Sheshbazzar

In the short Gospel of Mark there is no indication that he actually did rise from the dead. Some unidentified 'young man' sitting outside of the tomb, just said he had.
(was this one of the crew that had made off with the body?)

But no one at all actually saw him rise from the dead, and no one to that point had ever seen nor heard from any 'risen' Jebus.

It took doctoring of anonymous 'Mark's' short story's ending to add material showing that a 'resurrection' supposedly had actually had taken place.

Can't really blame old anonymous author of short 'Mark' for that one.

There is always someone who thinks they can give a better ending to Lardass's story.

Solo

Sure I can : gospel of Mark, gospel of Matthew, gospel of Luke, gospel of John.

Someone with a loaded name of Jesus got killed in Jerusalem, and the messianists in the city led by James the Just raised Cain until the temple authorities let those caught with Jesus go. He then sent them on missions to raise money for the "poor saints" and to proclaim Jesus as the prophet of the coming messiah (not himself). I believe, we have a corrupted tale of this in Acts 12.

Paul self-interprets his euphoric phantasms sponsored by bipolar disorder as God's revelations about his son. He goes around the big cities and finds people with similar experiences of high euphoria and grandeur to be followed by psychotic hell and depression. A number of them buy into his theological narrative (there was no psychiatry around), and find a great relief in it. The reason they find relief in it is that it provides an explanation for their suffering (and thereby helps in its management) and restores the dignity that is denied by society to psychotics. Paul is seen as God-sent by them.

Paul finding psychos milling about synagogues or other places Jews congregated is a no-brainer: this would be one of the places migrants would naturally go in the big cities if their brains started to play tricks on them. They would interpret the uncanny new "reality" sponsored by disordered brain chemistry as many people do today: God is controlling their thoughts; he has selected them to reveal great secrets; their agitated psychosis of annihilation is a revelation of God's plan to destroy everyone. Their recovery from the psychosis is taken as proof they are God's elect; they have been sent to warn those who would listen of mayhem coming onto the world. Very common narrative themes even today. Here is something written by Mark Vonnegut, the son of Kurt Vinnegut Jr., MD (and diagnosed as bi-polar):

The quote is from his book titled Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So (or via: amazon.co.uk) .

I believe with Price and Detering that it was not Paul who made that up, but someone who wanted look like Paul

The big difference is how Paul and his churches imagined "resurrection" and how the (later) Judaic belief treated it. To Paulines, the idea of Jesus rising from the grave in "flesh" would have been absurd.

The time-frame of Jesus' crucifixion as that of Pilate evidently became a marker only when the immediate hopes for Christ's speedy return were fading, and most of the contemporaries died out.

What I believe is that the idea of Jesus rising from the dead was based in the experience of altered mental states, both highly euphoric and grandiose on the one hand, and hugely dysphoric and annihilating on the other, associated commonly with a mental challenge known as bipolar disorder (which I have been diagnosed with). This is my interpretation of Paul's verse in 1 Cr 4:10: 'always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies'. This is how Paul interpreted the bipolar process and this is how he taught it to other sufferers of this fairly common and at times debilitating disorder.

Best,
Jiri

Diogenes the Cynic

You are not presenting an accurate quotation from Ehrman. You are cutting part of it out (or your source is). This is what is actually in the book:
That's the core of Ehrman's argument about independent sources. He does not claim there are multiple Aramaic sources, so let's please dispense with the strawmen and respond to what Ehrman actually says.

Diogenes the Cynic

It would serve no religious function to invent[ a Jesus, only to explain a Jesus.

Thomas plainly contains material independent of and more primitive than the Gospels, and we do know that Q has to at least predate Matthew and Luke.
"many" is my own word, not Ehrman's, and I politely disagree that 7 is not abundant.

The sources Ehrman lists are all demonstrably independent.

Toto

It clearly would serve a religious function to invent a historicized Jesus, if you felt that the spiritual Jesus of Paul was not sufficient for your religious purposes, or if you wanted to invent a chain of authority for your own ideas.

So many of these arguments for a historical Jesus seem to come down to a claim that early Christians lacked the imagination to invent anything. Is there any indication that early Christians were so lacking in normal human creativity? :huh:

How can you tell it is more primitive? And where is the historical Jesus in Thomas, other than an oracular speaker?

but not by more that a year or two; and we don't know that Q has to predate Mark.

Sorry, but no. His sources are all a part of the Christian tradition, and have all suffered from mutual influences and cross contamination.

An independent source would be a Jewish source that could be dated to the first century, that was not obviously a reaction to the gospel story. Or a traveler from Persia who remarked on a preacher in Palestine who was working up the crowds. Or a diary from a Roman official in Palestine, buried in 50 CE, rediscovered in 2013, that mentioned Jesus. We don't have anything approaching that sort of independence.

James The Least

Sheshbazzar, very well stated and argued. I have started to come to the same conclusions myself. The whole point of Mark is that God sent a prophet to the Jews but they killed him, as was supposedly prophesied in the scriptures. It is now the Gentiles, who acknowledge (=invented) the resurrected Christ, who are thus entitled to inherit the Kingdom of God and the Holy Scriptures. Jewish Prophets are transformed into Christian Saints, and the Tanakh becomes the "Old Testament."

The whole myth derives from Gentiles' desire to possess monotheism and scriptures. This was a precious literary heritage that had no equal in paganism.

James The Least

Not "invented," exactly. Rather, interpreted and inferred midrashically from the Scriptures, not unlike Enoch and Seth in similar cultic contexts.

The so-called evidence is evidence of theological legend and midrash, not evidence of actual sayings of an actual historic Jesus.

They are repeating hearsay that he lived. It was important for the emerging theology to make this claim, because they discovered that a historic Jesus killed by historic Jews was more compelling to converts than a mystical Jesus killed by mystical archons in heaven.

All of these so-called "independent" sources are actually completely derivative of Mark.

Acts doesn't "preserve" anything. It invents legend after legend in trying to imagine what a "historic Christian" cultus would have been like in the years after Jesus's death. There is no reliable historical information about Jesus or the church present in Acts. Acts should be regarded as an embarrassment to NT historians.

Diogenes the Cynic

Acts does contain speeches with an earlier Christology than Paul's or Luke's and which is contrary to the ones that they teach.

It is simply not true that all of the other strands are dependent on Mark. There is very good evidence and very good scholarship to the contrary.

If Jesus was a purely mythical character, it's very odd that not a single confessed believer, no matter how early the source, had any awareness of that fact. Who were the people who knew it was a myth?

Solo

Could fool me : "But other traditions in the Gospels certainly do go back to Aramaic originals". p.91

Best,
Jiri

Toto

I thought everyone agreed that the author of Acts made these up, in accordance with the historiographic standards of the time.

Is there a reference for this? The other sources are not dependent on Mark for all that they say, but their idea of a historical Jesus crucified under Pilate might be, or might have come from a common source with Mark.

We've gone through all this before. There were those who denied that Jesus came in the flesh. There were docetists, but historicists have to do backflips to define a docetist as someone who thought that Jesus was really there, but only appeared to be fleshy.

And, by the standards of the time, saying that Jesus was a supernatural god or a myth would not have been a blow against Christianity. The enemies of Christianity said that Jesus was merely a man, a failed man born as a bastard, who died on the cross and stayed dead.

It is only in modern times, when most of us no longer believe in the supernatural, that saying that Jesus was a myth would be regarded as a criticism of Christianity or likely to shake its foundations.

I recommend Robert M Price's podcast of May 2.