Valmont

The Passover crucifixion. This is virtually inexplicable as narrative decision on the part of the Evangelist, Mark, as virtually the entirety of 1st Century Christian symbology characterised the death of Jesus as a Yom Kippur sacrifice, whether the sin-offering (in Romans or Hebrews) or the goat of Azazel (in Barnabas).

Malachi151

Well, this is an issue here that people seem to have a hard time wrapping their heads around. IMO you can't really deal with this until you come to a full recognition of what Mark really is.

"Mark" BECAME authoritative because it was the only "story of Jesus" that was written, but its not like "Mark" was really an "authority".

In other words, "Mark" was just some guy who decided to write an allegorical story about "Jesus Christ", but he clearly wasn't using "oral tradition", he probably was a Roman Jew who was out of touch with the Jesus movement in reality, who was mostly just making up his own story. IN fact, he may have purposefully been putting his own new spin on the tradition.

He probably put the crucifixion on Passover to make a point against the Jews, as the whole work seems to be anti-Jewish in the first place, or at least anti-that particular Jewish mentality and ruling class. Perhaps it would be better to call it an anti-Judean work, than an anti-Jewish work.

But the thing is that "Mark" is simply a work that became popular because it was all that there was, its not because it made the most sense or that it reflected the oral tradition, or whatever, it forged its own tradition by its own weight.

Its like if a movie is made about a comic book series.

Take the Batman TV series that ran on television. In reality that TV series deviated a lot from the character of the comic book. It was only loosely based on the comic book as a source for the characters, but it was goofy, whereas the comic book was serious. Nevertheless the TV series became a dominant view of Batman for a long time, because it created its own authority by being on TV and having a wider audience than the comic book itself.

That's what "Mark" did. And that's the problem, we can't really rely on "Mark" for anything.

"Mark" doesn't even necessarily reflect the dominant beliefs about Jesus at the time that "Mark" was writing. "Mark" is "Mark's" story, and that's an important thing to understand.

Doug Shaver

There are many historicity claims for Jesus, notwithstanding your fixation on the one in the gospels.

Didymus

It's possible to view the events described in the gospels as largely ficticious, while at the same time believing that there was a man - not the MJ'ers' otherworldly ghost, but a real human being - at the root. Can someone who utterly denies the historicity of the gospel stories still be considered to believe in a historical Jesus? I don't think so.

It seems to me that, while the stories about Jesus, his disciples, etc., are entirely kludged together from non-historical sources, quite a bit of the contextual material is substantially correct. After all, it's pretty obvious that the gospel writers did their best to place their characters in a plausible historical setting. That setting may have been "long ago and far away" from wherever in the Diaspora they were writing their gospels, but they were learned men with some crude knowledge of historical figures like the Baptist, Caiphas and Pilate, and of places like Galilee and the Mount of Olives.

In response to the OP, I think some of the gospel material, particularly that which also appeared beforehand in Paul's epistles, is probably historical, including the notorious crucifixion of an enigmatic preacher named Jesus at some point early in the first century. And it was most likely a historical fact that a local "urban legend" held that the dead man had appeared to many, even "500," Jerusalemites in dreams and visions.

Seems to me when people talk about a historical Jesus they mean a man whose life more-or-less resembled the life described in the gospels. But a few poorly understood and little-known events described as taking place in a historical context don't really amount to much by way of historicity. Or, in my view, to a "historical Jesus."

Didymus

aa5874

You mean many claims of possibilities, since those only need vivid imaginatiions and speculative analysis.
No historicity claim has been confirmed to be valid.

gstafleu

Agreed.

Yes. With a caveat, see below.

Correct.

Quite so. Why then do I still think that your pointing out that the similarity between the crucifixion scene and a romance novel does not necessarily mean that the crucifixion was fictional is not all that useful? Because there are too many things in a similar position to be coincidence.

Let me try it step by step. If the argument was just that the extra-biblical evidence for an HJ was skimpy and the intra-biblical evidence unreliable, then I would agree that the initial position on HJ-MJ could be agnostic: we just can't tell. But we have more than just that.

If you want to reject an established theory you need to do more than just pointing out the other guys' evidence is faulty, although that is a start. You also need to come up with a better theory. Modern Jesus Myth Theory does just that. It starts by pointing out the evidence for an HJ is not convincing, but it then goes on to posit a new theory, in two steps. First it presents a developmental theory where Jesus morphs from mythical to historical (Doherty's work). Second, and that is what we are discussing here, it points out that (almost) everything that this now-historical Jesus is supposed to have said and done can be derived from then-extant material (Price). That is where the crucifixion-as-romance-novel (CARN) fits in.

CARN is just one plank in the rather wide platform of derivation. This platform is a bit different from a physical platform with physical planks. You can throw doubt on the plankness of a particular item, as you did. But items gain plankness from the existence of similar items, even though you can throw similar doubt on each of these individual items. (I do hope this paragraph doesn't make you bang your head agains a plank :banghead:!)

Take Robert Price's list of all sayings in Q1 (in Deconstructing Jesus), where he shows where each one came from. For each individual one you can say, like you did for CARN, "well, that is coincidence." But to dismantle the whole platform you'd have to make the point that all of these derivations are coincidence, and that just doesn't work.

To take away the CARN plank from the platform you therefore have to do more than say the similarity isn't enough: you have to show the similarity isn't there. Saying the similarity is there but not enough to establish identity would be sufficient if CARN was the only or one of a few planks. But there is this whole stack of other derivational planks.

Just think of all the things we know came from the OT or from Pythagoras or from Epictetus or from the Mysteries. Are you going to say "You cannot claim that a text which apparently evinces a genre or a trope, necessarily must have the other characteristics of that genre or trope" of all of them? That would be a lot of "coincidence"!

Now to get back to the original sheep, I gave CARN as just an example of what MJers could come up with as non-historical items (and I still haven't seen any examples of historical items from the HJers BTW ). That example cannot be seen separate from the company of all these other derived items. It is the sheer mass of derivation that gives the argument its strenght, not the individual contributions of each item in isolation.

Now, as an aside, for that caveat regarding putting something in the "does not exist" category if there is no evidence for its existence. I suspect Occam's razor favors that position. I would argue that something not existing is in this case the more parsimonious hypothesis. Perhaps I'm a bit of a minimalist here, but If I don't see evidence for somethings existence I tend to assume it doesn't exist, until evidence comes along.

Gerard Stafleu

gstafleu

It is certainly possible, a lot of people seem to do just that .

Agreed, I think many HJers are essentially in the MJ camp. The Jesus "we all know and love" is the whole shooting match from the gospels, a severely diminished version, as for example the Jesus Seminar argued for, doesn't count. There is a methodological problem with it as well: you are open to accusations of continuously diminishing your hypothesis to the level where it is not yet contradicted by the evidence.

However
The problem here is twofold. (1) It may "seem" so, but the evidence is skimpy. (2) There is a better explanation in the form of Doherty's and Price's work.

So did Ian Fleming! It is perfectly possible to place a fictional character in a historic setting. In fact, much present day fiction does exactly that. So did ancient fiction: Homer e.g., or even things like Pyramus and Thisbe (Ovid's metamorphoses). I'm sure there were frustrated lovers in the Orient, there may even have been a tomb of Ninus. But is that really why Mulberries are red?

Gerard Stafleu

rlogan

This is roughly the same position I hold. This specific mythicist rendition supplies an argument from best explanation.

spin has an agnostic position that is impossible to unseat because the burden of proof is so high given the way he approaches the question.

I think I have a better way of viewing the problem, and we'll see if the rascally spin can wrestle out of this one:

Ask ourselves instead what position is the one which provides the most likely explanation for generating the record we see before us. (Argument from best explanation).

The agnostic position does no explaining. It is not a positive formation that produces a record.


I notice that only one person here has supplied a historical scenario - Didymus


Pretty telling.

blkgayatheist

no, but if the only evidence we had of Kennedy's assasination was also a movie made about Kennedy's assasination supposedly around the same time frame as the Bush film, it would be worth questioning the historicity

spin

Hey, if you're happy with that. You have no evidence that my cat exists, so you can put her in the "does not exist" category. I can go along with that. I can stop feeding her and save a few bucks.


spin