krosero

This made me think of a book I saw at Barnes & Noble (I don't own it), Stanley Wolpert's "A New History of India." According to Google Books, it does not mention Sai Baba.

A search on Google Books for any title with the words "history" and "India" returns 314,000 hits, of which one at most might mention this Sai Baba. No internal info is available on that title, but it's listed as "Source Material for a History of the Freedom Movement in India," so I'm guessing it more likely refers to another holy man named Sai Baba who died in 1917.

As Toto discovered, books or articles specifically about religion or Indian religions do mention the Sai Baba we've been talking about:

What strikes me is that Josephus wrote a general history, much more akin to Wolpert's work.

I also note that the two references to Christ in Antiquities are not about the religions of Palestine; they mention Christ in reference to political figures and events (Pilate and his doings, including his repressions and executions; the changeovers in 62 of the offices of procurator and high priesthood).

So Christianity, for Josephus, could have been no more than a small-time sect, not on par with the religious schools he does mention like the Sadducees or the Essenes. Christ is mentioned in Antiquities only as a political footnote.

I don't know much about Sai Baba but I take his movement to be something noticed by those who study religion, culture, anthropology more than (political) history. Not that such movements do not have political impact, but at the very least I do not think Sai Baba has been executed by political authorities. Were the Indian state to execute him today, it would appear quickly and widely in the newspapers of record (Don having mentioned newspapers in another post) and would make it into book-length chronicles of the political history of India. I surmise this partly because Sai Baba has had, per Don's post, a career lasting decades and millions of followers, so his is a larger movement than Josephus would have witnessed in Christianity.

Kevin Rosero

rlogan

I realize why they are in the text, and agree wholeheartedly that there is a great deal of phony "boy he sure kicked some scribal ass" chest-thumping.

In the OP it is not just a naiive observation that scribes should have been taking notes.

Scribes are a professional class, and they along with the Pharisees and other dignitaries including Pilate and high priest alike - supposedly interacted on rather intimate terms with Jesus. That is, the scribes and the very people employing them to write are witnessing (allegedly) these acts.

One cannot make excuses therefore as to why he would not have so much as one word in a written record or subsequent reference to that written record in the second century.

So the historicist does not make that excuse. Instead it is to propose a Jesus that is found nowhere in any record whatsoever. A Jesus completely different from what any school of thought in the second and third century skirmishes proclaimed.

rob117

This is false.

The mainstream of historical Jesus studies has him as a religious deviant whose anti-status-quo messages and Temple vandalism got him executed- just as the gospels depict him. There is no reason to expect him to be well-reported except among his followers, as the authorities would have seen him as a common criminal/nuisance. Once he was dead, they had no reason to think about him anymore, any more than any of the other would-be messiahs reported by Josephus and no one else. Should we deny these people's existence as well?

You claim that dismissing specific claims of the gospels while still holding to Jesus's existence is hypocritical. No, it's parsimonious. Central religious figures who never existed are placed in the distant past, not less than forty years before the first writings that talk about them.

Please tell me your grounds for dismissing an authentic core in the TF as well as the James brother of Jesus reference. Do not use words such as "obviously" in your argument, as that is a rhetorical cover for a concept that is not obvious.

I don't claim to be an expert; I'm just asking why we should take your word over that of a vast body of accredited individuals who study this topic for a living; and why we should take your dismissal of 150+ years of criticism and accepted methods thereof seriously.

krosero

Rlogan, I wonder why you say there is no record among the "Docetists, Marcionites, and proto-catholics or whatever about the lowly Jesus of no note." Why would people speak of their object of worship as a lowly person of no note? That's especially true of the Docetists, who lead your list -- they had the most "supernatural", least human Jesus of all. Why would they or any other person who venerated Christ call him a lowly person of no note?

You say that it is "precisely here that the lowly, insignificant life of the itinerant loser would be recorded." I assume that by "here" you mean the Gospels, if I've read you correctly, but that makes no sense. Why would the Gospels say that Jesus was a lowly person of no note?

However, there are clues in the Gospels that Jesus was not widely popular. First of all is his crucifixion: he was not popular with the authorities; and he was not popular enough with the people to draw a multitude to resist or protest his execution. And the Gospels depict none of his followers being executed or even arrested with him: his followers must not have been numerous enough to be regarded as a threat.

And of course, the wider non-Christian world tells us that it regarded Jesus as a lowly person of no note. There are records of that Jesus: Antiquities mentions him (if you take out the clearly Christian statements) as just another itinerant preacher, with his brother mentioned in passing as part of a narrative about something else. If you don't like Josephus, what about the Roman records? Tacitus says Jesus was a criminal, a founder of a superstitious sect that is no better than any of the superstitions that Tacitus ruefully acknowledges to have reached Rome; his whole tone is as if to say that he would not mention the founder or his sect at all if not for the fire in Rome. Pliny has nothing to say about Christ per se and is exclusively interested in present Christian practice. Lucian dismisses Christ somewhat like Tacitus does, referring to him with abstract and impersonal language: "that other, to be sure, whom they still worship, the man who was crucified in Palestine because he introduced this new cult into the world."

So there clearly is an ancient record of a lowly fellow of little note. When we want to know what kind of an impact Jesus made on the non-Christian world, the non-Christians themselves tell us that he did not make much of an impression on them. Skeptical historians tell us that Christian records about Christ are likely to contain exaggeration, and that if we want to know Christ's impact on the larger world, we'd be advised not to trust the glowing reports of multitudes in the gospel uncritically, and that we'd be better off reading what non-Christians themselves thought of Christ.

That is just mainstream historical method.

Maybe I haven't understood your post, but what is the problem here?

Kevin Rosero

spamandham

We don't have to guess about that. The servant is specifically stated to be Israel in Isaiah 49. Isaiah 53 was not written as Messianic prophecy.

Of course, I have no idea whether or not first century Jews might have thought it was. Does anyone here have insight into that?

spamandham

...unless of course that story was invented later. There is nothing unreasonable with the idea that Jesus was an itinerate preacher who was executed for some crime against Rome, and as a result a cult following came to believe his death had special significance and spawned a new religion from which the mostly/entirely fictional Gospels eventually emerged.

This is all certainly possible. The question is, is there any reason to believe it's true?

I don't think you can use the fictional gospel stories to disprove the existence of the itinerate preacher whos life is said to have inspired all this. You pretty much have to start from the assumption the gospels are works of mythology. The task is to try to glean whatever real history we can out of those works of fiction. A rock solid argumnet has to be made when using such a doubtful source, whether for, or against.

Arguments of the form "the gospels say this, and that's impossible because of that, therefor Jesus never existed" are just as bad as arguments of the form "the gospels say this, and since that part isn't impossible, therefor Jesus existed". Neither conclusion is justifiable if we admit the gospel stories are mostly, or possibly entirely, fiction.

GakuseiDon

Er... no, quite the opposite:
1. The scribes were more lawyers than Bridgette Joneses. That was the point of the link I gave initially.
2. Lots of writings didn't survive.

So, Jesus could have been almost exactly like the Gospels describe (though I don't believe that myself) and I wouldn't be surprised that no writings from those anonymous scribes survived.

The one called Christ?

I state that he was crucified in Jerusalem for causing a ruckus in the time leading up to Passover, probably outside the Temple (though the story in the Gospels is probably exaggerated)

I think that a miracle-wielding Jesus who died within a few years after starting his ministry, and who didn't kill Romans or launch a revolt, would have been less significant than, say, the Egyptian. Jesus only became significant because Christianity became significant.

Roger Pearse

What percentage of works compiled by these people are extant today?

All the best,

Roger Pearse

GakuseiDon

The first one might be a good example, but I don't think that books on alternative spirituality had equivalents back then. Josephus mentions various sects though not Christianity, even though Christianity existed in some form back then.

I think it might be surprising if there were no Jesus in an ancient equivalent to "The Godmen of India", like a "Godmen of Israel". But I don't know of any equivalents.

Still, I don't want to overstress the example (since I'll probably be proved wrong :angel: ) But some mythicists (though I know not you) claim that a miracle-working person claiming to be the Son of God should have been written about by people everywhere, even as far away as Rome. Since not a lot of material survived, and nothing like a "Godmen of Israel" I just don't think that we can assume this.

I did find a more interesting example. There are several Sai Babas, and there was one that died about 90 years ago. According to this Wikipedia article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shirdi_Sai_Baba

Sai Baba of Shirdi (in Ahmednagar district) or Shirdi Sai Baba (d. 1918), (real name and date of birth unknown), was an Indian guru and fakir, who is regarded by his Hindu and Muslim followers as a saint...

There is no clear record of Sai's given name, nor of his origins...

Numerous miracles were attributed to him. He did not discourage such attributions, and his fame spread. Many pilgrims came for his blessings, and he attracted large crowds even for the most mundane of his activities...

He left no written records; Sai's teachings were oral: typically short, pithy sayings rather than elaborate discourses...

Sai Baba made... assurances to his devotees:
* I shall be ever active and vigorous even after leaving this earthly body.
* I shall be active and vigorous even from my tomb.
* I am ever living to help and guide all who come to me, who surrender to me and who seek refuge in me.
* If you look to me, I look to you.
* If you cast your burden on me, I shall surely bear it.

The guy lived to be quite old, so it is surprising that his real name isn't known clearly, nor details of his origins. Again, I wonder how many history books would have written about this miracle-wielding holyman.

gstafleu

No it is not. This straw man keeps being re-erected by HJers, with an admirable degree of repetitive desperation.

Sure, MJ starts with pointing out that the amount of evidence for an HJ is not impressive: very little extra-biblical, and the intra-biblical is suspect because (a) it (the 27 books) is not independent and (b) it comes from inside the tradition so there is an element of ax grinding. But after that start, MJ continues by producing a developmental model of the NT, one that doesn't need an HJ. This model (1) shows that the concept of Jesus started out as an MJ and morphed to an HJ over time (Doherty's work), and (2) shows that what that HJ then said and did can all be derived from then extant material (Price e.g.).

Now, you may not agree with analyses (1) and (2), but you cannot ignore them by stating that MJ only consists of the lack of evidence argument.

Gerard Stafleu