Iskander

Thinking here is waste of time for it would only produce shouting, insults, infractions and warnings...

Goodbye, have fun.

gurugeorge

Yes, I think that's probably true for most of the gospels (and as I understand the discussions here over the years, almost certainly true of GMark) but probably not for the early Church.

The early Church is 1 Corinthians 12 - i.e. "occultism" as we call it nowadays. Trance states, visions, automatic speaking, writing, etc., etc. I think it's Ehrman who says somewhere that this kind of stuff may have been the actual source of some of the gospels.

In reality, it might have been be a bit of everything - someone says something inspired, or told to them by their imaginary friend "Jesus", someone else picks it up and embellishes it, then later it goes through the orthodox mill and gets tested for "coherence with the Apostolic Succession, acceptance of priests as necessary intermediares, and liability to be conducive to a secure flow of monies to the Church".

archibald

What I like about you and george, maryhelena, is your willingness to allow that it seems unlikely that Jesus was ever thought of by any group of followers (or indeed any group in ancient times) as having not existed. This fits well with all the evidence we do have, certainly better than all the convoluted speculation required in order to have him first considered non-existent, then made existent within what appears to have been a relatively short space of time, and subsequently all the varied amounts of covering up that that would be needed.

And I do again stress 'likely' and I say again that it is not a mathematical likelihood, but one arrived at by the best, though inherently imperfect reasoning methods available. And I am not saying 'vastly more likely' or 'the alternative is a non-starter'.

Now, moving on to your perspective.

I have a couple of comments.

It does appear to be true that there were messianic expectations of some sorts prior to 'Jesus'. However, this does not indicate that the conditions created the story. Not in any way. In fact, it is sometimes put that expectations of a messiah will simply increase the likelihood of a candidate turning up, or alternatively, that a 'regular sage/prophet type' will be seen by some followers as a messiah (Ref: Monty Python's Life of Brian, which is arguably the only documentary evidence anyone could require, lol).

Some would say that the eschatological expectations beforehand and the satisfaction of these after purported events (that is to say the belief that something had arrived/happened) is arguably more of an indicator that a credible messianic claimant had actually emerged in the interim. ,(I believe they were cropping up periodically :]).

In short, I can't shake the feeling that you have a stage, and a general plot idea, and that you need a main character, even if only a grain of sand for your oyster to kick start the pearl. And I can't help thinking that someone was ad libbing their part at the audition, since there were crucial things which not only weren't in the script, but would have been deemed very odd if they were. Eg. crucifixion of the main character.

And certainly this is what all the evidence seems to say. Because I can't help thinking that your 'history' is really only 'background history' and you are losing sight of the fact that for the study ancient history, ancient texts are not a bad source, by any means, and the discipline often operates with only a small fraction of what we have here (eg. Spartacus). In effect, these texts ARE the historical evidence., however flawed they may be. And of course, at best (that is to say in the most 'original' form that we can reasonably discern) we cannot take them to tell us facts, but only what the writers believed.

Cheers,

A.

gurugeorge

Like Christ, Paul thinks of himself as having a spiritual side.

So the phrase "according to the flesh" means "insofar as the material aspect of the entity (Paul, Christ, you or I) is concerned", or quite simply "from the human point of view".

i.e., he's talking about a divine being (lord over all) incarnated, and he's talking about the incarnated part.

Elsewhere (2 Corinthians 5:16), he says "ok now let's set aside the incarnated part and talk only about the spiritual part" - the other side of the coin.

gurugeorge

But the other possibility is this. That at some point for a certain group of people there was a variation in the very concept of the Messiah. NOT SOMEONE TO COME BUT SOMEONE WHO HAS ALREADY BEEN.

And that's what "according to Scripture" pertains to - the first Christians thought they saw warrant in Scripture for tweaking the Messiah concept in this way. (i.e. "according to Scripture, He's already been you stupid plonker, so there's no point waiting for him - it's all done and dusted, but it wasn't a military victory like you thought it would be, but a spiritual victory")

The pre-Christian Messiah is a myth - the beginnings of the Christian Messiah is simply the "same" myth with some parameters tweaked.

The rest was just filling in the "backstory".

IOW, the first Christians weren't people who thought they'd found in some recently deceased human being the right claimant for the traditional role of Messiah; they are people who had revised the traditional concept of the Messiah, to make Him an entity of the past rather than of the future (hence it was a great "secret" that only they could see, but was only now being revealed).

stephan huller

Early Christians were evenly split on the idea of Jesus being 'all God' or 'all human' (see Jerome's discussion at the beginning of his Commentary on Galatians). This does not settle the issue in any way. For me at least the whole idea that the world took to a messianic claimant who - in the words of Celsus - never did any of the things he promised to do is especially problematic to the historical Jesus argument. What was the chain of events which led to the systematic corruption of a body of literature associated with this failed messiah which led to his adoption by a community of Gentiles and transformed that failure into a 'victory'? It is utterly baffling to even consider.

I have no opinion on the question of whether there was or wasn't a historical Jesus. On the one hand the events surrounding the life of Jesus have to be seen to be based on history in some sense. Yet on the other hand, it is just as easy to imagine the scenario where a God coming down to earth narrative became transformed into a narrative involving a human being as the other way around.

Again what I find especially puzzling is why this failed messiah became so successful as opposed to all the others. Indeed most of the discussion on this subject fail to take into account that ALL the early discussions of the gospel are deeply involved in allegory and symbolism. No one took the story literally. As such it is difficult to believe in the 'facts' when none of the early commentators felt constrained by them.

archibald

Hi again George,

If I am not mistaken, this is the biggest weakness in your scenario.

There is no 'purely spiritual' figure in the ancient texts.

Well, there is, sort of. More precisely, as far as we can discern, it is the (heavenly) ghost of a man who had died not long before.

And I think the difference is crucial, and it's why I think your take on 'how religions generally start' may need a bit of modification (IMHO) and why the list of 'other relgion starts' are not really comparable.

Indeed it is. And maybe there wasn't one.

I'm not entirely sure about this. Entirely. Though I think I see what you mean and can agree up to a point. It is nevertheless he case that he was almost universally described as having existed on earth prior to his death (and I am still waiting for someone to comment on the verse in the OP which even Doherty accepts as being Pre-Pauline).

That's true. It doesn't work like that. Certainly not for me. It would be very foolish to just strip away all the fanciful and magical stuff and assume that what's left is likely true, just because it's not magical.

Up to a point George, maybe, but the comparison with an emperor is a bit misleading. there are hundreds of minor characters for whom the amount and type of documentary evidence for Jesus compares favourably. We can only expect he amount of evidence we can reasonably expect, no?

That is why requests for better evidence are not persuasive to me. They set the bar too high.

Or alternatively, if that's where someone wants the bar to be, i would need to know that they set it consistently for many, many figures from ancient history. Which is to say, if they are agnostic about Jesus because of the quality and type of the evidence, then they should be agnostic about others. And if they lean towards an NEP for Jesus......



You have just joined the growing list of those who have moved the straw goalposts to 'must have been'. :]



I have the feeling that holding out for a causal chain, while it would be lovely, is expecting too much for such a backwater minor figure, stories about whom may have circulated only orally for a long time.



:notworthy:

stephan huller

Here's my question to the HJers. If all the early witnesses emphasized the historicity of Jesus, why is that a historical dating for Jesus's ministry is only found in one canonical witness? This is especially baffling. Three of four canonical gospels have no historical dating for Jesus's ministry. There are even disputes about the length of the ministry and the differences (at least in the traditions associated with the narrative) are massive - i.e. either a single year or almost twenty years. The date of this report is extremely early by Christian standards (c. 190 CE). If the early tradition emphasized the historical nature of Jesus how was it that it cared so little about the historical facts surrounding his ministry?

gurugeorge

Yeah but then you're caught on the other horn of the dilemma Toto mentions. Stories circulate orally about someone who's interesting and remarkable, if they're interesting and remarkable they make some kind of traceable splash (note how minor some of the other "Joshuas" are that Josephus mentions - yet they seemingly made a bigger impact on him than the particular hypothetical "Joshua" under discussion here).

OTOH, if they're so obscure they don't make some kind of splash, and nobody even remembers anything they said (seemingly, since nearly everything put in Jesus' mouth can be traced to other sources), why the hell would anybody deify them, far less remember them?

Why would "Paul" have a vision of such a dull fellow?

You don't make the sorts of encomiums to the divine that Paul makes about Christ, to someone's ghost. The Christ figure for Paul is pre-eminently divine, with some kind of human incarnated aspect that demonstrated something in His incarnated form.

Yes, he thought it really happened. But no, there's no evidence of any ordinary human preacher there.

maryhelena

No, archibald, the gospel JC chap never existed. But that does not rule out the possibility that a historical figure, during the time of Pilate, was relevant to the gospel writers and their prophetic view of history. Yes, the christian views of things could never have got off the ground if all it resolved around was a vision of one man; one man trying to get other people to accept that his vision was the ultimate vision to end all visions....Ah - but the qualifying standard was very high - and carpenters need not apply.....Sure, but the gospel story that we do have is about one such figure - the gospel JC is supposed to have come to fulfill the Law and the prophets predictions? So, however much our modern minds might read all sorts of purpose driven fulfillment scenarios - the fact remains that that is just what we have to deal with if we are seeking early christian origins.

[T2]"Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them."[/T2]

[T2]
Meanwhile Jesus stood before the governor, and the governor asked him, “Are you the king of the Jews?” “You have said so,” Jesus replied.[/T2]

Sorry, archibald - but texts will not do the trick here.....Texts are open to interpolation and interpretation - and heaven help us, to linguistic analyzing. I sometimes wonder what those early gospel writers would think about the almighty focus that is placed on what words they used and in what order.....:devil3: