Juststeve

Spam:

If I were to assume that there was no historical Jesus then I would agree that the origin of the particular story about the betrayal for 30 pieces of silver might be as you suggest.

Now look back at the question I asked you. I asked you what part of the story you found incredible, the betrayal, the name of the betrayer, or the amount of money involved. I was hoping that your thinking would extend to the possibility that there could have been an actual betrayal embellished with things like 30 pieces of silver and a betrayer named Judas. If you gave it some thought you might realize that there is apologetic reason for making Judas the heavy in the piece and making 30 pieces of silver the price of betrayal.

Now I as quite willing to admit that I can’t know if Jesus was betrayed at all. What surprises me is that you’re so sure he wasn’t.

Steve

Juststeve

Mercy:

Any historical reconstruction contains a lot of conjecture. None of the mythers have reconstructed the process whereby a fictional character got to be regarded as real for nearly 2000 years and is still so regarded by the vast majority of scholars who have considered the issue. Conjecture is just part of what we are doing.

As to your question about moving from conjecture to something more substantial, I propose to leave that heavy lifting to people who have made their life’s work of it. I’m referring of course to the scholars that mythers eschew. I’m not saying that people on the fringe might not be right, but the smart money is usually on recognized experts.

Steve

gurugeorge

If there was a Jesus, then sure it would be plausible. Is there any confirmation outside the cult texts of such a person? No. End of (hi)story.

But, to play with the hypothesis qua hypothesis, to play with the mere possibility itself, here's the deal. If something has a literary precedent (as spam has pointed out), then what you have to believe is that in that hypothetical real historical event, the amount of money paid over just happened to coincide with the money paid over in the prior literary trope.

Ockham's Razor suggests you should just go with interpreting the passage as a repeat of the literary trope.

The same goes for all the stuff in the NT. If precedents can be found, then what is there left to be something uncontaminated by being mixed up with prior literary tropes, so that you could say with any confidence whatsoever, that here you had gotten hold of something that might be genuine history?

Robert Price argues that the situation with biblical scholarship is like this: here in one corner, a scholar finds this bit of the gospels to be based on novelistic tropes of the day, then in another corner, another scholar finds another bit to be based on Scripture, etc., etc., etc. If you "join the dots" (as biblical scholars will not do, of course), then the amount of material that could possibly serve as uncontaminated historical witness diminishes to nothing.

At which point, why not cut the painter and go with the mythicist hypothesis? It's no less plausible than the historicist - religions do start with people having visions and mystical experiences of meeting weird and wonderful entities, or parsing them from their holy writings or whatever. It might have been a "Jesus" fellow having such experiences and kicking off a religion, but seeing as there's no reason to hold to the historicity of such a person, the mythicist explanation is simply that other people had these types of mystical visions and Scripture-parsings about an entity they called "Jesus".

It started off in a really simple way (the "biography" in Paul is tiny, and easily construable mythically/mystically), and then people confabulated and "filled in" over time, till eventually you had a firm story in GMark, and then everyone copied him because it was a cool story, the best filled-in biography anyone had come up with.

And then the idea of apostolic succession was created as proto-orthodoxy's big idea to give them leverage over the other, variegated "heretical" forms of Christianity (which were variegated precisely as one would expect from a religion that started as a small, mystico-philosophical cult - there being no actual history or people remembering any actual history, to keep it reasonably grounded).

And the rest is history

aa5874

You are arguing plausibility and NOT history, credibility, or veracity.

Fundamentalists and Christians use the very same plausibility arguments to claim Jesus was the Creator of heaven and earth, walked on water, was RAISED from the dead and ascended to heaven.

According to fundamentalists and Christians it is plausible that a God or a Supernatural being could do everything that Jesus supposedly did in the NT Canon.

The betrayal of Jesus in gMatthew appeared to have been based on Hebrew Scripture.

Examine Psalms 41:9 - Matthew 26.21 Zechariah 11:12 - Matthew 26.15 The betrayal of Jesus in the NT is not credible. Jesus BLEW Judas' cover, Judas was EXPOSED as a TRAITOR, yet Judas, as if an IDIOT or was CONTROLLED by God or some supernatural POWER fulfilled prophecy by still betraying Jesus.

You must understand that a betrayal is plausible but that is NOT the question.

Who lived in the City of Nazareth, a man or the offspring a Ghost if there ever was such a CITY and what source external of gMatthew corroborates that the CITY of Nazareth did exist during the governorship of Pilate?

Now, it is already assumed that you know it is plausible that people, not Ghosts, live in CITIES.

It is PLAUSIBLE that there was NO City called Nazareth and no offspring of a Ghost called Jesus.

Juststeve

gurugeorge:

If it is you position that Christian writing, what you call cult texts, constitute no evidence whatsoever for a historical Jesus, then there is nothing left for us to discuss. Apart from a few contentious writing by Josephus and Tacitus there is nothing else. This in not really news to anyone, so you ought to wonder why mainstream scholars almost unanimously disagree with your conclusions. I suppose they must be either stupid or ill motivated. What else can they be once you exclude the possibility that they are right?

Similarly I disagree with the proposition that if something can be a literary trope it necessarily is a literary trope. The most a reasonable person with an open mind can say is that it may be a fictional response to the literary trope or an apologetic impulse. That an event conforms to a literary trope or evidences an apologetic purpose is something to be considered but ought not to be seen as dispositive.

Steve

Kapyong

Gday,

Hasn't your life experience taught you that people make up religious stories?

K

show_no_mercy

But because of the horrible nature of the evidence, the scholars are all over the place:

The Clueless Search for the Historical Jesus

Historians know Bismarck and Alexander were leaders of states or political powers. They know David Hume and Socrates were philosophers. They know Nat Turner and Spartacus were rebel slaves. But they don’t know who or what Jesus was.

Albert Schweitzer understood Jesus as an apocalyptic Jesus. In the latest quest, Sanders’s Jesus is an eschatological prophet; Crossan’s Jesus is a Mediterranean peasant cynic full of wit and critical of the Establishment; Borg’s Jesus is a mystical genius; Wright’s Jesus is an end-of-the-exile messianic prophet who believed he was God returning to Zion. We could go on, but we have made our point: Historical Jesus scholars reconstruct what Jesus was really like and orient their faith around that reconstruction. (Scot McKnight: The Jesus We’ll Never Know)

No, Scot McKnight’s last sentence there does not encapsulate the problem he has raised in the previous sentences. HJ scholars don’t know who or what Jesus was — not simply “what he was really like”!

And...

Letting Go of Jesus

Albert Schweitzer’s Quest of the Historical Jesus—a long, not altogether engaging survey of the 18th and 19th century attempts to piece together a coherent picture of the hero of the gospels. Schweitzer pronounced the quests a failure, because none of them dealt with the data within the appropriate historical framework. No final conclusions were possible.

We can know, because of what we know about ancient literature and ancient Roman Palestine, what Jesus might have been like—we can know the contours of an existence. But not enough for a New York Times obituary.

Beyond tracing this line we get lost in contradiction. If he taught anything, he must have taught something that people of his own time could have understood. But that means that what he had to say will be irrelevant or perhaps incomprehensible to people in different social situations. His teaching, if we were to hear it, Schweitzer said, would sound mad to us. He might have preached the end of the world. If he did, he would not have spent his time developing a social agenda or an ethics textbook for his soon-to-be-raptured followers.

[...]

Whatever sketch you come up with will be a sketch based on the image you have already formed: The agnostic former Jesuit Alfred Loisy (d. 1940) after his excommunication wrote a book called The Gospel and the Church, in which he lampooned the writings of the reigning German theologian Adolph von Harnack (d. 1930) who had published a book called The Essence of Christianity.

In the book Harnack argued that the Gospel had permanent ethical value given to it by someone who possessed (what he called) God-consciousness: Jesus was the ethical teacher par excellence. Loisy responded, “Professor Harnack has looked deep into the well for the face of the historical Jesus, but what he has seen is his own liberal protestant reflection.”

In America, Jesus was undergoing a similar transformation. In New York City around 1917 a young graduate of the Colgate Divinity School named Walter Rauschenbusch was looking at the same miserable social conditions that were being described by everyone from Jane Addams to Sinclair Lewis and Theodore Dreiser in literature.

[...]


For many of us who follow the Jesus quest wherever it goes, it’s impressive that the less we know about Jesus–the less we know for sure–the longer and many the books that can be written. In what will surely be the greatest historical irony of the late 20th and early 21st century, for example, members of the Jesus Seminar, founded in 1985 to pare the sayings of Jesus down to “just the real ones,” came to the conclusion that 82% of the sayings of Jesus were (in various shades) inauthentic, that Jesus had never claimed the title Messiah, that he did not share a final meal with his disciples (there goes the Mass), and that he did not invent the Lord’s prayer.

They come to these conclusions however in more than a hundred books by Seminar members, of varying quality and interest, each of which promises to deliver the real Jesus. The “real Jesus,” unsurprisingly, can be almost anything his inventor wants him to be: prophet, wise man, magician, sage, bandit, revolutionary, gay, French, Southern Baptist or Cajun.

[...]


We don’t know what [Jesus] thought about the messiah or himself. The gospels are cagey on the subject and can yield almost any answer you want.

He was neither a social conservative nor a liberal democrat. The change he (or his inventors) advocated was regressive rather than progressive. But it’s also possible that we don’t even know enough to say that much.

He doesn’t seem to have had much of a work ethic; he tells his followers to beg from door to door, go barefoot (or not), and not worry about where their next meal is coming from. He might have been a magician; the law (Ex. xxii. 17 [A. V. 18]) which punishes sorcery with death speaks of the witch and not of the wizard, and exorcism was prevalent in the time of Jesus, as were magical amulets, tricks, healings, love potions and charms—like phylacteries.

But we can’t be sure. If he was a magician, he was certainly not interested in ethics. After a point, the plural Jesuses available to us in the gospels become self-negating, and even the conclusion that the gospels are biographies of communities becomes unhelpful: they are the biographies of different perspectives often arising within the same community.

Like the empty tomb story, the story of Jesus becomes the story of the man who wasn’t there.

What we need to be mindful of, however, is the danger of using greatly reduced, demythologized and under-impressive sources as though no matter what we do, or what we discover, the source—the Gospel–retains its authority.

It is obviously true that somehow the less certain we can be about whether x is true, the more possibilities there are for x. But when I took math, we seldom defined certainty as the increase in a variable’s domain. The dishonesty of much New Testament scholarship is the exploitation of the variable. [my emphasis]

[...]

No other historical figure or legendary hero can be abused in quite the same way. We leave Alexander the Great in the fourth century BCE, Cleopatra in Hellenistic Egypt, and Churchill buried at the family plot in Bladon near Oxford.

[...]

It’s (at least) an act of honesty to say that what we would like to believe to be the case about him might not have been the case at all.

[...]

The history of Jesus-scholarship is a progression of narratives about what might have been the case, but probably wasn’t.

This is what happens when we rely on too much conjecture and not enough actual evidence.

Kapyong

Gday,

I beg your pardon?
Earl Doherty has done exactly that!
Why on earth haven't you read his work?

Sadly, Steve it's clear from your previous comments (such as "made up from whole cloth") that you have no idea what the MJers actually claim. It looks like you have never ever read any of the JM theories at all.

Are you deliberately trying NOT to read and understand the MJ theory?


K

Juststeve

Mercy:

You have documented a large number of scholars, all of whom think Jesus was an historical figure but who interpret him differently. Is this meant to advance your case that there was no historical Jesus, or are you merely pointing out that even experts disagree on exactly how to describe him?

If you want I can cite you to authors who interpretation of Lincoln would range between savior of the nation to tyrant. Is this evidence that Lincoln didn’t exist, or is it something else?

Steve

Juststeve

Kapyong:

Sure they do. Even stories about Jesus.

Steve