mountainman

The 1st C CE to 5th C CE is the period where the HJ and the MJ (including the FJ) start getting serious with the evidential citations. My position is that the HJ position has no evidence other than the Pygmy Eusebius's say so. The relative population size of size of Pygmy Christianity for each of these centuries is conjectural and again based upon Eusebius's say so. Pygmy Christianity may have been alot smaller than conjectured. Alot smaller.

But the Pygmy Constantine ???

aa5874

But, you have put forward the absurd notion that Jesus believers KNEW Jesus was just a man living in Galilee for about thirty years and that he did NOT resurrect but still worshiped Jesus as a son of God, equal to God, the Creator of heaven and earth and that without the resurrection of Jesus all mankind would still be in sin.

I cannot allow you to promote your absurd unsupported imagination based HJ without challenge.

I must COUNTER your fallacies every time.

IT was the authors of the NT Canon and the Church writers who put forward the written EVIDENCE that Jesus was TRULY the offspring of the Holy Ghost of God.

It was the authors of the NT and Church writers that put forward the written EVIDENCE that Jesus was truly God, was the Creator of heaven and earth.

It was the authors of the NT and Church writers that put forward the written EVIDENCE that Jesus was TRULY with the Devil on the pinnacle of the Temple, TRULY walked on the sea and witnessed by the disciples, was TRULY transfigured and witnessed by Peter, James and John, and was RAISED from the dead and seen eating fish by the disciples when he was supposed to be dead.

The authors of the NT and Church writers have presented a mythological entity.

Jesus of the NT was a MYTH.

Your HJ theory sucks.

ApostateAbe

Nuh uh.

maryhelena

But don't you ever stop to think that what you are defending is indefensible? A purely human Jesus, a carpenter, or a carpenter' son, that was crucified nearly 2000 years ago - is something impossible to establish historically. Regardless of how one is going to interpret the NT as to a possibility that such a figure existed, one still has to deal with the historical impossibility of verifying such a NT interpretation. There is no way under the sun that your possibility can be established historically. Thus, if its early christian origins that one seeks, other avenues need to be explored.

Chances are that such an everyman Jesus, some ordinary bloke of the time, would not even be literate let alone be able to write. As Ehrman says in that youtube video - most people in that ancient world did not even go to school.
So, from a purely scholarly point of view - why on earth would anyone attempt to justify the existence of such a nobody figure. The place and the time was full of such people. To assume that such a figure was able to have some impact upon those around him, to draw thousands to listen to his words - boggles the minds as to its implausible - its nothing but pure fantasy. (albeit in the service of theology....)

The real debate is not over the historicity of the gospel crucified Jesus figure. There is no real debate here. (as aa5874 is continually pointing out.....)The real debate is over the early history of christianity, the pre-christian, pre-Paul, communities. And it is within those communities that the possibility, the very real possibility, of a historical figure becomes an issue. So, no need to give up your defense of the idea that there is some history, some historical figure relevant to early christian origins - just change the focus of your argument from the gospel storyline to the historical time period in which that storyline is set. Drop the crucifixion idea, drop the carpenter idea, drop even the name of Jesus (it's only a tag line anyway) and start looking for a historical figure that could have had the wherewithal to inspire - and thus to generate in others the conviction that their lives had been changed by his existence.

bacht

MaryH, are you thinking there was someone like the Teacher of Righteousness before Paul, a founder or innovator in the development of whatever christianity was at that point? If the NT material was written in the late 1st or early 2nd C that leaves a lot of time elapsed (decades or more), which would make it harder to pinpoint such a person in time and place.

For instance maybe this pre-Paul figure was active in Syria or Asia Minor. By the early 2nd C, could the origins have become cloudy enough for people to assert Palestine as 'ground zero'?

ApostateAbe

I do think that the key to finding the most probable answer to whether or not there was a Jesus, and what kind of person he most likely was, is to find the best explanation for the New Testament writings and how Christianity begun. The character of Jesus would follow from the best explanation for the beginnings of Christianity. The crucifixion is central to my model of how Christianity began, and it seemingly has been central all throughout the history of Christianity from the beginning, so it isn't easy to drop that, along with other seemingly essential elements, such as the resurrection, the apocalypticism, and the messianism. We want to find explanations that best account for all of it, and what was important to early Christians should be important to the explanations of modern history buffs.

maryhelena

Come off it, Abe - this is utter nonsense. History buffs should not be confined by what was important to early christians, or what they believed. Yes, the crucifixion is central to christianity - to christian theology! No resurrection without a sacrificial death - normal deaths just won't do. That's just part and parcel of the original dying and rising god mythology: The Sumarian myth of Innana who was killed in the underworld and left to hang on a hook for three days prior to her resurrection. Abe, your stuck on theology - but it won't get you anywhere near the historical origins of christianity.

ApostateAbe

Well, wouldn't you normally expect that that is the sensible way to go about it? Finding the best explanation for the earliest variations of Christianity? That would necessarily entail an explanation for the belief in the crucifixion. You seem to think it is about theology, but the act of crucifixion is very much a common historical phenomenon in the Roman empire, and it seems somewhat out of place in a theological construct. I know that the mythicists have earnestly tried to explain it in terms of theology, and for good reason. It is hard to compete with the standard explanation for Christianity's focus on crucifixion--Jesus really was crucified.

spamandham

Which came first, the crucifixion or the atonement by sacrifice? It's can work either way, but a historical crucifixion is more strained.

If there was a historical crucifixion, then we can see how this would have been interpreted after the fact as a sacrifice. Although implausible, it's not impossible. But this is ad hoc. It's an unlikely explanation invented to maintain the mere possibility of a historical Jesus. Why is it unlikely? ...because cults founded by personality figures only rarely outlive their founder, and for such a cult to outlive a founder convicted and executed by Rome in a society dominated by authoritarian thinking and worship of the powerful borders on the absurd. We also have the problem that there is no body and no tomb of Jesus. How could it possibly have been lost given an uninterrupted line of Jesus worshipers as historicism requires? Instead, we have a resurrection story that quite conveniently explains away why no-one knows where the tomb is. And what happened to Jesus' family? They just fall off the map. This is also implausible. If we look to modern cult dynamics as an indicator, we see that family members of the cult leader tend to hold high rank in the cult. Aside from Moon himself, the key leaders of the Moonies are all direct family members - his wife, his children, etc. The same holds true the lunatics at Westboro, and numerous other modern cults. So you have several implausibilities all rollwed into one: a cult outliving it's humiliated executed leader, the missing tomb, and the cult leader's family just disappearing from history. Any one of these is sufficient to call the hypothesis into serious question, and combined they are a death punch. Yet HJers just ignore all this as if it were no big deal.

So what about the opposite idea...that the crucifixion came 2nd.

If there was no historical crucifixion, it's also easy to see how it would have been fabricated by a culture obsessed with sacrifices. The concept of atonement by sacrifice is universal in the ancient world, including pre-Christian Judaism. Further, the Jewish scriptures depict two different messiahs, one that is the triumphant savior of Israel, and one that is the suffering servant. At a time when expectations of the triumphant savior resulted in the destruction of the temple and even of Jerusalem itself, it's easy to see how a shift in focus to the other messiah could take root as a backlash, and once it had taken root it's easy to see how an origin story would be created and back dated to a symbolic 40 years prior to the fall of the temple, just as a bogus birth story and fake geneaology was backdated a necessary 30 years prior to that. Is this implausible? Not at all. Does it account for all the evidence? Yes.

maryhelena

Great post...