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Ham. My excellent good friends! How dost thou, Guildenstern? Ah, Rosencrantz! Good lads, how do ye both?
Ros. As the indifferent children of the earth.
Guil. Happy in that we are not over-happy. On Fortune's cap we are not the very button.
Ham. Nor the soles of her shoe?
Ros. Neither, my lord.
Ham. Then you live about her waist, or in the middle of her favours?

Let's not exclude the middle.


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teamonger

I've already pointed out why I think Paul believed there was a real human who was crucified by the "rulers of this age". If we had only Paul, we would still have enough to make a historical Jesus likely. But we have far more. The synoptics, while they probably didn't reach their final forms until well after Paul, very likely were derived from material earlier than him. At the very least, we know the Jesus movement predated him, because he started out persecuting it. I don't know why it's so difficult to believe these pre-Pauline Jesus people knew a guy who impressed them with his Kingdom talk.
t

spin

Can you stop to think for a moment? Whether Paul believed there was a real human or not is irrelevant to the fact that he didn't need one to still believe so.

You are filling in the blanks. And you shouldn't use a ouija board to learn when the gospels were written.

Where does Paul tell you what they believe?


spin

aa5874

This is a most illogical way to reconstruct history. All you are doing is assume you what is true about Jesus. Your plausibility method is just useless, many fiction novels are totally plausible with respect to the events, characters and locations written about.

The plausibilty method produces false results.

The authors of the NT and the church writers made statements about Jesus, if these statements are found to be false, implausible, chronologically erroneous and incoherent, then the authors are just not credible.

If an author claimed Jesus ascended through the clouds and was witnessed by the disciples which appears to be false and implausible, what makes the crucifixion a real event?

The authors of the NTand the church writers have no credibilty, nothing they write can be assumed to be true without external non-apologetic sources.

spamandham

In the case of Jesus, he is not simply a man with a few legendary decorations like one of the emperors for example. His character is fundamentally legendary with a few human decorations. Paul barely even mentions his human side.

Well, at least we agree on that. Please keep in mind in the future that derived positions are not what prima facie evidence is all about.

Ted Hoffman

I believe that Sanders is an apologist - yes, sometimes he admits that the writers made stuff up, but he does that only when there is no escape, or when he can do so and still retain his favored apocalyptic prophet. Anything that threatens that portrait is circumvented, ignored or massaged off. I have reached this conclusion by reading two of his books and I demonstrate this. My reasons are clear from this review of his book, The Historical Figure of Jesus.
When I published this expose of Sanders, I was accused of reading "pulp junk" by people like Peter Kirby. Does a serious scholar publish "pulp junk"?
I bought and read Jesus and Judaism but it makes no argument with regard to the historicity of Jesus. This latter book shows that Sanders is erudite, keen, critical and persuasive. But HFoJ shows that he is an apologist.

gurugeorge

Surely this reveals how much you are begging the question? You say "you know how quickly legends develop" - but how do you know the Jesus myth (for, prima facie, it is a myth) in particular is precisely an instance of legends developing around a man? There's a whole slew of other options as to how a myth like this could have developed - some spin has outlined (including fraud, art, etc.), to that I would add, Jungian possibilities, other kinds of psychological or neurological possibilities.

What you've really got to show first, it seems to me, is that the Jesus myth is an instance of a myth developing from a real man (as opposed to literary fraud, art, visionary experience, etc.). To do that, you've got to have independently identified your man (of course that's a counsel of perfection, but one has to at least have made a decent attempt, and it seems to me that this has been lacking, too much has been taken for granted).

teamonger

Well, I read some of this review, but stopped when I realized I couldn't take it seriously. I read:
"At one point, though, a voice that seeks to assure Christian readers interrupts his scholarly tenor and declares that "there is good news" because Christian scribes probably only rewrote Antiquities 18.63. This means that Josephus likely mentioned Jesus, which is good news for Christians seeking affirmation that a historical Jesus indeed existed."

Seems clear this reviewer has a case of apologist paranoia. Sanders remark, "there is good news" simply means, good news for historical inquiry. To think he is trying to reassure Christians here is absurd, but this does seem typical of the mythicist tendency to find apologists under every rock.

Because of Sanders' powerful critiques against the perfection of the gospels, and because he thinks Jesus was a mistaken prophet, many apologists I have debated call him an atheist in disguise. I'm not saying he is; he keeps such faith questions out if his discussion, tries to keep focus on the subject, as a historian should.

Painting a scholar with any kind of brush is no excuse to dismiss his arguments.

t

Ted Hoffman

You don't understand what I wrote. Its probably good you stopped reading once you couldn't understand.
At any rate, Antiquities 18.63 either mentions Jesus or it doesn't. Antiquities 18.63 is either authentic, fully fabricated or partly fabricated. These are historical/textual issues to be determined and whichever way the evidence points is neither good nor bad unless one is committed to a prior position, of if one has emotional or faith commitments to a related idea.
"Good" or "bad" has no place in historical inquiry. Historians report and interpret historical facts, they don't make moral judgments on what the evidence can support and what the evidence cannot.

And that was the lamest excuse I have ever seen provided for a failure to read a document.

teamonger

When an inquirer into history finds something he considers of historical value, he will naturally consider that good news for the inquiry. Painting this innocent remark as some "moral judgment" is simply ridiculous.
t