Toto

It seems that there are two extremes - the Bible believing maximalist and the Acharya S mythicist, based on astrotheology (ignoring for the moment Pete and his late-invented fictional theory.)

Everyone in between thinks that there is some combination of history, myth, legend, and literary creation in the gospels. It's hard to group the different opinions meaningfully.

spin

I didn't have the intention of grouping positions, I just noticed that I could put some together. But I'd look at the gamut differently. What should concern us is

1) how true believers get attached to the belief according to the theory, and

2) how the theory reflects the piecemeal literature of the religion.

As to the first causes grave difficulty for the conspiracy theorists who have to retroject the actions of someone like L. Ron back into the theory in order to motivate belief. It is the burden of belief that gives a religion its life--at least until the 20th century. It is often against the powers that be that believers carried their burden. One turned to new religions because old ones were somehow inadequate. State conspiracies don't understand this.

The piecemeal literature isn't handled by the conspiracists or the maximalists.

We are left with two forms of vestigial Jesus (Historical & "Accreted"), a supernatural Jesus and an unknowable Jesus. All of these have the potential to explain the development of a believer base and of the literature as we know it.

As active as Paul seems to have been, he didn't supply more than a small seed of a religion, though he did manage to hold his churches together--perhaps through his browbeating letters and visits. (Lucian's Alexander of Abonoteichus provided much less for his religion basically folded with him.) The religion developed a long way at least in the appearance of the literature seemingly from Paul to the first gospel then to the other gospels and a theory has to explain these appearances. But first we need to be able to distinguish between each of the theories based on their properties. (And the listing I've put together is barely partial.)


spin

mountainman

But in the development of any guide as the positions on the "historical" or "otherwise not historical Jesus" I have seen no other positions provide a comprehensive explanation of the history of the authorship of books of the "Gnostic Gospels and Acts" in addition to an explanation for the authorship of the books of the "NT Canon".

The "Gnostic Gospels and Acts" are evidence of a position described by the historian Grant as a "severely conditioned response to Jesus" in as much as these "authors usually deny his humanity". Nobody appears to understand that these Gnostic authors are but a hair's breadth away from denying the "historicity" of Jesus, and without too many exceptions, the discussions in this forum are drawn with an irresistible gravitational force into the issues related to the books of the NT Canon in isolation from the "Forbidden Books of the Gnostics".

Which of the theories in the tabulated data address explicitly address this known available in-your-face evidence represented by the "Gnostic Gospels and Acts, etc" and the Nag Hammadi Codices, etc? Which of the theories attempt to integrate an explanation of the history of the books of the NT Canon with the history of these "Other Books about Jesus"? Not too many that I can see from here.

Toto

I question whether you are following the arguments here. I have tried to explain the relation between docetism and mythicism. Freke and Gandy consider the docetists to be early mythicists, while the historicist school denies this.

You also need to realize that standard orthodox Christianity, which denies that Jesus was a mere human, is a hair's breadth away from denying the historicity of Jesus. The historicity of Jesus is that insubstantial.

mountainman

Earliest Christianity (1999) - G.A. Wells

So it is clear from the above the positions of the three authors.
Freke and Gandy and Earl Doherty Jesus never existed in history period.
Well's wishes to hang on to some historicity, no matter how small it may be.

This is fine - historicity - can be ascribed any value from between 0.000001 % to 100.000 % by the historicists, but what we are dealing with in the case of the above two theories (called here "Mythical Jesus") are theories in which the historicity of Jesus is null and not some exceedingly small positive amount. As I see it (and I may be incorrect) this result (null not zero) arises naturally out of the Bayesian formulae that Richard Carrier has developed and popularised. The terms in Carriers equations are each derived from the evidence, and are multiplied or added together. When those terms have no values to use (ie: when there is no evidence to be computed) the resultant historicity necessarily resolves to an empty set, null, and not a zero (or otherwise an extremely small positive amount).

Freke and Gandi on the "Gnostics"

Taken from Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy, Jesus and the Lost Goddess: The Secret Teaching of the Original Christians. Harmony Books (AKA Crown Publishing/Random House), Reviewed by Robert M. Price.

I happen to completely agree with the term nondualist mysticism as applied to the overall philosophy of the "Gnostics", but I happen to also wish to address the overall history of the Gnostics with explicit reference to the authorship of the entire series of "Gnostic Gospels and Acts" in some form of profane historical narrative that is receptive to all the available ancient historical evidence. Who authored the Gnostic Gospels and Acts, and when and why, and why did the 4th century newly reformed state imperially sponsored "Christian Church" suppress and prohibit and class these texts as the works of daemons and heretics and the sons of the Devil.


As I attempted to indicate in discussing Carrier's Bayesian historicity equations, many theories can play with very small numbers, where the "Historical Jesus" has an extremely small but positive "historicity value".
The defining characteristic for the "Mythicists" authors mentioned above is that this value is null and void on the basis that we have no evidence whatsoever.

So I understand "insubstantial historicity" as an exceedingly small number, which can be tweaked up and down according to the assessment, interpretation and relative weighting of the evidence itself.

But my issue is that the "Gnostic Gospels and Acts" are physical evidence which has been slowly being brought out of archaeological and manuscript discoveries over the last few hundred years, and doubled with the Nag Hammadi Codices. Who were these "Gnostic Gospel" authors? Why were they authoring this series of codicies containing all sorts of texts? How are they related to the political enviroment of the times - mid 4th century. Why were they buried not far from the "Gnostic monastery" at Nag Hammadi?

These recently discovered codices have extremely critical Gnostic ideas about Jesus - where do they fit into a guide for Jesus positions?

Toto

Pete - You are actually wrong on this point of there being a "null" amount of evidence. Freke and Gandy admit that there is enough "evidence" that a historicist could believe in a historical Jesus if he chose to - they just think that a mythical Jesus is a better, more satisfying explanation. Earl Doherty also spends some time examining evidence, some of which could support a historical Jesus. But he finds mythicism a better explanation.

mountainman

Which only goes to show that what we are dealing with here by all authors concerned in the critical and skeptical assessment of evidence related to "Christian Origins" and the "Historical Jesus" is interpretation of the evidence.


Both these authors appear to be able to regard the evidence as assessed by others as an option but one which they then reject in favor of an argument from what we are here calling "mythicism".

The mythicist argument and the arguments of the "fictionalists" (such as those listed) have a similarity in terms of the way they are dealing with the question of the "Historical Jesus". In this group of theories Jesus never existed as an historical person in history, and the arguments are all for establishing this as the argument of best explanation for the interpretation of evidence at hand, with the view in mind that the historicity of Jesus is not just a small amount, but that rather is NULL and VOID. Jesus did not actually exist.

It seems to me that the "historicists" by definition will only accept theories for which the historicity of Jesus is a "positive value" (say as a percentage between 10 and 100). Each person has their own subjective way of addressing the evidence, and weighting it in a relative sense to all the other evidence, and then arriving at a conclusion.

The evidence is what matters most, but it is often tainted with preconceived notions and hidden postulates. It is a spectrum of conditioned and unconditioned belief concerning the evidence.

dogsgod

spin, excellent chart. Anyways, where does G.A.Wells' Jesus fit in?



My present standpoint is: this complex is not all post-Pauline (Q in its earliest form may well be as early as ca. A.D. 40), and it is not all mythical. The essential point, as I see it, is that what is authentic in this material refers to a personage who is not to be identified with the dying and rising Christ of the early epistles. Jesus myth theory, wiki

So, a Jesus type figure stemming from Q and possibly Galilee that the epistle writers seem oblivious to, a Jesus that may have preached in the 70's.

spin

Here's the latest version. I've placed the agnostic position at the end of the table again, allowing Wells to follow the Historical Jesus position, which is now not really too far from it.

[T2]{r:bg=lightgray}{c:bg=slategray;ah=center;b-b=2,solid,black}Type of Jesus
|
{c:ah=center;b-b=2,solid,black}Status
|
{c:ah=center;b-b=2,solid,black}Characteristics
|
{c:ah=center;b-b=2,solid,black}Published Proponents
||
{c:bg=#80C0C0}Maximal
|
Existed in real world
|
The gospels are seen as reliable documentary evidence and record the known events in the life of the man who started the religion.
|
Joseph Klausner, Birger Gerhardsson
||
{c:bg=#80C0C0;b-b=2,dashed,black}Historical
|
{c:b-b=2,dashed,black}Existed in real world
|
{c:b-b=2,dashed,black}Literary records--gospels, church fathers and even pagan sources--contain vestiges of real world knowledge of the man who started the religion. The record is problematical, but there is a man behind it.
|
{c:b-b=2,dashed,black}Borg, Crossan & Jesus seminar
||
{c:bg=#80C0C0;b-b=3,double,black}"Accreted"
|
{c:b-b=3,double,black}A core preacher existed
|
{c:b-b=3,double,black;bg=#D0E0FF}Jesus was the product of various sources including knowledge of a real person, as can be found in "Q".
|
{c:b-b=3,double,black}G.A. Wells
||
{c:bg=#B05070;b-b=2,dashed,black}Transformed
|
{c:b-b=2,dashed,black}Did not exist
|
{c:b-b=2,dashed,black}Jesus was the product of corrupted retelling of events relating to Julius Caesar. Under Vespasian the story was developed into a new religion.
|
{c:b-b=2,dashed,black}Francesco Carotta
||
{c:bg=#B05070;b-b=2,dashed,black}Fictional
|
{c:b-b=2,dashed,black}Authorial invention
|
{c:b-b=2,dashed,black}Jesus was the product of purely literary activity. Flavian emperors constructed a new religion with the aid of Josephus in an effort to try to gain control over the Jews.
|
{c:b-b=2,dashed,black}Joe Atwill (1, 2)
||
{c:bg=#B05070;b-b=3,double,black}Mythological composite
|
{c:b-b=3,double,black}Authorial invention
|
{c:b-b=3,double,black}Jesus was the product of mainly pagan mythological elements, be they solar myth (Acharya S) or dying & resurrection myths of Osiris/Dionysis (Freke & Gandy).
|
{c:b-b=3,double,black}Acharya S, Freke & Gandy
||
{c:bg=DarkOrchid;b-b=2,solid,black}Supernatural
|
{c:b-b=2,solid,black}Existed in supernatural world
|
{c:b-b=2,solid,black}Origin as a purely theological development, Jesus performed his salvific act in the supernatural realm, but later became reified.
|
{c:b-b=2,solid,black}Earl Doherty
||
{c:bg=RoyalBlue}Traditional
|
Unknown (tradition doesn't permit clarification)
|
Tradition doesn't distinguish between real and non-real. It merely takes accepted elements ("accepted" -> believed to be real) and passes them on with associated transmission distortions.
|
[-]
||
{c:bg=RoyalBlue}Jesus agnostic
|
Unknown
|
Due to the nature of available information there is insufficient evidence to decide on the existence of Jesus.
|
Robert M. Price
[/T2]

spin

Toto

Some offtopic posts (Chili and response by Pete) have been split off here