Ktotwf

As others have said of Doherty's work - he can establish a good POSITIVE case for why Christianity started as a hellenistic mystery religion.

It isn't just lack of evidence for the historical Jesus, but evidence for the Mystery Religion Christmyth hypothesis.

aa5874

But Christ, the Messiah, was expected by the Jews to be historical long before Jesus was fabricated as a supernatural entity.

King David was called the Christ of God hundreds of years before Jesus Christ was manufactured as a God, even the so-called prophet Daniel wrote about a physical Messiah, and the advent of Simon Barcocheba clearly showed the expectation of a physical Messiah.

It would appear that the historical Christ, the expected physical Messiah of the Jews, was mythologized and his role reversed some time in the late 1st century or early 2nd century.

The expected Jewish MESSSIAH would fight and kill for the Jews, but the later spiritual Messiah claimed the Jews were of the Devil or vipers and must love those who hate them.

mg01

Understood, but the same claim can be made by HJ supporters as well. In both cases, supporting information tends to come from selected passages deemed to be early among the layers of tradition that have come down to us. It's essentially speculation on top of speculation.

I'm not completely convinced by arguments for either case. It seems that all you can derive from either approach is to gain a sense of what the earliest writers thought.

The TF is a good example. I've seen it used by supporters from both sides as evidence for their position, each selectively claiming different portions as latter additions. How can it be either if there is no way to know what's original or what's not?

aa5874

Are you looking for a confession from the authors of the NT and the Church writers that Jesus did not exist in the 1st century?

I don't think you will find one.

It is by deduction that a person comes to a conclusion once there is no physical evidence.

As it stands now, the information that supports the deduction that Jesus was not a real person far outweighs any information for historicity.

mg01

Not at all.

It is the methods of deduction that underlie the point I'm trying to make. Since the nature of the material we have prevents completely objective analysis, proponents on each side start with some criteria by which evidence is either accepted or rejected. Both sides end up with a hypothesis with built in mechanisms to explain the presence of ideas contrary to the central premise rendering both unfalsifiable.

This is exactly what the HJ position would predict based on its premise that early writers new little or nothing about the historical man (not that they didn't care as some may argue), and later writers filled in those holes with both Jewish and Hellenistic mythology to make theological points.

Even with the best possible methodology, given the sources, the most that can ever be recovered is simply what the earliest writers thought about Jesus.
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jakejonesiv

That is a good observation!

Jake

Toto

How does your particular HJ position reconcile "Jesus existed" with "early writers knew little or nothing about the historical man"? The usual explanation is "oral tradition" which has now morphed into "refracted memory" which seems to be code for factually unreliable oral tradition.

:huh:

mg01

I'm not an HJ advoate and question the same leap in logic by those who are.

aa5874

What you say is hardly true at all. The extant material we have does not in any way impede an objective analysis at all.

We have descriptions of Jesus where he was described as a God and creator of the world by the NT and the Church writers that are considered truthful by the Church with supposed witnesses.

The mythical hypothesis is directly dependent on lack of historical evidence and mythological attributes by the supposed contemporaries of Jesus and this is exactly what is found.

The conditions to maintain that Jesus was a myth is intact and very good.

Please tell me how such a prediction helps the case for historicity when this is exactly what the MJ needed?

No argument for historicity can be made without historical evidence or information, that is the fatal flaw in the case for historicity. What you are proposing for the HJ is a conspiracy theory where everybody in antiquity simply forgot that Jesus was human including his supposed mother, disciples, skeptics, gnostics and heretics.


And the earliest writers, even his supposed contemporaries, presented or thought Jesus was TRULYa God, the creator of the world, the offspring of the Holy Ghost, who Truly transfigured, resurrected and ascended through the clouds.

Only a myth can be recovered.

Paul a supposed contemporary of Jesus can only personally account for Jesus in a resurrected state.

That is why the MJ case is extremely strong.

And further, there is Philo, Josephus, Tacitus, Suetonius, and Pliny the younger who cannot account for Jesus or disciples carrying his name any where in the 1st century.

What is the strength of the HJ case? It is based on a lack of historical evidence or an assumption that everybody in antiquity forgot that Jesus existed in the 1st century as only human.

There is no HJ case.

Roger Pearse

Doherty's original argument required an early date for Minucius Felix, and since this is uncertain (indeed most likely wrong on philological grounds), that argument collapsed there and then. I may have given it a modest shove, I admit, but it was tottering from day 1. It seemed to me that he did not know that scholarship had progressed on this issue, since the sources he was reading when he wrote the first edition had been issued. The last I heard, he was still trying to make the dead parrot fly.

It sounds as if he has again tried to cling to the argument, despite this, although of course I haven't seen his text so I don't really know.

But if so, that's a bit sad. We all make mistakes of fact; the thing to do is accept it and move on.

All the best,

Roger Pearse