EricK

I only occasionally glance at at this forum, so I don't know if this question has been answered before: What is the minimum requirement for someone to be an historic Jesus?

Is it enough that he said a few of the things attributed to him, or must he have said most or all of them? Does he have to have lived in the areas claimed? Does he have to have lived at the time claimed? Must he have been crucified or even just put on trial? Does he even have to have been named Jesus (Jeshua)? etc etc

Eric

Diogenes the Cynic

It's a good question, especially for this forum. I once started a thread asking this very question myself but didn't get much traction.

In my opinion, the absoute minimum I would require to call HJ is if he said at least some of what is attributed to him and if he was crucified. I suppose it would be helpful if he was also named Yeshua.

gurugeorge

Depends who is asking for a "historical jesus"!

I think for the orthodox Christian, the main thing would have to be clear proof of Christ being literally God's incarnation, which pragmatically would mean some kind of proof of extraordinary events and miracles, some kind of proof of Godhead. The theory is that God incarnated once, and once only, on this Earth, in the form of His Son, and sacrificed himself to atone for our inborn Original Sin. Nothing short of that is worthy of that distinctive label "Christian" for the truly orthodox Christian. In the old days people were satisfied by the miraculous stories in the Bible; latterly, it's gotten more and more difficult for an intelligent person to seriously believe the hardcore Christian thing, but some still manage it.

Humanist-tinged, or rationalist Christians, who balk at such a shamefully un-scientific theology, would probably want to see proof that there was a "preacher" or "teacher" called Jesus, who lived around that time, and can be shown to have behaved well and enunciated many of the important (and - why not? - noble) ethical and spiritual teachings attributed to him in the New Testament. I suspect this is where the majority of people calling themselves "Christian" would be happy to see themselves. This is liberal Christianity.

Humanists and rationalists outright, agnostics or atheists or theists, would expect to see some bare proof of somebody by that name, having said some things that would even vaguely resemble what Christ is reported to have said in the Bible. (i.e., the existence of such a person would explain the existence of the phenomenon of Christianity satisfactorily.)

If no evidence of this sort can be found at all, and it looks like there can be found no good evidence to show any such person as Jesus ever existed, and that the phenomenon of Christianity can be explained by reasons other than the historical existence of its leading figure, then ... well, there isn't a name for this broad "not found" category.

"Mythical Jesus" is a subset of this space. However that "mythical" might be interpreted, the idea would be that he's a made-up figure: whether accreted through the semi-conscious ventings of the collective Unconscious in prophets' and mediums' trance states, leading to religious poetry and legend, the foundations of culture; whether made-up deliberately by sinister cabals of priests in cahoots with government and criminal elements; whether a founding figure retroactively injected into the history of several, closely linked communities of practicing mystics - by whatsoever means, the absence of evidence for a historical Jesus has to be made sense of somehow, and the various MJ positions are attempts to make sense of it.

Steven Avery

An interesting definition. On the first part, The Jesus Seminar would be the prototype, since they voted on which sayings were real. Perhaps anybody who voted "yes" less than 5% or 10% of the time is actually a mythicist.

On second part there could have been an amazing Messiah claimant, but then Mark, Luke and Matthew, mostly writing in far-off lands, added a crucifixion (and resurrection) story, and basically everybody quickly "bit".

I was wondering about this a bit, watching how malleable the mythicist views are. On one hand the NT books, or perhaps only the Gospels, are not written for about a century (in mythicist land), and yet it still is fine that people in Israel around 40 AD put Yeshua aloth and crosses on their tombs, based on an oral story. The oral story would be the "truth" of the myth (hmmm) about a resurrected saviour at 40 AD and then the historical Gospels, with their precise historicity and geography of the region and the earlier times, become the "fiction" of the myth. And then I guess letters are created about the lives of the men of these times that are themselves myths, creating a fiction of what they might have gone through in those early years, and writing in their names ? Or are Peter and Paul and others real, and they wrote those letters based on the original myth, and then the Gospels were back-added to match "genuine" letters? And so many strange omsisions, why not at least take Acts up till some martyrdoms and the judgement on the Temple in 70 ? Oh, and in the midst of this, do not forget to create one city, Nazareth

Oh, the mind doth boggle.

Shalom,
Steven Avery
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Messianic_Apologetic

Diogenes the Cynic

This is not a mythicist claim.
No they didn't.
There is no such story in 40 CE.
You must be reading different Gospels than what's in the Bible, because the Canonical Gospels are full of geographical and historical mistakes.
There are no letters about "the lives" of anyone who knew Jesus. The New Testament contains no first hand accounts of Jesus, not even forged ones.
Peter wrote nothing. Paul's 7 authentic letters were written before the Gospels.
Becuse the author wasn't aware of any martyrdoms, because the destruction of the Temple was irrelevant to the author's fictionalized life of Paul. As to Nazareth, there is no evidence that such a place existed in Jesus' day, or if it did, where it was located. The archaeological site called "Nazareth" today is a 2nd century village which may or may not have been called Nazareth even then.

The existence of a place called Nazareth would be meaningless anyway. King Kong climbed up the Empire State Building.

hallq

I'd make "Paul knew people who knew him" and important part of the idea of an historical Jeusus. He's apparently our sorce closest to the guy, and if the Peter and James he mentions didn't know him like the Gospels say, we don't have much.

Vorkosigan

What? More twisting? Imagine that.

Steven Avery

Whenever you want to give a complete proposed scenario, who wrote what when, who was real, who was a myth, who was a partial myth etc. I will not have to try to conjecture the mythicist view.

Clarice O'C

I'd say we have to have reliable extra-biblical testimony--what we have has flopped.

Doug Shaver

For me: (1) A Galilean preacher of the early first century whose teachings were similar to those attributed to Jesus by the gospel authors and (2) a violent death at the hands of either Jewish or Roman authorities. Crucifixion by Pilate would ice the cake, but I could get by without it.

The more the merrier, obviously. I'm not sure where the cutoff would be.

Probably. It would depend to some extent on the other similarities. If everything else was a good match, I could cut him some slack on his venue.

It would have to be close, depending again on how close the other similarities were.

I think the bottom line is the plausibility of stories about that person morphing into the gospel stories through oral transmission during the time between his death and the time the gospels were written.