Amaleq13

I'm not sure what it is you don't find persuasive. It is a fact that humans can become so enamored with a spiritual leader that deluded beliefs about him/her can develop even after his/her death. That fact simply establishes the very real possibility that a human Jesus had similarly devoted followers who developed deluded beliefs about him after his death. There are far too many examples of such bizarre beliefs to discount that the possibility is entirely realistic.

aa5874

Without evidence, there will be numerous probabilities and plausibilities. In order for the historicity of Jesus Christ to be confirmed or an attempt to be made to verify it, one must show that at least one of the Gospels or the Epistles is credible. The question is, are the depictions of Jesus Christ based on true accounts, or are they all copies of one another or made up through imagination and rumors

It is known that the Bible contains fiction, the creation story, the tower of babel story, the sun and moon standing still story, the Exodus story and many more fictitious articles. There are far too many bizarre stories, in the Bible, to discount the myth of Jesus Christ.

The complete failure to provide evidence to support the historicity of Jesus Christ by the HJers have basically destroyed their view. The probabilty of Jesus Christ is immaterial without evidence.

No Robots

My contention is thus that we have every reason to proceed on the assumption that Jesus' closest disciples had an authoritative position in early Christianity as witnesses and bearers of the traditions of what Jesus had said and done. There is no reason to suppose that any believer in the early church could create traditions about Jesus and expect that his word would be accepted.—Birger Gerhardsson, The Reliability of the Gospel Tradition, p. 39. Quoted here.

andrewcriddle

Hi Jake

I think that's quite likely.

Andrew Criddle

Amaleq13

This sub-topic has never been offered as an effort to confirm or verify the historicity of Jesus Christ (which should have been obvious to anyone following it).

spamandham

Gerhardsson obviously didn't think this through very well. There were numerous competing sects of Christianity from the earliest records on, each making up their own beliefs and claiming authority. This hardly seems likely if Jesus had actually existed and people remembered him, but it does seem likely if he was a fictional character that no-one actually knew.

No Robots

I'm not really in a position to defend Gerhardsson at this point. I need to do more reading. But I would be wary of dismissing him. Neusner attacked Gerhardsson years ago, but recanted in a lengthy Introduction to a republication of Gerhardsson's breakthrough work, Memory and manuscript : oral tradition and written transmission in rabbinic Judaism and early Christianity. (or via: amazon.co.uk)

Doug Shaver

It does not matter if it could have been the case. What would matter would be evidence that is probably was the case.

Doug Shaver

Historicists allege that sometime in the early first century, some Jewish followers of an itinerant Jewish preacher came to believe, sometime after his death, that the preacher was a god, and that those followers convinced many other Jews that they were right.

You are offering Jim Jones and David Koresh as evidence that the allegation is plausible. That is what I find unpersuasive. Their followers did not deify them. And even if they had, those followers grew up in a culture in which it was taken for granted that at least one man could be God incarnate. First-century Jews did not take that for granted. To the contrary, they were adamantly opposed to any such notion.

Even stipulating that a man could been so charismatic as to overcome that prejudice, any man with that much charisma would have been noticed by somebody within his own lifetime, and such a notice would have left some trace in the historical record. But there is none. That dog should have barked, loudly, and we don't have so much as a whimper.

The Bishop

Why are all the documents that were written automatically excluded from your list of "historical record"? Jesus had "that much" charisma to obtain a following of maybe fifty individuals during his lifetime. That's enough to start a religion, but not really enough to impinge on contemporary record, by which we mean people writing in Rome.

This was Judaea we are talking about. What actual documents are we talking about that talk about things at the level of the life of Jesus and his followers? Josephus? He mentions Jesus. Even the gospels don't claim that Jesus had popular support to the level of a John the Baptist or even a Simon bar Kochbar. In that time, outside Rome you pretty much had to start a full scale war to make it into so-called historical record. But if you accept that five different authors writing within decades of the events were talking about somebody then there's plenty of what is consensually accepted as "historical basis".