mountainman

The question now resolves to asking when the Talmud was assembled, specifically the references that are interpreted to relate to the material in the Toldoth. According to WIKI:

About the Mishnah it then states:

Hence we have the earliest possible references spanning a period that ends c.330 CE which is after the all important Council of Nicaea, and after what would have been the immediate political, social, religious and literary reaction to Constantine's agenda.

Therefore I remain unconvinced that the Toledoth story was known before the Council of Nicaea or that it was originally sourced in Hebrew. The summary message of the Toldeth Jeshu is that Jesus was not the son of God but was the bastard son of a Roman soldier. This is the classic anti-Christian story and is IMO likely to have been a reaction to the canonical Christian story.

Duvduv

The story recorded in the Talmud tractates is not the Toldoth story or the NT story.
It is the story of a deceiver and magician who was executed in the days after Jannaeus on the eve of Passover and who was born to Miriam out of wedlock by Joseph Pandera.
He had five named disciples, and later one Jacob of Sachnya invoked Yeshu's name when healing people.
That is the total of the Jewish account outside of and preceding the very confused Toldoths.

I don't recall the Talmud itself engaging in parody, and the meager report about Yeshu buried in the Talmud has no indication of resembling the NT story except in two elements. It should be noted, however, that the Talmud stories do not explicitly say that the father Pandera also had the name of YOSEF. This would of course have been easy to add as part of a parody anyway. Furthermore, the stories about Yeshu do not involved any discussion of laws dealing with gentiles, paganism or Romans. The story about his hanging involve a halachic discussion about testimony of witnesses starting in the mishnah of that section.

The Talmud recounts many historical events, and there is no evidence that this report was backdated as a parody.
So the issue unresolved is why the gospel writers would have used the same parental names, and nothing else except for the execution date which would cast aspersions on the gospel nativity story, names the later apologists were stuck with.

srd44

Ok, this is a huge thread, and by no means have I read through all of it. And I'm not going to respond to all the points, although they all need to be.

First, your (the original OP) methodology is just as flawed as those that would use the literature of the 1st (and Paul's letters are dated to the 1st, period) and 2nd century to argue for the historicity of the Jesus movement. The premise you, and your opponents, start from is that literature reflects reality --- not so.

So, where else do we start? Obviously our only access to the past is through its literary (and archeological) remains. But rather than adopt the views of the writers (i.e., no mention of Jesus/mention of Jesus = reality) we must keep in mind that these are merely perspectives, etc. A good historian uses his sources to hypothesis on the probability of X having happened, where X does not need to particularly agree with how X was perceived and written about in antiquity. So, where does that leave us. I’m afraid in much of an abysmal mess.

I can lay out my supporting evidence in another post, but here is a good historical reconstruction with a high amount of probability – the only one, certainly not.

Josephus tells us of a number of “messianic claimants” theoughout Palestine in the 1st century. This and other factors, make it highly probably that Jesus was proclaimed as a messiah (note the past tense). Second, what that particular claimant means, must be addressed from the cultural context of the 1st century. When Jesus is hailed the Christ in the gospels, there has, or is, already a shift in the terms meaning.

What ever Jesus was doing, teaching, or thought he was, was doing, are lost to history (the gospels cannot give us any information here). Does this mean that there was no Jesus movement? Of course not, but it is a good probability that there were some 1st Aramaic speaking Jews who professed Jesus as messiah (during or after his life, uncertain, debatable). His “movement” would have certainly been marginal — passing under the radar of all historians, certainly almost everyone (so the gospel portraits of Jesus being known throughout Galilee are also a literary invention).

Paul’s letter to the Galatians is invaluable. It tells us that Paul’s “gospel” was at odds with that of the Jerusalem “assembly,” together with the fact that we have no surviving literature from Palestine prior to its destruction in 70 AD, leaves us knowing nothing about the Jesus movement on Palestinian territory. Does this mean there was none? Certainly not. But how do we reconstruct the movement is also fraught with difficulties. At any rate, there’s a good chance that what Paul was doing and especially to whom (Greek non-Jews!) was not equivalent to the claims and positions of the Jesus movement. .... to be continued

Ok, I have to give it a break there, because there is another thing I’d like to raise. I concede that the Jesus of the gospels is a fabrication of later writers, but that does not mean that there was no Jesus. Here are some of the issues that mythicists need to address:

1) There are frankly speaking no mythic elements in the Jesus story/stories. There are no talking serpents, anthropomorphic deities, allusions to agricultural myths, no presentation of a primordial of pre-historical time-frame, no description of a decent and ascent from the underworld, no demi-gods, etc. The only element that might be inferred as mythic is the virgin birth story, but even there the claim is dubious (see #4).

2) In fact, the label or idea of a mythical Christ comes from a later period in Christianity. In the 3rd and 4th centuries under Roman influence, Christ was assimilated into Greco-Roman myths and mystery cults. There are literary and art works which recognize many of these assimilations: Christ as Orpheus, Christ as Adonis (or vice versa), Christ as Osiris, etc. Another example of later Christian mythicization is represented in gnostic literature where there is repeated talk of ascents to the 7 realms of heaven where the individual meets mythological figures, rewritings of the Fall myth that place Christ as the talking serpent, etc. What our so-called Mythists have actually done is retrojected a phenomenon of later Christianity onto its origins. This is just poor methodology. Today among biblical scholars, the paradigm is to understand the early Jesus movement from within 1st century Palestinian Judaism, even if, granted, this morphed into other religious varieties and beliefs in later periods.

3) The 1st century Palestinian Judaic context amply explains much of what we see in the early literature. Thus even though Paul’s gospel and theology is antithetical to mainstream 1st c. Judaism it nevertheless can be explained from within this very context, AND the fact that Paul has adopted his “Jewish” message for non-Jewish Greeks. Much of the later literature, the gospels, can also be understood from the socio-historical contexts that gave birth to each of their compositions—a socio-historical context that often witnessed the very questions that Judaism itself faced upon the destruction of its primary religious symbol and center, the temple. Early “Christian” writers were attempting to provide an answer to ‘what direction should Judaism take’ as too were other Jewish groups of the 1st and 2nd centuries.

4) All of the supernatural, miraculous, and hyperbolic elements certainly present in the gospel accounts can sufficiently be explained by taking a broader look at what ancient Greco-Roman literature was about, especially when authors wrote “histories” and “biographies” about people who were deemed exceptional by the communities that wrote about them. Look at Plutarch’s biography of Alexander the Great, born from Aphrodite, or Seutonius’ biography of the emperor Vespasian who performed miracles of healing in the Roman forum. Or the hyperbolic biography of Apollonius of Tyre who also raised a man from the dead, cured blindness, etc. It is in this literary context that the gospel narratives must be understood.

The Mythists must overcome these data — often they simply ignore it.
Granted I think that there is also overwhelming data to conclude that the portraits of Christ in the gospels, like Plutarch’s Aphrodite mom for Alexander the Great, are in no way representative to of the historical Jesus the Jew. But that is an entirely different claim than to say there was no Jesus at all. And with this comment, I might add a final fifth query, more hypothetical in nature than the preceding four.

5) if Jesus Christ of the gospels was a literary invention (which he was even from my perspective so let’s say it’s a literary creatio ex nihilo from the Mythists’ perspective) then for what rationale? So that a heretical sect could be persecuted by its mainstream father-religion? Or burnt alive by Roman emperors? So that this community of people, many of whom were poor, outcast, could hand over their very last possessions, become labeled as criminals by the political hegemony, and opt out of living economically in the world to sit and wait for the messiah?

I don’t see a single strength in the Mythists’ position.

mountainman

The Acts of Paul was on the list of prohibited books which was first drawn up by that master heresiologist Eusebius. In later centuries its author was referred to as "the Son of the Devil". Roman Emperors and bishops could not find enough swear words to use for this author. Elsewhere you yourself appear quite comfortable to describe the Gnostic Acts as pulp fiction.


The author of the Acts of Paul (and Thecla) introduces women priests and uses Aesop's story about "The Lion and the Mouse" to compare Paul to the mouse. Paul saviour in the story is the very talking lion that he had baptized as Christian in the wilderness. I'd classify this text as (originally) a Greek satire / parody of the canonical story.


aa5874 has to deal with ALL the evidence and not just some of it.

aa5874 (and most other posters here) rarely discuss the far side of the corpus of early Christian literature. The NT apocryphal texts or the non canonical texts or the Gnostic Gospels and Acts - these are on the FAR SIDE of the theoretical equation involving the MJ. On the near side and conspicuous by its marketing, are the canonical story books about the J figure and his supporting cast.

mountainman

There is an abysmal collection of evidence to assess, and in its investigation we all start with our own set of hypotheses (Hn) which we assume to be provisionally true. Examples are as follows:

(H1) - Jesus was an historical person
(H2) - Paul was an historical person

Alternate examples are:

(H3) - Jesus was not an historical person
(H4) - Paul was not an historical person


Obviously there are many combinations and permutations of these hypotheses some of which may be the antitheses of each other.

The state of the evidence has caused a number of high profile "Quests for the Historical Jesus" to fail. An objective investigator might therefore be free to investigate whether the "Quest for the Mythical Jesus" is successful at producing results in the field of ancient history.

aa5874

The Quest for an Historical Jesus was Initiated Precisely because NT Jesus was a Jesus of Faith.

In effect, people on the Quest for HJ have conceded that NT Jesus is NOT the real thing.

The real Jesus is somewhere out there.

Jesus is in heaven--Only Myths live there.

Sheshbazzar

And when the imagined historical Jesus is a different Jesus than the Jesus of the Gospel, that imagined historical Jesus can never be the real Jesus.
The only Jesus that can meet the test is the Jesus of Faith, the one that is believed to have done and said ALL that is attributed to Jesus the Christ.
The one and the only historical Jesus is he whose remains will never be located on earth because he took them with him when he went to heaven.
That is the only identifiable historical Jesus that anyone will ever be able to 'find'.

aa5874

Jesus is building some "condos" in his fathers mansion for those who believe he existed.

John 14:2 KJV---In my Father's house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you.

Sheshbazzar

In case anyone is wondering what is that has been keeping Jesus busy all of this time....
According to Revelations it appears that he would be employed for some time in the constructing or refurbishing that gigantic fourteen hundred mile long, wide, and high space cube that is supposed to descend from heaven (Rev 21:10-16) land on earth and become the eternal dwelling place and cult headquarters of the saints. SciFi for ya c. -130 CE.

srd44

Indeed, .... I think

Since historical figures of the past come down to use through literature, sculpture as well, and the literature was written by the conventions of the day (where even history was fictionalized or agendazied if you will), to adopt an all out skeptical position seems defeatist.

THe work I've done, starts (would like to start) with a historical reconstruction of the time. So for example, let us try the best we can, the most object we can with the literary remains we have to recontrust what 1st Palestinian Judaism was. So this methodology relies on Josephus, heavily, Dead Sea Scrolls and other intertestamental literature etc.,

Second, since any historical reconstruction is speaking in terms of probability, what would the 1st century Jew, even Galilean, belief, practice, think, etc. In other words, paint a portrait of our world fisrt, then place the historical Jesus in that....