ApostateAbe

That is well argued, Doug Shaver. I would like some specifics. Maybe you can give a hypothetical example of the sort of historical evidence that you would expect to be extant if Jesus were a crucified leader of small rural doomsday cult. For example, would you expect an author of some sort to write a letter to someone else criticizing this cult, literate Christians find this letter, they criticize the letter, and they copy that criticism continually over the generations? If not, then maybe you can tell me specifically about what evidence that you would expect to be present given such a historical scenario. GakuseiDon made the point that a volcanic eruption that completely destroyed a large city left only one letter for extant textual evidence, and it seems to be a difficult point for me to rebut.

aa5874

The FACT that NO ONE wrote about your Jesus does NOT help you AT ALL. One letter survived for a Volcanic ERUPTION and we KNOW that a VOLCANIC eruption can be EXTERMELY DESTRUCTIVE but we have NOTHING for your Jesus even though there was NO VOLCANIC ERUPTION in Judea.

Josephus wrote the "Antiquities of the Jews" in 20 books UP TO around 93 CE and WROTE about an INSIGNIFICANT OBSCURE APOCALYPTIC MAD MAN called Jesus Son of Ananus.

BUT Jesus called Christ was the MOST SIGNIFICANT Name in the Roman Empire and there were SUPPOSED to be books written called Gospels where he CORRECTLY PREDICTED the Fall of the Temple--See Mark 13 and Matthew 24.

Why did Josephus MENTION the Obscure Apocalyptic Mad Man instead of the the MOST SIGNIFICANT Jewish Messiah?

The answer is painfully Obvious.

Jesus called Christ did NOT exist as described and there were NO Jewish people called Christians who worshiped a man as a God in the 1st century.

It was the so-called "Failed Prophecies" that caused the People to REPENT sometime in the 2nd century and STARTED the Jesus cult of Christians who were WAITING for the Apocalypse that NEVER came.

Kapyong

Gday,

Fantastic!

I am so glad that you AGREE with all us Jesus Mythers, Steve. That makes me very pleased that you agree.

Because - JMers do NOT argue a historical Jesus is implausible. So thank you for being so open about your agreement with the Jesus Mythers.

So -
now that we agree a historical Jesus is not implausible, can we move on to whether he actually DID exist?

Or is "not implausible" ALL you have ?


Kapyong

Doug Shaver

It's the only record that survived. It is probable that there were many others. Pliny's record survived because he was famous enough for his works to have been copied often enough for some manuscripts to still be extant.

People's interest in natural disasters tends to be transitory. There would have been scant motivation for anyone to copy documents mentioning the eruption unless something else about the documents made them valuable -- famous authorship, for example.

Doug Shaver

I would not expect a small rural doomsday cult whose leader was crucified to become a major religion in the first place, unless there was something highly unusual about that leader. What I would expect in the way of evidence would be his followers' reports -- or reports of those reports -- of what that highly unusual something was.

ApostateAbe

I think that is a fair point. If he wasn't exceptional enough to attract attention, then maybe we wouldn't have expected him to be the founder of the largest religion in the world. I have often wondered and thought about the things that made Christianity as big as it is. It must have been a combination of many things--such as monotheism, ancient scripturalism, heaven and hell, apocalypticism, and lower-class morality. I think GakuseiDon has a lead on an aspect of early Christianity that would have made it jump out from its competitors--the perceived fulfillment of Jewish scriptural prophecies. I earlier made the mistake of thinking that Clement bent the Jewish scriptures toward his own religious purpose, but actually he didn't and it wasn't necessary, because the LXX versions of Isaiah 53 and Psalm 22 seem to fit several key aspects of the death of Jesus, including the piercings and stripes, and of course the myth of Jesus was adjusted well before Clement to fit those aspects of perceived prophecy not fit by the historical Jesus. There have been thousands of cults in history that did not have the convergence of circumstances in their favor, but Christianity was just that lucky cult, for reasons that I think we can plausibly explain, not for anything especially notable about the founder with respect to disinterested contemporaries.

jgoodguy

Lets work backward a bit. Christianity became big because of Constantine choosing it to be the Roman state religion and enforcing the orthodox view as a political decision to unite the empire. In one aspect the destruction of all but one version of Christianity meant that most of Christianity lost. Backing up, why was the orthodox version strong enough to be a useful ally of Constantine? Organization. Organization allowed the orthodox to marshal resources for Constantine. The justification for that organization was Apostolic succession and a canon that provided proof of that succession back to Jesus.

A valid question is did organization proceed from a history of that Apostolic succession(real history or tradition and oral transmission) or was the history created in service to the organization.

The only luck was being in the right place at the right time when a rebel needed an ally and that rebel won. An interesting speculation is what would Christianity look like today if Constantine had lost and the victors destroyed the orthodox in revenge.

aa5874

Again, Jesus did NOT found any religion called Christianity. In the NT, Jesus DEMANDED that the disciples TELL NO MAN he was the Christ.

Mt 16:20 - Mark 9.30Luke 9.21 Jesus did NOT start any religion and did NOT tell the Jews he was Christ in the NT.

You KNOW why Christianity is as big as it is. You KNOW that it was CONSTANTINE the EMPEROR of Rome who decided to make Jesus Christ the NEW GOD of the Roman Empire.

You KNOW that if the EMPEROR JULIAN did NOT die very early that Jesus may NOT have been the God of the Romans.

The EMPEROR Julian thought Jesus and the Galileans were a MONSTROUS tale.

"Against the Galileans" Christianity is big because of 4th century POLITICS.

We all could have still been SACRIFICING to ZEUS if the Emperor Julian lived a little longer.

JonA

Well, there is the Gospel of John (emphases added):

John 20:30–31 (NRSV):

Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.

Absolutely correct! And, if this can be said of the gospel Jesus, it can be said even more strongly of the historical Jesus.

The Historical Jesus hypothesis predicts that the historical Jesus would be the type of person who, in his life time, would be noteworthy for nothing; he would be among many apocalyptic preachers of the day, and so would not be very noticeable to any but his closest followers, who—because they believed that he was to return within their lifetime, and because of their probable illiteracy—never wrote or had anything written down about this man during his lifetime.

The historical Jesus is a figure whose renown didn't exist within his lifetime, and not even immediately following his death, but only several decades later as the movement spread by his followers and gained public attention.

The Historical Jesus hypothesis predicts a virtual lack of contemporary accounts of the Jesus figure: the historical Jesus simply wasn't worth writing about until well after he had died, and this would even be the belief of his own followers. Of course, there not being an historical Jesus predicts the same thing: silence.

Therefore, the lack of contemporaneous accounts of Jesus' life is predicted by both an HJ position and an MJ position; thus the failure to find these accounts (verifying the prediction) can do absolutely nothing to help eliminate hypotheses.

Silence cannot help us when both hypotheses predict silence. Only when a set of hypotheses makes contradictory predictions can verification of one of the predictions help to discredit the alternative hypothesis.

Science 101.

Jon

JonA

Precisely; which is why the objection that someone as insignificant as the historical Jesus could not have been the basis for the Christian religion is simply nonsense.

Jesus didn't found a new religion; at most he was the basis of a sect of Judaism with peculiar messianic beliefs.

Jon