Amaleq13

How much about the lives of Manson, Jones, Applewhite, or Koresh did their followers know about them?

It doesn't seem to me that it is realistic to expect the followers of a charismatic leader to know much about him at all. It is The Man (as he is) and His Message that is paramount. I would think that, if any, only personal background directly relevant to The Message would be related. Jesus' preaching is generally depicted as focused on the future.

Add the possibility of apocalyptic beliefs and it seems we have even less reason to expect concerns about irrelevant details like date-of-birth or hometown or even written records of any sort. I would expect more writing, over time, as those beliefs were held unfulfilled.

gstafleu

So how come the gospels, then?

GD said something similar, to wit that Christian writers don't incorporate much historical detail, period. Again, whence then the gospels?

Let's say you are both right. Would this then not mean that the gospels were most likely "fantasy" (i.e. not based on historical fact)? After all, if I understand you correctly, Christian authors focussed on there beliefs, and beliefs are notoriously fungible.

To be more precise, let us say that early writers, like Paul, focussed almost exclusively on the faith, not on its grubby incarnation. That would mean that next to no historical detail would be transmitted beyond that period. At least not by Christians, we'd have to rely on non-Christian docs, and we know how scarce they are in this respect. Any later historical information we find in Christian documents is then unlikely to be "real history" (which was not transmitted), and therefore has to be "faith based" (sounds nicer than "fantasy").

How then, can we distinguish a scenario where there was an ignored HJ, from one where there was no HJ at all, just faith? If we cannot distinguish these two, isn't the best--HJ-wise--we can do agnosticism? Plus, given the fact that we see the faith mechanism in action and hence know it exists, isn't the most parsimonious explanation to rely just on that known mechanism, and not introduce an unknown HJ?

Gerard Stafleu

Amaleq13

How does that necessarily follow? It appears to be a possibility but I don't understand the basis for "most likely".

We shouldn't expect much, no, though we cannot ignore other possible avenues of transmission (eg oral tradition, lost texts).

Yes, first they would have to care enough about a silly superstition to locate someone who could tell them.

Again, this does not appear to necessarily follow and I'm not sure of the basis for "unlikely".

It should certainly suggest caution in assuming that any apparently historical detail is a fabrication but it also just as certainly leaves open the possibility.

As far as I can tell, it requires an explicit indicator on the part of the latter. Otherwise, I think it looks the same.

HJ and MJ-wise, yes.

Seems more lazy than parsimonious to me.

The use of "the faith mechanism" and a possible disinterest in historical details do not preclude actual historical details being retained and transmitted by other methods.

GakuseiDon

I raised Tertullian in response to Roland's point: "I just find that implausible, especially when the post-Justin writers felt no compunction against relating those details ad nauseum."

Obviously that isn't true. The lack of details in many Christian letters extends well beyond Justin. Many of those letters contain only one or two references to Gospel details, like Pilate or Mary.

There are plenty of details about Jesus in Paul, even references to the Gospel Jesus if you want to read Gospel details into Paul. For some reason though, reading Gospel details into Paul isn't allowed, and then it is claimed there are no Gospel details in Paul.

It is evidence that "occasional" letters can exclude all details of Jesus. The standard HJ reason for the lack of details in Paul is that they were "occasional" letters to address issues in the churches 20-odd years after Christ was crucified.

GakuseiDon

But the Gospels don't include much in the way of historical details, either. Sanders believes that the Gospels started out this way: people remembered isolated teachings or events ("pericopes") which became stripped of their historical context; these pericopes were gradually strung together to form proto-gospels; these were reshaped by the authors of the Gospels to something like the form we know them.

Read through Mark, and note how often he uses "Immediately after", "And then", etc, to link passages together. We can't tell how long the period was between events in nearly all cases. Other than references to Pilate and Herod, how would we date the setting of Mark? The lack of historical details seems IMHO to extend to Mark and the other Gospels.

Mark mentions people associated with Christ, but so does Paul (James, Peter). Mark refers to Jesus coming from Nazareth and going to Jerusalem to be crucified, and Paul refers to Christ being crucified in Jerusalem ("Zion"). Paul's Christ arguably dies around the same time as the Jesus in Mark. Rather than working out what Paul didn't say, shouldn't we look at what he did say first?

Toto

"Reading gospel details into Paul" is inserting information into Paul's letters that was not originally there. That's why it is dismissed.

These letters are the sum total of what early Christians saved from Paul's output. They are much more than occasional letters. Doherty has pointed out particular passages where Paul would have referred to some mundane event from Jesus' life on earth if he had known about it.

The standard HJ excuse is that he didn't really care about those details. This just doesn't ring true from what we know of human psychology.

Toto

Well, not real history, anyway. But that hasn't stopped historicists from constructing one.

But Paul doesn't associate these people with Jesus, except for the ambiguous title "brother of the Lord."

Is Zion a real place in Paul's letters? How do you know?

But there is no indication from Paul as to when Jesus died, unless you rely on that "brother of the Lord" title and make it mean "biological sibling of Jesus." That's a lot of baggage to hang on that one phrase.

aa5874

But, the flaw with this argument is that the authors appear to have REMEMBERED only events that could not have occurred. These authors striiped away all the so-called history and substituted it with their imagination, and all the authors and Church writers had no way of realising that their stories of Jesus was fiction.

For your argument to be valid, even the witnesses to the historical Jesus would have not remembered the true history of Jesus and would have accepted or agreed with the authors' fundamentally non-historical account.

The simplest explanation, BASED ON THE EVIDENCE, is that the Jesus story was written many years after the fictitious events and believed to be true, and as the believers grew in numbers, more Jesus stories were manufactured, and more and more people started to believe, until Constantine and Eusebius.

GakuseiDon

In that case, can we finally close the book on Doherty's "Paul thought Jesus was crucified in a sublunar realm", then? That's not in Paul.

"Occasional", as in being written to address specific problems in the churches Paul was writing to.

Which one of Doherty's silences is the most impressive, IYO? Let's have a look at them.

Actually, I thought that the standard HJ excuse was that Paul was writing "occasional" letters. What does human psychology say about that?

Well, I don't know, but "Zion" as Jerusalem works best in the context. It can't be the heavenly Jerusalem, at least from a Doherty perspective, since it was located above the sublunar realm.

Without reading anything into Paul, what is a better fit for "Zion" than "Jerusalem, the actual earthly city" IYO?

Toto

I think everyone would be happy if you never mentioned it again. It is your own obsession.

The most impressive is, I think, not one of his original silences - was Jesus married or not?

People are nosy and like to gossip and and find out details about important people. The idea that Paul just didn't care about what Jesus looked like, what his favorite food was, etc. is just contrary to everything we know.

Which verse are you talking about? Romans 11:26? Is that anything but a reference to the Hebrew Scriptures?