doubt that, and since people who claimed to have seen him were interviewed by writters whose works we possess there is really a strong probalbity that he did exist.



Layman can't provide them. Would you like to take a stab at it, Bede?


Meta: O sorry, you are confussed again. you see, he doesnt' have to. It is you who must give a reason to doubt it. Jesus existence has presumption because it's never been doubted, it is assume as a historical fact and has been since the first century. Moreover, every history course in the world today teaches that Jesus existed. You can't even show me a publication by a credible academic historian who doubts this.

Metacrock

Meta: No modern scholar, neither Bultmann nor Crosson nor any historian ever doubted every single word of the NT. Every scholar assumes that some of it is true. that would be so foolish to doubt that. for example it speaks of Jerusalem, does that mean they made up Jerusalem?

that's what about Ceasar's Gaulic Wars if we apply your criteria we have to dout ever word in that work including its authorship. That no one does just shows how foolish your criteria is.

spin

Again you miss the point. We have the statues to show that there was a person, we have inscriptions to give epigraphic data from that person, we have references to that person's deeds. We are going from primary evidence. When we get to the Gallic War we have the full weight of what we have as primary evidence to allow us to deal with that text, which also claims to be primary evidence and I think it can be shown that it is what it claims to be.

Here you are simply shifting data from one page to another and nothing more. History requires primary evidence, which you simply don't have. Can I get it any clearer?



You have a text purporting to be from the beginning of the second century. Is it?? How do you know, given that you don't have any primary sources on the matter and you only have the text that you do through it being cited in a much later text. Is it really what it claims to be? How would you know? You have an epistemological nightmare in your hands.

Heresay in undatable sources is of no value. Try, oh try again, when you understand what is necessary. Hell this is simple enough. Each text you want to introduce must be in some way that your interlocutor can understand validified.

You would wish that this stuff is threatening. It's just bad scholarship.


Philo, the good Platonic Alexandrian Jewish writer, happily used logos, even though he was not conversant in Hebrew. I don't know of any biblical evidence for memra, but I do know of HKMWT which/who came out of the mouth of God. Could you supply a few biblical references to the use of memra that your source indicates?

Don't you love it when none of these fellows ever, ever cough up the goods they complain that they have???

Isn't that a feel-good response?

The thing that didn't get through was the word "directly". Osiris obviously was a hot topic throughout the first millennium. Even the Romans got a bit of interest... I don't discuont the notion of the dying god being indirectly powerful throughout the Levant.

On Cumont:

Be happy, I'm not near a library.

Cumont is not in any sense primary.

The artefacts are primary. (And I have been through at least four of the Ostian Mithaei.)

Who gives a hoot about Koester's opinions. We have only a few fragments of texts in the late 2nd century (see Schmidt on P52), and no obvious citations of gospel material until Justin Martyr. Talking about pathetic pseudo scholarship!

Gosh, what a meaningful response! Methodology 101 might be of use to you. You were giving authorities instead of evidence. Doh.

At least try to be relevant. You made specious claims about what "means that we have to take seriously the basic storyline". This is not an argument as putting it in other contexts shows.

Where have you been for the last century? Who believes that Paul wrote Colossians or Ephesians? or for that matter most of Philippians?

And still I don't care about the opinions of the bulk of nt academics. Opinons are only opinions and numbers of believers doesn't make anything more credible.

I guess you're with the idiots who still believe in the flat earth.

And historical thought has become somewhat more sophisticated and demanding than the fellows you're used to.

OK, the idea hasn't dawned on you. You take a text, any text whose content cannot be anchored to history. You have no way of showing whether the characters therein existed or not. It's not sufficient to assume that because they are in a text they must have existed. You need to look at the significance of the analogy not so much the specifics.

See what I mean: "it is generally understood that they draw upon material that is much older, some of it perhaps form the first century". No evidence at all.

Excuses, excuses. I know all about dyslexia. I have dealt with it all my life. My editing skills are reasonably good. Now that you've got it out of your system


Did you get that insult out of your dictionary?

Fact little known to you: substantive claims require substantive evidence. You adhere to the substantive claim and I have been asking for evidence. I have asked you and a wave of other irate apologists who simply cannot cough up the goods. We have come to expect this.

You have shown no attempts to go beyond giving other people's opinions and citing undatable sources. This is not particularly useful evidence.

You don't know what my training is, so stop talking about what you don't know.

Hey, you're the religionist. I think I've got common sense on my side.

As I have said above, substantive claims -- hey, you do claim that Jesus was a historical figure don't you? -- require substantive evidence.

I've seen what you consider evidence. Hearsay, opinions, and texts you know next to nothing about. It doesn't augur well for your God given opinions.


spin

Metacrock

Metacrock responded:



I wish you guys would learn something about argumentation! No dude, we are not the "claimant" as you put it. We are not pushing a change form the status quoe, we are the status quoe, the consensus scholarly opinon.


You are the ones who want to make a radical break with that which has been understood as historical fact for 2000 years, of course your burden of proof! how foolish that is! that's absurd to think otherwise! that would be like the consipriacy buffs saying it's the Warren commissions job to prove there was no conspiracy, or the scienist's job to disporve creationism, or the Air Force's job to disprove UFO's. The one who argues for making the radical break with historical fact and that which has always been understood as true, is the one who has the burden of proof to make good his claims!

Historical Jesus has presumption!





Meta: who are you quoting?





Meta: "Born of a woman" has to do with prophetic background in OT--he's not asserting that as proof agaisnt their argument. Their argument of another Gospel has nothing to do with Jesus status as existing or not exiting in the flesh, their other gospel was anti-Grace. the examples given have to do wtih no eating with Gentiles.








Meta: You have taken that so far out of context it's not even funny. that says to me you surely don't know what's going on in this subjectmatter!

Trypho is not saying Jesus wasn't born in flesh. There is no way you can understand that passage to mean that. The reason you do is becuase you think Christ is his name! Christ is not his name, it's his title! They were looking "the Christ" the Messiah to come. They did not have a particular identity of who he would be, they were looking for a man with the title, not a partciular indivudual known to them. When he says Christ has not been born that doenst' mean "O we think Jesus of Naz didn't come in the flesh as a real guy" it means the guy with the title hasn't showen up yet!








Meta:NONONONONONNON! that is so halarius! Wait till I show my class!

Talking about pre-existing he means the Messiah was though to exist in heaven before he came to earth. this was controersy among the jews. He's saying even if I can't prove the pre-mundane nature of the Messiah, I can show that Jesus filled the bill.

good Lord!


That you have made an unsubstantiated assertion and persisted in refusing to substantiate it makes your closing remark quite ironic:



Since the bold assertion is yours, you should ask this question of yourself.



Meta:we are not making a bold assertion, we are assuming what is taken as historical fact the world over for 2000 years. YOu seek to change the status quote, it is your burden of rpof. and you have no evidence and you can't give me one reason to think otherwise.

spin

Well, isn't that hunky dory?

It sad to see this stuff being even posted. We know Julius Caesar from his statues which fit well with the physical descriptions we have of the man. We have his inscriptions. We have secondary texts which fit well with the primary evidence and the combination of the primary ande that secondary evidence give validity to the Gallic War. The text has to be dealt with because people can lie or get things wrong or give conscious or unconscious bias to what is said, but we are dealing with nice ordinary historical materials and valid methodologies. You don't have the lack of material to turn your problem with your texts against the Gallic War -- you might find a better text to rail against, but I probably wouldn't want to use the text as evidence.


spin