Juststeve

You get a sense of the Christ from Paul but very little sense of Jesus. Why? Because Paul claimed an experience of the risen Jesus and received his Gospel from no man. Paul doesn’t talk about the man Jesus because as far as we can tell he knows very little about him, or if he does he doesn’t want to acknowledge his sources. . He does however know that Jesus was born of woman, lived here on earth, and was killed, buried and resurrected. I don’t credit the resurrection part but I have no a priori reason to doubt the born, lived killed and buried part. This was 20 or so years after the supposed death of Jesus and already he is a man here on earth. He knows Jesus had followers and can even name some of them. Not much I agree but hardly evidence supporting the claim made by one of theis group that Jesus was a fictional character created in the second century.

Passing Paul we see a lot of development of legendary material if we consider the Gospels in the order in which they were written, Mark, Matthew, Luke and John. Mark’s Jesus with the original ending is most the itinerant preacher with the beginnings of legendary flourishes, John’s the full blown incarnate word of God. If you take the standard dating, (major universities) it shows how fast the legend about Jesus came to overwhelm the man. It is of course possible that the second century writer of fiction had a time machine, but I don’t think so.

Steve

aa5874

Jesus is not the origin of the word "Christ". You really have NO good reason or corroborative historical source that show there were people who believed in Jesus the Messiah by the middle of the 1st century.

There is no external corroborative source for any Pauline writing before the Fall of the Temple. Once Jesus was just a man who LIVED in Galilee for about 30 years then the Pauline writings would be loaded with fiction.

Tacitus did NOT write a single word about JESUS. The name JESUS is not in Tacitus "Annals".

And again, people were called Christians in the 1st century who did NOT have anything to do with Jesus according to an apologetic source.

You assume you know when people of antiquity started to believe the Jesus story.

This theory is EXTREMELY plausible and the available evidence of antiquity supports this theory very well.

Up to the end of the 2nd century Christians were in DISPUTE about the PHYSICAL nature of Jesus, only his SPIRIT nature was CERTAIN.

And once Christians AGREED that Jesus was of a SPIRIT nature, he could have only APPEARED to be human.


This theory requires that the followers of Jesus to be completely dishonest and behave like idiots. Once Jesus was KNOWN to be just a man and was living in Galilee for 30 years then all the people of Galilee who knew Jesus would have REALIZED that Paul and the apostles were LIARS and IDIOTS.

The parents of Jesus would have KNOWN Paul and the apostles were DISHONEST when they claimed Jesus was RAISED from the dead and was EQUAL to God.

Once Jesus was KNOWN to be just a man, his death had NO ability to REMIT sins and Paul would have to LIE about a dead man who was resurrected.

Paul and the apostles would then be BEATEN, STONED, JAILED, EXECUTED and DIED for their own lies knowing full well that Jesus was just a man.

It is FAR more plausible that Jesus was just an invented story and that there were NO dishonest crazy-like idiots like Paul and the apostles who knew Jesus was just a man like everyone else and brazenly lied and claimed Jesus was the Creator of heaven and earth.

It would appear to me that the Jesus story was written to warn people of the supposed prophecy of the destruction of heaven and earth after the Fall of the Temple by anonymous writers.

gurugeorge

Oh? Where do you get this insider knowledge about Paul from?

You could say "so far as we can tell he knows little about him" IF you could point to a man who lived at that time who might be they hypothetical human Jesus, who might be the "him" in question. Yes, certainly if we had good independent reason to believe there was such a man, you could say "Paul seems to know very little about him, or not care". But since you can't point to such a fellow, you have no right to that inference.

Moreover, if you look at Paul as Paul, without automatically importing euhemerism into the myth, he seems to know just exactly as much as he knows about the entity he calls "Jesus Christ". It only seems like there's something missing if you automatically interpret the myth euhemeristically.

All equally possible if there were no human being - it's just a story about a largely mythical entity (indeed, in Paul, mystical and visionary entity) that has some earthly bits to it.

aa5874

The very Pauline letters to the Churches are clear indications that there were written late.

The Jesus Christ religion must have or most likely started in obscurity and extremely small and took some time to develop yet in ACTS of the Apostles the Jesus movement was growing at rates of upto three and five thousand a day and Paul was able to evangelize or preach to almost the entire Roman Empire and not once but 2-3 times in some instances.

It was hardly likely that Greek was the language used by the illiterate or the vast majority of people in every region in the Roman Empire.

Why are all the Pauline letters in Greek? One would expect that the letters would have been in different languages based on the region that the letter was sent.

Even in Acts, there appears to have been multiple languages spoken in Jerusalem.

Acts 2.7-11 The author of Acts had to fabricate a story about "talking in tongues" to resolve the language barrier problem .

Acts of the Apostles and the Pauline writings are non-historical.

When the writings of Justin Martyr are examined it is seen that the Jesus movement was almost unheard or operating in secret and underground. Justin did not name a single christian writer, bishop or teacher BEFORE or AFTER he was converted.

Up to the time of Origen's response to Celsus in "Against Celsus" in the 3rd century, there appears to have been NO known public churches in the Roman Empire.

Examine Origen's "Against Celsus" 1 The Jesus Messiah religion must have started in obscurity, in secret associations, and very small and took many many decades to develop.

Doug Shaver

I didn't. There was a period of time when I thought Jesus' existence was probable but unproven. I did not myself seriously doubt his existence, but I also felt that those apologists who insisted that his existence was a virtual certainty were greatly overstating their case. I believed in particular that the gospels were insufficient as evidence because of their unknown authorship and reliance on unknown sources.

During this period, I would have defended my belief in his probable existence by saying there was some evidence, even if poor evidence, for his existence and none against it. I changed my mind after discovering that there does exist evidence against it.

The clarity of their description is irrelevant to their value as evidence.

I'm not sure what you mean by "a priori." Philosophers use the term one way and almost everybody else seems to use it another way. But I think I can answer your question without worrying about that.

I present a general argument for Jesus' nonexistence on my Web site, here. I do need to update the essay, but none of the corrections or additions I'll be making will weaken the case.

To summarize as briefly as I can, the Pauline corpus together with all other Christian writings, canonical and otherwise, that certainly or probably predate the gospels are inconsistent with any supposition that those who wrote them, and those to whom they were addressed, had it in their minds that the person referred to by the writers as "Jesus" or "Christ" or combinations thereof was a man who had recently lived in this world. When I talk of writings that "certainly or probably predate the gospels," I mean all first-century writings and quite a few second-century writings as well. The gospels' existence is not unambiguously attested before Irenaeus. For the time being, I'm accepting Justin's reference to the "memoirs of the apostles" as probable attestation, but that is still halfway into the second century and we can't be sure he was talking about the same books that Irenaeus was endorsing.

In other words, although we have clear evidence for a Christian religion existing early in the first century, there is no clear Christian witness to a human Christ before the second century. This, to me, seems highly improbable under any assumption that the religion was founded by any man who was even vaguely like the central character of the canonical gospels.

Paul's writings in particular strike me as simply inexplicable, absent a pile of question-begging ad hoc assumptions, if the Jesus to whom he referred was the Jesus of Nazareth whose story is told in the gospels.

From this, along with much other data that I cannot include in a post of this length, I infer that Jesus of Nazareth never existed. That means the gospels were not just bad history, but were either fraud or fiction. I presumptively reject fraud absent clear evidence of deceitful intent. That leaves fiction. The authors didn't expect their readers to think their books were factual history. But some readers did think so, and thus did Christianity begin to evolve into what we now know it as.

Point taken, but I think we're starting to push the limits of the courtroom analogy. For one thing, relevant evidence can never, for any reason, be ruled inadmissible. Irrelevance itself is the only grounds for rejection. For another, legal proceedings must always be accommodating to certain rights of all parties concerned. Insofar as historiography is about dead people, we don't need to be concerned about anybody's rights. Questions of fact are the only questions that need concern us.

As just noted, it isn't what the gospels say. It's what all those other Christian writings don't say.

At the same time, though, there is a wealth of scholarly writing on the subject of where the gospel authors got their material. They had no need to make up anything out of whole cloth. Everything they wrote had antecedents.

Doug Shaver

Quite so. But did they believe the same things Christians believed at the end of the second century. For that, we don't have such good reason.

I assume you meant "for Nero to persecute."

How much we can infer about Christianity's origins from that report depends on where Tacitus got his information.

Indeed.

Yeah, that's one.

And that's another.

Either choice would be very premature. There are a few other possible explanations that really ought to be given serious consideration.

gurugeorge

Thinking about what Juststeve is saying - he's expressing fairly and well (a bit like ApostateAbe does) what the common view is, and in trying to get at where I think it's wrong, it's gradually becoming a bit clearer to me.

It's to do with reference.

When people say (paraphrasing): "I think he was just a guy, and we can get at the guy by stripping away the supernatural crap and seeing what looks sensible in the story", what they are doing is illegitimate in the following way:-

The referent of "he" in the Christ story is the god-man, the fantastic, supernatural entity (who happens to have a few earthly-sounding aspects to his tale, as many other fantastic supernatural type entities do).

But the referent of "he" in a naturalized version of the Christ story (the story stripped of supernatural crap) is merely hypothetical until he has been independently located by triangulation with other evidence from the past.

Another way of putting it: the sentence "I think he was just a guy, and we can get at the guy by stripping away the supernatural crap" is meaningless, because UNTIL a naturalized referent of "he" is found by historical investigation, the only "he" we have IS the supernatural "he" of the Christ story, the fantastic, supernatural god-man "he".

There is no warrant to insert a naturalized "he" into the Christ story (as the euhemeristic root of the Christ story) until that natural fellow has been located.

THEN, if he has been located, the cult text evidence we have congeals as "something we could maybe get some historical details from". Any historicity that might be extracted from the Christ myth has to come from the historicity of the real guy we have independently located. Until he has been located the myth is a myth is a myth is a myth - entirely ambiguous, unclear as to origin, provenance, etc.

bacht

Forums like this exist is because there isn't enough evidence to prove what really happened in the years before the mid-2nd C. If we had substantial non-Christian confirmation of the people and processes that led to proto-Catholicism there would be no place for the speculations that you see here.

Anyone who has studied the NT even superficially knows the basic official story: Jesus appeared ca 30 with a group of followers and had a public career including teaching, miracles and prophecy. After his death his followers continued to celebrate Jesus, with the addition of new followers like Paul who never met JC. The movement expanded beyond Palestinian Jews into the eastern Mediterranean, apparently through local synagogues. By the early 60s several of the early leaders had been martyred including Peter, James and Paul. The mission to the gentiles was largely complete by the time of the revolt of 66-73.

There is a consistency to this picture, if we accept the basic premisses. But we have learned more about unorthodox beliefs like the Marcionites and gnostics, and textual analysis has raised questions about who wrote the NT books and when. History is written by the winners, and in this case the Catholic church carefully controlled the texts that survived and destroyed the ones they didn't like.

Keep in mind also that much of the surviving classical literature we have passed through the hands of Catholic copyists. Non-Christian historians like Tacitus and Josephus may have been 'corrected' along the way.

maryhelena

Great post!
:thumbs:

spamandham

The aspect of contradiction is part of it sure, but it's purpose is to demonstrate that the idea really was embarrassing *to later writers*. But so what? We already know that Christians believe Jesus was a flesh and blood human, and we know they've been believing this since at least the 2nd century. That tells us nothing about whether or not the movement started with a historical Jesus.

If we start with the premise that Jesus started as a character in a story rather than as a human of history, and we know he is now viewed as a human of history, then necessarily he was historicized. Once he came to be viewed as a real human of history, then the writers from that point forward would of course write as if he really had been a human of history...and try to minimize the embarrassing aspects of earlier texts.

But this approach overlooks something extremely important, which is that the original author clearly did not find the baptism of Jesus, crucifixion, whatever to be embarrassing at all, or they never would have included the stories! This strongly suggests then that the stories were included with intent for some purpose other than to record history...which means they are not historical.

Yes it does. Just not always.

The crucifixion is the key example of the principle being used soley on the basis of embarassment. See the wiki.

The Crucifixion of Jesus is another example of an event that meets the criterion of embarrassment. This method of execution was considered the most shameful and degrading in the Roman world, and therefore it is the least likely to have been invented by the followers of Jesus.