lpetrich

What are those tests of authenticity that he had referred to? I've yet to see them anywhere.

There are serious questions about how much we really know about those three gentlemen, and if there was a historical Jesus Christ, he would be in much the same situation.

According to Wikipedia, "As few of the details of the Buddha's life can be independently verified, it is difficult to gauge the historical accuracy of the these accounts." -- and his canonical biography has events that are dismissed by non-Buddhists as mythology, like when he was born, someone had prophesied that he would become a great religious leader.

And the historicity of at least some of the canonical Islamic biography of Mohammed has also been questioned, especially in recent years.

As to Zoroaster, though he is generally considered to have existed, estimates of when he lived have varied widely.

That's a reasonable question to ask, though it involves conceding that at least some of the Gospels' content is unhistorical.

Fair enough.

But some Jesus mythers, like Earl Doherty with his Jesus Puzzle site, do seem to have been reasonably rigorous in their work.

yalla

If you had asked me a handful or so years ago if was there a real historical JC I probably would have said "I dunno, maybe, but surely not the bits about walking on water and rising from the dead and so on".
The "there must have been something to start things up", logic [or lack of].
Because although I studied history and politics I had not looked at Christianity, its texts and its history, at all.
I just sort off went with the flow and the consensus of what surrounded me.
And of, of course, that is within the context of being born, raised, educated and living in a society where Christianity, whether one was a believer in god[s], Christian or any other variety, was embedded thoroughly in the society and the culture, its history music, poetry, "holydays" etc.
It's in the air and the water.
So if you dont have specific specialised knowledge [regarding Chritianity's origins] how can, or why would you, question the overwhelmingly dominant orthodox paridigm?
And if you did dare to dip an academically inquisitive toe into that specialised field I suspect the specialists [read "Christian scholars" not "scholars of Christianity"] would have pointed out your shortcomings, eg lack of specific knowledge of particular ancient languages [have a look at threads about the meaning of 1 single word in Hebrew or Koine Greek to see the detail they can entail], a lifetime [how many lifetimes does a scholar have?] of study in a narrow field, and suggested that you work your side of the street and stay away from their turf.
One of the first scholars I did read when I started studying this stuff was G.A. Wells and I later read that he was criticised for stepping out of his field into that of the Christian scholars.
Sort of a union demarcation dispute situation.
And Wells is one of the few scholars I have read concerning Christianity who was not a Christian.
Even the heavily criticised Jesus Seminar are Christians AFAIK.

That is my suggestion as to why standard historians more or less concede the discussion/debate to the orthodox Christian scholars, default rather than debate.
cheers
yalla

GakuseiDon

Having examined Doherty in depth (admittedly as a layman), looking at his "fleshy sublunar realm" and for his opinions on Second Century apologists, I'd suggest that he isn't as rigorous as you might think. Regardless of whether there were a historical Jesus or not, I think Doherty's concept (as it stands) can be reasonably rejected.

I think that is because no alternative has been pushed in scholarly circles, at least in the last 50 years. Richard Carrier has said that he will be publishing his ideas on a Christ-myth sometime in 2007, so he may be the first.

The Bishop

I've never understood this point. I'm not denying that a great deal that is derived from mythology, not to mention Jewish scripture. But I don't really see how anybody cam claim that it's "so tightly coupled to mytholgy" when there are self evidently hundreds of details which have nothing to do with any known mythology whatsoever. It's just too easy to point to the virgin birth - only even mentioned in two of the four Gospels, after all - the miracles, the crucifixion and the resurrection and say that such-and-such a mythological character had a virgin birth and performed miracles, and this other mythological character was executed, and another one died and rose again. Patently mythological details can be added to any real life, and there are plenty of other historical characters of whom this can be said. But who would create a mythology about a son of King David born in Bethlehem, and then make him a Galilean carpenter? What mythos does that come from?

He states nothing of substance about Jesus, and yet he talks about him all the time. Lets take a modern equivalent - say a statesman like Tony Blair. The number of words expended on this man, every single day in the newspapers, must be of a phenomenal order of magnitude. Yet what proportion of this deals with his early life? His town of birth? Individual acts of kindness or compassion he may have performed in his life? Even from writers who support him? If you exclude direct reportage of his actual newsworthy doings, a huge amount is written about Tony Blair that deals with him entirely in the abstract - who his friends and enemies might be, what his political machinations in the background might - only might, please note - have been engineered by him, what his core political beliefs are and how they have changed, "support" for America, "policy" in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is why the argument from silence is totally worthless in my opinion. You simply can't derive either Jesus's existence or his non-existence from the fact that Paul never mentions the name of Jesus's mother.

And about your last sentence - if resurrection from the dead isn't some kind of mystery, I really wonder what would qualify?

You're going to have to demonstrate this, I'm afraid. Unless you just mean the rest of the letters and Revelation, about which I quite agree.

But why? Why go to the trouble of dismissing him? You're first two reasons are specious and would never be applied in any other historical writing about any figure about whom historicity was in doubt. In a time when Josephus's "tabloid journalism" is the only thing available, any historian is grateful to get any clues at all. Independent confirmation is appropriate in this media heavy world, but you get what you can. In any case, Josephus is being cited as the independent confirmation for the NT accounts that there was such a person. You can't dismiss the confirmation because it doesn't have its own confirmation - you'd be using the other thing as confirmation and Josephus as backup! And why does the Gospel account, even though it is larded with a great deal of acknowledged fiction, not count as corroboration to Jesus's life for Josephus?
That there are interpolations is absolutely indisputable. But it does not read entirely as if it could have been written by only one man - why praise in one sentence and damn the next? There is sufficient to state that he knew about Jesus and the kind of man he was, and he didn't think much of him.

The answer is simply that! Since historians generally accept the historicity of Jesus, the evidence for his existence must be credible, and all of the objections you raise are not sufficient. Nobody's claiming Mary was really a virgin or that he literally rose from the dead (I myself believe that he didn't die when he was supposed to have done). You aren't really doing anything by continuing to deny what credibility there is except denigrate the integrity of the majority of historians.

Real historians don't just look at the obviously fictional parts of any source document. They assess it as a whole, and find the parts which are consistent with what is known from other sources. In the case of Jesus, the level of anachronism, for example, is remarkably low compared to other mythological/religious figures. The sheer quantity of documents about him from such a wide array of sources makes it more likely there really was such a living person, in that the four canonical accounts that we have are probably no further than third hand away, and conceivably second hand (Mark as dictated by Peter, or John being dictated by the "disciple that Jesus loved"). On any such criteria, most historians would accept the existence of Jesus simply on the balance of probabilities.

spin

Hi Laura, welcome.

I'm about to breathe fire and brimstone, so have your asbestos suit on.
I wonder why Will Durant gets dragged into this sort of discussion so often. He was writing a long time ago. We have since become a lot more critical of our primary sources. Yet people still seem to think that "popular" history is keen. I don't really understand it. It's like finding Britney Spears' lyrics deep.

Let's breeze through history on a wing and a prayer. Really, what criteria are involved in such a pronouncement?

He doesn't even know when the christian texts were written -- but then who does? A modern historian would never treat unprovenanced works the way he does. It is outrageous to claim that he can look into the minds of the writers of the texts. He simply didn't have a full pack to play with. So much information wasn't available to him that is available to us today. One can't fault Durant for not having information that was not available. He wrote what he could with the cards he had. But to use him in serious historical discussion is like quoting from an encyclopaedia as a scholarlys source.

This of course is patently absurd. Throw away all the texts about Rome and we still have coins and incriptions that render Caesar more tangible than any figure in the bible. Alexander left cities which sprung up at the time that he was accredited to have passed through the places. Two of them still stand today. Klausner had a touch of the histrionics rather than history when he mumbled that gem.

But then, how many coins bear his image??

These issues have been looked at a number of times in the archives. It is always good to check them before dealing with issues.

This one seems a fair chance of being an original.

This one is a wring-in. Josephus the Jew will not call someone who died the christ. It would be sacrilegious: the messiah is the one who comes to save the sons of Israel. For a Jew death is an obvious indication of falseness of the messiahship. Besides, for a Roman audience of Greek, the term "christ" meant "oil" and so would be unfathomable in the context.

The grammar is so contorted to be about to talk about James by mentioning the unmentioned Jesus first!

It's further worthy of note that despite the fact that the word "christ" appears over 40 times in the LXX it is only found in Josephus when referring to Jesus. Do you start to smell the fish?

This is another passage we've looked at here. Note the context: Tacitus is building up his case against Nero regarding the fire. Suddenly the case which should have ended with the populace, despite Nero's best efforts to the contrary, believing he was responsible for the fire. Then you get this awful passage about the christians (in which Pilate is erroneously called a procurator, even though Tacitus knows the history of Roman administration of Judea as he shows in the Histories), which takes the reader away from the finely wrought attack on Nero to a passage giving christianity in a nutshell.

This passage gives the reader the impression that the Roman populace and Nero's agents could easily distinguish the christians, obviously from other eastern beliefs. The populace called them christians. How does your average garden-variety Roman pleb polytheist distinguish one monotheistic religion from the next?

And stylistically, we have one of the most impressive orators of the period, Tacitus, writing some brutal Latin full of alliteration, and going into garish detail of the exquisite horrors that Nero was supposed to have heaped upon his victims, yet Tacitus shunned such writing elsewhere.

There are more problems than reasons to support this passage.

These comparisons are useless. We are trying to do history here, not bolster other religions.

Would you like to go and see the battlefield where Hannibal fought against the Romans near Lake Trasimene? People are still finding artefacts there from the battle. Would you like to see a series of statues that shows Augustus as he ages? Would you like to see the mummies of a number of Rammessid pharaohs whose bones and features show the familial relationship between them? How about copies of a treaty between the Hittites and the Egyptians found in situ in Hattusis and at Luxor? These things are tangible evidence of history.

Josephus describes the camps around the foot of Masada as the Romans besieged the place. People didn't believe him until the camps were found. Despite writing an apology for the Jews, Josephus was a capable historian. But when we deal with such ancient works we have to evaluate the content of the material we want to use. Is the writer reliable? Is the text reliable?

I fault both the reference from Josephus and from Tacitus as not being reliable text. I do this not by citing modern opinions, but by working with the source texts and with what we know about the writers. It is not strange to think that both these texts were preserved by christian scribes, some of whom were responsible for the orthodox courruption of scripture. Is it strange that marginal comments have crept into these classical authors? Someone notes in the margin that this James is the brother of Jesus who is (called) "christ". With Tacitus though, it isn't marginalia, but an active corruption.


spin

gurugeorge

This is also dubious. It seems to me pretty clear that the "Jesus" who "James" is the brother of in that passage is the "Jesus son of Damneus" mentioned at the end of it, and that "who was called Christ" is merely the interpolation of an importunate and none-too-bright Christian scribe, who having scoured the text discussing the period when "Jesus" was supposed to have been alive, felt that this "Jesus" must have been the Christ, on account of the mention of James, regardless of the fact that the events clearly have nothing to do with either the NT Jesus or the NT James!!!

In fact, it looks like a measure of desperation, a clutching at straws, and in this sense makes it even more clear that Josephus, the contemporary who one would most expect to have mentioned this mysterious preacher/revolutionary had he existed, doesn't mention him at all (even though he mentions all sorts of lunatics of the day, some of them even called "Jesus"!):-

In fact, I'd be willing to bet that instead of "who was called Christ", the original text had simply "son of Damneus".

The Bishop

Unfortunately that doesn't make any sense at all, in any kind of historical context. The criticisms of overzealousness against the high priest for his stoning of James were surely not sufficient that the compensation be that the stoned person's brother would be the one to supplant Ananus as High Priest?

The order of events are - Ananus is HP - James is stoned - the people complain - Ananus is sacked - a guy called Jesus son of Damneus is appointed HP.

I don't see how you would write about that by naming the final beneficiary of the events first, and then mentioning James as his brother. You would mention James first, then describe what happened, and then mention that the HP was Jesus the brother of said James. Even without the "Christ" part, it's clear that James's breaking of the Law is somehow connected to whoever the first Jesus is, in which case it's unlikely in the extreme that that very same person be the one who gets the very top job in Judaism (short of the King).

Agrippa may have disliked Ananus for his own reasons, but it's unlikely that he would ever support anybody whose principal claim to fame was breaking the Law and absolutely certain that he would not support (accepting the Jesus "called the Christ" context) anybody who claimed to be the messiah.

Amaleq13

Parsimony.

It is also an example of the logical fallacy of an appeal to adverse consequences. The fact that a claim would result in unwanted consequences says nothing about the validity of the claim.

hatsoff

Quite right. I had not realized that; thankyou for correcting me.

Remember, though, Josephus was not a "contemporary."

jakejonesiv

This has yet to be established. All we have are a collection of alleged letters that cannot be shown to exist before the second century.

Jake Jones IV