Juststeve

Motorhead:

I think you and I are in substantial agreement. I think the existence of a Jesus of Nazareth is the best explanation for the existence of the Christian movement in the middle to later half of the first century. It is not a certainty but it is better than the Jesus as a comic book character theory. I think it is very hard to capture many of the details of his life and teaching although I suspect there are clues in the gospels. I’m sort of with the Jesus Seminar on that issue. You can’t know exactly what he taught but you can capture some of the main themes.

The only reason I join this debate is because I’m put off by the dogmatic position taken by the Mythers. Claiming to know with certainty that some guy from Nazareth didn’t exist 2000 years ago gives skeptical thought a bad name.

Skeptical thought includes thinking carefully about what one can know and can’t know, it is not the automatic gainsaying of any position taken up by a believer. I see a bunch of the later hear about.

Steve

show_no_mercy

Who does that? I think only aa_ does that.

And what about the opposite - those who claim to know with dogmatic certainty that some guy from Nazareth* did exist 2,000 years ago?

(*Jesus was originally called a Nazarene in Mark, not "from Nazareth". The Nasarenes seem to have been an ancient Gnostic religious group, if Epiphanus is credible. So it's more like Jesus the Na[z/s]arene)

spamandham

Steve, what is your explanation of Matthews reference to the prophecy I posted earlier?

He went and dwelt in a town called Nazareth, so that what had been spoken through the prophets might be fulfilled, "He shall be called a Nazorean."

Is it not clear from this that Matthew was aware of some prophecy that the chosen one would be called a Nazorean, and that the reason Jesus is from Nazareth is to fulfill that prophecy? That doens't sound historical to me, it sounds like a literary creation.

dizzy

You have blithely ignored the posts that have disputed your thesis. Is this the "thinking carefully" you had in mind? Post something, ignore responses, and repeat yourself almost verbatim at the end.

bacht

Steve, you've been a pretty good sport, and this forum is a kind of home for bible skeptics. But as show_no_mercy says, we've had the gospel story for something like 1800 years, and the general public is nowhere near a consensus about mythic origins for Christianity. What's the harm in examining the tradition from a different starting point? Surely we can still learn things from this kind of process. If it leads back to a historical Jesus so be it.

gurugeorge

This is just your strawman.

Of the people on this board who are a-historicist, very few would claim certainty (I think only aa5874 does), and not all are mythicists.

What most of the a-historicists here are saying is this:-

The extant evidence is not good enough to be confident about a historical Jesus, and is also compatible with a number of other possible origin scenarios that are worth exploring.

This is the baseline that many on this board have been working with for years. This, I submit, is a properly sceptical position, and does not "give scepticism a bad name" at all.

Doug Shaver

Those might be the only two hypotheses you care to discuss, but there are others. Most ahistoricists whose opinions I care about do not believe that the Jesus character was "made up out of whole cloth to form the basis of a new religion." It's certainly not what Doherty thinks.

Doug Shaver

I suspect you're correct about that. Which only means that if there was no historical Jesus, then the gospel authors must have had some reason other than apologetic to claim he was from Nazareth. That does not strike me as so improbable as to constitute a good argument for his historicity.

Juststeve

Spamandham:

My take on Matthew is this. 1) He was writing about an historical figure about whom certain facts were known. 2) He believed it would advance his argument about the importance of Jesus, particularly among a Jewish Audience, if he could show he some of those facts had been prophesied in the Hebrew Bible. 3) In an effort to do just that he mined the Hebrew Scriptures, often twisting them to his purpose, to show that Jesus really does appear in the Hebrew Bible.

The example you give shows this process in action. There is no prophesy in the Hebrew Bible that says the Messiah will be know as a Nazorean. The word Nazorean never appears in the Hebrew Bible. No prophet ever uses the word to describe the Messiah. This is something the author of Matthew made up to make the most he could out of the fact that Jesus was from Nazareth. He most certainly didn’t place Jesus in Nazareth to fulfill a nonexistent prophesy. Why would he?

We could have a very long discussion about Matthew’s misuse and abuse of Hebrew Scripture. It was as though he was on a scavenger hunt through the Hebrew Bible for anything that sounded or could be made to sound like Jesus. That would have been unnecessary if his writings about Jesus were on a blank slate.

Steve

Juststeve

Doug:

I take it you don't think Jesus was made up out of whole cloth. On that we can agree. How then do you account for the growth of a belief in a real historical Jesus who lived in Nazareth in the first half of the first century C.E. I would be more than happy to discuss your theory. It makes more sense than a running discussion with ahistorists having differing theories. One theory at a time would be good.

Steve