Johnnyboy

Hey Guys. I have a little question for you. My father, who is a fundie(jehovas wittnesses) said to me that Michael Grant "proved" the existence of the biblical jesus in his book "Jesus". I know that Michael Grant was a great historian, but I didn't read the book, and I don't know how to get it (in german). Besides of that I can't believe that Grant made such a claim. As far as I know he believed in Jesus as a historical Person, but he also believed that the bible is not literal right, or am I wrong? Did anybody of you read the books of Grant?



Greetings from Heidelberg.

Ecrasez L'infame

I think it's probably OK to quote a couple of sentences from the book. Grant is AFAIK the originator of the oft-quoted "we know more about Jesus than we know about Alexander" line; although that isn't quite what he said. This is in the Appendix, p199-200 of my edition, and is offered complete and unabridged:

""In the first place, Judaism was a milieu to which doctrines of the deaths and rebirths of mythical gods seems so entirely foreign that the emergence of such a fabrication from its midst is very hard to credit. But above all, if we apply to the New Testament, as we should, the same sort of criteria that we apply to other ancient writings containing historical material, we can no more reject Jesus' existence than we can reject the existence of a mass of pagan personages whose reality as historical figures is never questioned. Certainly, there are all those discrepancies between one Gospel and another. But we do not deny that an event took place just because pagan historians such as, for example, Livy and Polybius, happen to have described it in differing terms. That there was a growth of legend around Jesus cannot be denied, and it arose very quickly. But there had also been a rapid growth of legend around Alexander the Great; and yet nobody regards him as wholly mythical and fictitious. To sum up, modern critical methods fail to support the Christ-myth theory. It has 'again and again been answered and annihilated by first-rank scholars'. In recent years 'no serious scholar has ventured to postulate the non-historicity of Jesus' - or at any rate very few, and they have not succeeded in disposing of the much stronger, indeed very abundant, evidence to the contrary."

[Entered by hand, so pardon typos.] The two quotes are probably R Dunkerley, Beyond the Gospels, and O Betz, What Do We Know About Jesus?

My only comment on this is - remember it was written in the mid-70s.

Nice place, Heidelberg.

Regards

Robert

Toto

Michael Grant assumes but does not prove that the gospels are ancient documents that can be used as history. He clearly does not believe that they are inerrant or that the supernatural events described in them actually happened.

Grant is usually described by Christian debaters who use his work as an atheist (as in "even the atheist historian Michael Grant believes that Jesus existed"), but I have been unable to verify his religious orientation.

Grant has written Jesus and Jesus: An Historians Review of the Gospels.

NOGO

I have a question for your father.
JW believe that Jesus is a created being. Archangel Michael I believe.

How do the JW explain these verses?

Philippians 2:10-11
That at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of [things] in heaven, and [things] in earth, and [things] under the earth; And [that] every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ [is] Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

Isaiah 45:23
I (Yahweh) have sworn by myself, the word is gone out of my mouth [in] righteousness, and shall not return, That unto me every knee shall bow, every tongue shall swear.

Yahweh says that every knew shall bow unto him.
Paul says that every knew show bow unto Jesus.

Steven Carr

Probably the same way Christians explain why Paul thnks Jesus was God, and yet became exalted to Lord only at the resurrection.

Being god is pretty much the end of the caree chain. You can't get a promotion to a higher post.

Johnnyboy

Thanks to you guys.

@ NOGO: Since I am not a JW, I do not think much about their doctrines. But I know that the theory, that Michael is Jesus, isn't usual among Christians. But definately there are lager bugs in the JW doctrines. Remermber they think that Jerusalem was destroyed in 607 bc by the bablonyians. And they are the only one in the world who believe it.

Greetings from Heidelberg.

exapologist

This response is *extremely* late, but hey, so was my de-conversion from christianity.

I read Grant's book. He thinks Jesus existed, and that we could re-construct a rough picture of him by applying the tools of the historian to the gospel materials. His conclusion -- which is undeniable, in my opinion -- was that Jesus was a failed apocalyptic figure that believed that God was using him to usher in the restoration of Israel (he had little or no interest in reaching out to the gentiles -- re: those passages about only going "to the lost sheep of Israel", calling the Syrophonecian woman and others "dogs" and "pigs", etc.) followed by the apocalypse.

Even though his work is now dated, he makes an extremely deep point: if we take much of the gospel materials at face value, you can't avoid the conclusion that Jesus thought the restoration of the 12 tribes of Israel and the apocalypse would happen within his lifetime -- A tragic belief that was dashed with his crucifixion (Grant thinks that Jesus *really* meant it when he cried from the cross, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?")