Charles Wilson

I am attempting to follow just such a program and I disagree with you here. There IS a lot to work with. As an example, why should you believe in the "purported time and events of Jesus' life..."? What if the time and life of a Jesus is 4 BCE? How would you know?

You don't know how ironic this sentence is. There is something left and it is exactly here. The Priests - "Jesus", if you will - are caught in an Assault that will leave 3000 dead (Argue the numbers but not the effect.). This occurs in the Temple. The Assault occurs very late at night and the story is exactly how some survived and others did not.
You want to strip out metaphysics and dogma? Ask yourself this: What is the "Realm of Heaven" and Where is the "Narrow Door"? If you answer that this is atmospherics and solar deity stuff, you haven't looked hard enough.


"We are all Hegelians now."

Anyway, I'm posting some of these ideas here on Jesus vs. Archelaus. Hope to see you there.

RUmike

Just because you believe there is "nothing left" doesn't mean others draw the same conclusion. I personally find there to be a rather significant amount of authentic information about Jesus present in the gospels; enough to come up with a rather coherent profile of him (although he little resembles the Christ of faith).

reddish

This is supposed to clinch that Bolland rejects a historical jesus?

Let me attempt a translation of this rather obfuscated passage:

There is, however, more understood in it or to be understood; there is lying in it, that an Alexandrian Jew or Jew companion of the first century has had a pre-jesuan Jesus as a figure of the imagination,...

I can assure you that the Dutch is less easily understandable than my translation. It's incredible - this guy easily out-obfuscates all clap-trap found in postmodernism.

How you interpret this as Bolland unequivocally rejecting HJ is quite beyond me. But I suppose that when doing exegesis-on-exegesis, anything goes.

Biff the unclean

Do you take into account all the other Gospels that were produced along with the set we still use? Take the Gnostic gospel of John. In it Jesus' feet never touch the ground, when you touch him sometimes you feel him and sometimes your hand is in thin air. And everyone who sees him sees someone different. In the scene where John and his brother meet Jesus for the first time one sees a young boy and the other a bald old man.
Seems a pretty coherent profile that could only belong to a fictional character.

RUmike

I primarily take into account the synoptics and Thomas. The other gospels are too late. Naturally I dispose of all the miraculous elements, although I recognize Jesus could very well have been known to perform such things in his day. But I am interested mostly in who Jesus was and what he taught, not what he did, and so the sayings are most important to me. And there is an abundance of those in the synoptics and Thomas, plenty of which fit the environment of 1st century Palestine, are distinctive, and are not likely to have been made up by believers wishing to place Jesus on a pedastal.

Chris Weimer

No gospel should be discarded entirely. Do you have a link to the gospel?

Mediancat

Real people can also be fictional characters. Look at the various mystery series featuring Mark Twain, Groucho Marx, or Sir John Fielding as detectives.

This could equally be a purely fictional account of someone who really existed.

Rob aka Mediancat

TerryTryon

A few years ago, I belonged to a discussion group that met once a week to explore various issues of interest to atheists. One evening, the topic was, “Is there any basis to a historical Jesus?” I thought the question to be outrageous. Is the earth truly a sphere? Was Abraham Lincoln the sixteenth president? That kind of stuff. I was intrigued and started reading all kinds of stuff.

I read about the argument from silence and the counter argument, “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” Think about who stacked those cards: all hail to unverifiable hypotheses. Then, according to G. A. Wells, if you read the documents, both gospel and secular, the closer in time you get to Jesus, the more amorphous, he gets. Then I read that all claims in the gospels, that Jesus fulfilled Old Testament prophecies, come from references in the Septuagint and when there is an error in translating the Hebrew into Greek, the Greek version wins. This leads one to believe that none of the gospel writers or the epistle writers knew Hebrew and thus did not read the Old Testament in its original language; they were not Jews. Then, according to Zindler, virtually the entire landscape of the New Testament Gospels consists of place names taken from the Septuagint and apparently eponymous fictional places as absent from the historical record as Jesus himself. Nazareth, Capernaum, Magadalan. On and on and on.

It gets so tedious. People grab a proof verse here and another proof verse there and soon enough they have written The Passover Plot. Or they grab some obscure character with no more historical documentation than Jesus himself and identify him as Jesus, because he happened to be crucified or was scorned by the Sanhedrin or some other dubious parallel. Whenever I get into one of these things, people start pulling in their Greek alphabets, arguing about passages in Dutch, (Ironic, no, considering the English idiom, “I don’t understand your Dutch.”) and ultimately contemplating angels dancing on pinheads and counting lint particles trapped in the navel.

I shouldn’t do this. I really should stay away from this whole Philosophical Forum. I am so disgusted with conclusions based on flimsy evidence or worse conclusions reached on selective appraisal of evidence. Adherents to the principle of Occam’s razor need not post. :banghead:

Clivedurdle

No, please do post - the continuous repetition of two plus two equals five is exhausting and does tempt one to give up and state there was an HJ (but it was the teacher of righteousness in 100BCE so I.m not sure that helps!)

Clivedurdle

HJ=not an atheist is probably an incorrect formulation.

What about Atheist asserting HJ might not being clear about which hj they are asserting?

Earlier in this thread we discussed 500 people seeing A RISEN CHRIST.

I hope that is not being taken as evidence of an hj - some of the posts seem unclear about that!