ApostateAbe

I wrote a long post a in another thread, which nobody responded to, and I rewrote it for its own thread. It explains most thoroughly why I firmly oppose all of the variations of MJ (mythical Jesus theories). I use "MJ" as an abbreviation for anyone who thinks that Jesus was not a human being. I am an advocate of HJ (historical Jesus or human Jesus). You are either one, the other or you haven't made up your mind.

MJ advocates tend to take their own position as the default position. Until evidence is provided to the contrary, they see it as reasonable to believe that Jesus was mythical or otherwise non-historical. After all, our earliest sources paint a picture of Jesus that is clearly fantastical.

But, the way I see it, there should be no default position. It is most reasonable to simply choose the theory that best explains the available evidence.

What should matter the most is evidence and probability, and there should not be a default position. There is strong evidence that Jesus existed. The evidence is excluded to Christian writings that claim miracle stories and other unlikely events, but it is strong evidence all the same.

Included in such evidence is the historically-accurate elements of the gospels. There are also historically-inaccurate elements, yes, but HJ explains both, and it is possible but tougher for MJ theories to explain both sets of elements.

Also included are analogies to the external patterns of human cult leaders who are mythologized by their adherents, such as Rastafari, Buddha, Muhammad, and Joseph Smith. Analogies favored among MJ advocates, such as Moses, Robin Hood and Hercules, do not fit nearly so well. The invention of Jesus apparently was not a long slow religious tradition, but it was an upstart cult that very quickly evolved and was very quickly established.

But, my favorite evidence is much more direct. They are Paul's meetings of two people.

Paul in his letter to the Galatians reported on meeting James and Peter (Cephas). James is given the identifying title, "the Lord's brother," and Peter is identified as a strong leader of the Christian church. James is mentioned only in passing and Peter is mentioned in opposition with the author Paul. James is reported as a brother of Jesus in the Christian gospels and in the writing of Josephus, and Peter is identified as a direct disciple of Jesus in the gospels. There can be many explanations for these things:

Maybe "Cephas" isn't really Peter, and the verse identifying him as Peter is only an interpolation, and the writer of the gospel of John used the Epistle to the Galatians to link the two.

Maybe Peter is real, but he was chosen as a character in a fictional story or elaborate lie or myth.

Maybe "the Lord's brother" was only a title of religious respect the same way Paul uses "brother" or "brothers" to mean "friend," and the fact that "James" was listed as one of the brothers of Jesus according to Matthew, Mark and Josephus was only a coincidence since the name was so common. Maybe the title was known to the early Christians but not to later Christian tradition.

Maybe "the Lord's brother" was merely a redaction.

But the most probable explanation is that there really was a man named Jesus who had a brother named James and a disciple named Peter, both of whom met Paul.

The difference between an "ad hoc" explanation and a serious explanation is that the serious explanation has evidence. You can find trivial explanations for anything in this field of study, because almost anything is possible. It is something I say again and again, but possibility matters little. The greatest probability is what counts in the end. Anything on a list of mere maybes is worth next to nothing.

MJ advocates very often demand evidence that is not derived from Christian writings. The idea of excluding religious literature from the line-up of evidence is based on what can be a good way of thinking. We would much rather trust the unbiased sources. If we have plenty of information from unbiased sources, then the weird information coming from religious adherents has almost no effect on our model. But, when we have nothing but biased religious sources, then it is responsible to use those biased religious sources for what they are rather than discard them as if you have no information at all.

We have no non-biased information on Jesus, so we have to reconstruct the most likely Jesus from the information from Christians.

A similar problem exists for the Prophet Muhammad. There are no non-Islamic writing on Muhammad until centuries afterward. Since the earliest sources are Islamic, we must find the most likely theory using those Islamic sources to reconstruct the original character of Muhammad.

There are several accepted models of Jesus among qualified secular New Testament scholars. In the minds of some MJ advocates, the diversity of these models betrays the lack of evidence for the historical Jesus. But, the most conclusive evidence for the historical Jesus, as I gave, does not speak to the sort of personality that Jesus had, so it is a non sequitur. The most popular and best models of Jesus seem to be that of the "wise sage" Jesus of the Jesus Seminar and the "apocalyptic prophet" Jesus of Bart Ehrman. Regardless, if the skeptics of a historical Jesus want their model to be taken seriously, then they need a model of early Christianity that makes better sense than any other model.

Confoundingly, the most popular models seem to rest on the conclusion that Paul's Jesus was merely a spiritual being, based on the fact that Paul seldom mentions the earthly events or ministry surrounding Jesus. But, a good handful of such items are contained in the writings of Paul that are otherwise widely thought to be authentic, and such advocates must propose redactions and unlikely interpretations in places where no such things were ever before proposed by critical scholars. The presence of such passages is a huge problems for such MJ advocates, because the uncommonality of them can be explained merely by Paul wishing to sideline the human ministry of Jesus for the sake of Paul's own ideas and authority, and there is no great need to newly propose redactions and weird interpretations.

Moreover, the evidence for such a model is sorely lacking. If the earliest known Christians such as Paul believed that Jesus was merely spiritual, then we would expect evidence of inter-religious controversy between Christians who believed that Jesus was at least in large part human. We would very much expect to see evidence of such things either in the writings of Paul (spiritual Jesus) or in the gospels (human Jesus).

However, we seem to find no good evidence for such a thing. One argument, that has the correct idea at least, is from 2 Peter 1:16. "For we did not follow cleverly devised tales when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of His majesty." The argument is that this refers to the said division between Christians. But the "cleverly devised tales" refers to the tale of the "Transfiguration" (as specifically described in the context). The division was not between believers of a merely spiritual Jesus and a human Jesus, but between Christians and skeptics. Evidence for the division that MJ advocates need has yet to be found!

It is not enough to dismiss this point as an argument from silence, because matters of silence are extremely relevant if they are matters that we would very much expect to be in the record given the theory. Early Christian writings are filled with evidence of theological disputes about many things, and this matter would be expected to weigh very heavily on the minds of early Christians of all stripes!

A lot of people, when arguing in favor of MJ for too long and getting beat, take the position that both sides equally lack evidence, and they attack proponents of the HJ merely for their arrogant certainty. That is better than certainty in a loony theory, I suppose, but I think certainty in a probable theory is justified when it has consilience of evidence. "Consilience" is the principle that a theory is probable when many diverse lines of evidence line up in favor of it.

Sheshbazzar

Hundreds of millions celebrate Easter every year so it must be probable that the myth of Peter Cottontail is based upon an original HP.

DNAReplicator

My problem is not that you think that there was a HJ – indeed I have previously posted here my opinion that, on ballance of probabilities I also think so. Indeed I have also stated that the otherwise inexplicable interaction between Paul and pillars in Jerusalem is the strongest part of that case. But athough I don’t disagree with the way you read the evidence, I do disagree with the way you draw conclusions. You state;

The trouble is that a long list of probabilities also matters little, as together they result in a narrative that has very colse to zero probability. For instance, you may be able to make a good case for for each of the following statements.

1. Jesus came from Nazareth,
2. Jesus was an apolyptic prophet,
3. Jesus had a brother called James and a discpile named Peter
4. Jesus was crucified.

But although you may be able to argue each may be more probable than improbable, for all of them to be true at the same time is a much longer shot. And yet you seem happy to string together 30-40 of these types of claims (many of which are much more suspect), and argue that the narrative that results is what counts

And it is this need to cling to some sort of narrative I find difficult. I am quite happy to agree with much of what you say on a point-by-point basis, but I have much less faith that this gives me a clear picture of the people and events described in the gospels. You, on the other hand seem to have a need for a narrative, which you appear to express a certain degree of belief in. Yes, your narrative is interresting and cleverly constructed, but ultimatly it is pointless, as it tells us nothing. The best you can say is that others may be even more wrong.

I suppose my question to you is more about your own psychology. I can understand that winding up the more extreme wing of the MJ camp may be fun, but you appear to stray beyond that into the relm of constructing a belief in a particular version of a non-magical Jesus, as if in response a need to replace an earlier strongly held belief in a divine saviour. Your username is also something of a clue in this regard.

Am I miles off?

Chili

But dear apostate, for Jesus to be human he is already identified as sinner and so now you are telling us that God is a sinner too and are stepping on the very stone you are trying to lift. Hu- is from 'humus' and denotes earthly as opposed to heavenly to say that man without te prefix hu-is heavenly and not earthly.

Peter was the faith of Jesus and also of Paul who therefore also was a direct disciple of Jesus while James was a 'second hand oats' man as 'brother' of Jesus. This is rather obvious if you consider that Peter and Paul were the first pope with Paul being the seat of Peter (instead of pope and co-pope) . . . and Peter so is the [infallible] seat of every Pope after that (oops).

Mohammed has his 'wires crossed' when he gets his inspirated from Gabriel who is a 'one shot' angel from God with no mind of his own. It can be said that Mohammed was also a brother of Jesus, this being a brother of the real Jesus who "came after me but was before me" already since the beginning when the "word" was still first hand.

The Transfiguration is real but merely denotes the physical result in evidence of a crisis moment that brings about change, but that can be originative from satanic forces in the final rout (par-ousia) between good and evil when the 'darkness' did overcome it.'

spin

:banghead:


Utter rubbish, Abe. You don't choose anything. You, like those you try to criticize, have a starting position. You then fit your theory around your manipulations of texts.

Not bloody probability again? You have no criteria for setting probabilities. And you don't have a scrap of evidence. You have a bunch of traditions whose contents you are unable to validate, so you crap on as you do in this post against your inability to show historical content.

Again, without meaningful criteria, you have no evidence for any historically-accurate elements of the gospels. This is all pipedream.

This seems to be an argument from ignorance. As I tend to give Robin Hood, though not a mythicist, what do you know about the evidence available for Robin Hood???

How many years do you feel it would take to develop the religion from its Pauline indications amongst a series of communities that were fertile in their speculations?

To show how eager you are to cheat, you insist on writing "Peter" here against the best text.

What's your problem with Paul meeting some messianists? He'd become a messianist.

Note, not the brother of Jesus, nor the brother of the christ, but the brother of the lord. And you use anachronism to decide what that means.

Love it, still bashing away with Peter. Still saying christian church. No wonder your stuff is so full of blunders. You cannot help yourself.

To be precise Peter is only mentioned in Gal 2:7-8 in an interpolation which contradicts the following verse.

See, the anachronism. If you start with Paul you should understand what he is saying. If you read back from a later source, you don't know how the earlier source has influenced the latter, so you have no way of knowing the validity of using the later text.

You do note that the reference of Cephas to Peter is only used once and that in John 1. One must have suspicion when a figure is given two names different names. It smells of conflation. When given three names you are even more on guard.

As pointed out to you many times in the Epistle of the Apostles both Cephas and Peter are mentioned in a list of apostles. Your silence on this issue reflects merely your stubbornness in avoiding it.

There you go, slipping in the lie.

You know all about ad hoc, Abe. You're an expert user. You start off assuming your conclusions. You use bad translations and insist on readings that are not there. You are unwilling to note that the literature you are so naive about has gone through 10 centuries or more of christian control and many more of interpretation which you inherit. You happily treat kerygmatic content in pagan sources as though they were kosher. And worse still, you have no way to show that any payload content of christian biblical literature has any history in it, yet you put it forward as though you can, after eliminating those bits you don't like, of course. Ad hoc is something you are at home with, Abe.

Ooops, probabilities again.

Just evidence, Abe. If you can show that the content of the christian literature can be related to the real world then we can use them. Go ahead, show us that they are not unprovenanced, nor undated, nor anonymous, nor all related within one tradition.

If you want it, validate it. If you can't, then it's not available to you for mining. Most historical texts get validation through a knowledge base built on hard evidence (coins, inscriptions, statues, etc). There's nothing like that for the christian literature. How do you attach that literature to reality?

The bias is not the problem, Abe. It's that it lacks any way of allowing itself to be shown to have historical content.

Traditions are notoriously difficult for someone to be able to find history in.

That's thrilling. Let's extract a gay hippy who says bad things to trees. Doh! Models are worthless without any attachment to reality.

Yet, I've said to you it would seem Paul needs a real human being in order to make the sacrifice meaningful. Paul believes Jesus was real. What Paul believes isn't particularly meaningful when he never met this Jesus.

I'll challenge you now to deal with any of those passages I have pointed out as showing good signs of interpolations. You can start with the last supper being injected into Paul's "lordly meal" in 1 Cor 11, as outlined in a blog I've made available here.

If they were veracious they would be, but you don't have the facilities to analyse the materials and so you rely on sleeping with the enemy: the dominantly christian scholars don't see them as interpolations...

Umm, it is sufficient that Paul believes that Jesus is real for his reality to be accepted by later tradition. Jesus's reality is necessary for his theology. Jesus died for you. What Paul believes, never having met such a person, means little. Tertullian, never having met Ebion, still wrote against this non-existent person, thinking he existed.

Your musing against the mythical Jesus are irrelevant to me. You aren't dealing with the problems you need to, but trying to attack easy targets.

You're pretty bruised there yourself, Abe. You fail to deal with anything substantial and shift the burden away from demonstrating any history onto the sorry mythicist. You have not done, and cannot do, any history with the sorry material you are fiddling with. You just say after doing a little text criticism, that the mythicist doesn't do as well. In short, you show nothing to support your case for historicity.

As I'm the major proponent of the position that both sides are empty-handed, I don't attack proponents of the HJ merely for their arrogant certainty, but for the impotence in doing history.

As you know I think your hotchpotch of gullibility (believing christian experts you think you can) and naivety is not up to dealing with the complexities of the materials you are dabbling with.

Consilience will not help you through your reliance on the fruits of christian cultural hegemony. It's just the latest magic word.


spin

PhilosopherJay

Hi Spin,

This is an excellent point by point and almost line by line response.

The crux of ApostateAbe's argument and the real textual part is the fact that in one of the twenty-one epistles in the New Testament, the author appears to interact with Gospel characters. It is not throughout the whole epistle where this happens, but in only one section, about 10% of the epistle where it occurs. This presents a problem because it is so exceptional. We can say that 99% of the epistles have no relationship to the gospels and thus does not support its historicity in any fashion. This leaves the 1% to do the work of testimony virtually alone. But even that one percent does not support it substantially. It is not like Paul says that he talked with James, Jesus' brother and James told him how they hung out together as kids and Jesus' would cure goats and bring sheep back from the dead, or how he was once lost in a temple and his parents found him. No the only connection is that we find the phrase "the Lord's brother" connected to the name "James." Likewise, with Peter, we don't have Peter saying, "Oh man, Paul, you should have seen Jesus that night in the Garden, he was really sweating, I ain't never seen a dude so sure he was going to die." Instead, it is the phrase "apostle" and "Chephas" which are matched to the gospel which appears to use the term "apostle" once or twice to refer to the disciples (Mark 6:30) and the term "Peter", which means "Rock," just as "Cephas" means "Rock."

In both cases, we have to do a small transformation. We have to transform "Lord" into "Jesus" and "Chephas" into "Peter." When we have made these translations, then the two references kind of, sort of, almost exactly match
the references in the gospels. Can it really lift the weight that it is being asked to carry? Can these two kind of, sort of, almost exact references really be the proof that the gospels are historical?

Imagine a poor person who wishes to believe in angels. They find hundreds of old photographs from the 19th century and one them is a faded picture of a beautiful child and if you look really, really close you can see that the child is dressed in an angel outfit. "Eureka," shouts the poor person, "Who can deny angels now?"
Who has the heart or lack thereof to tell this poor person the bad news?

Sincerely,

Philosopher Jay

ApostateAbe

You are not miles off from the way I think. Maybe only a few hundred feet. I did not mean to make an issue out of my particular model of Jesus, but my thread was a rambling rant anyhow, so I don't mind going off on a tangent. The way I see it, the value of a theory is not estimated by looking at the probability that every single detail of the theory is true. Take the biological theory of evolution. It necessarily has an incredible amount of details, more details than you can imagine, encompassing a family tree with millions of species, billions of years, and an enormous library of genetic, morphological and environmental information. Despite the large relative uncertainty of my model of early Christianity, it is exponentially more likely to be completely correct than the entire model of the theory of evolution. That is not because I have so much faith in my own model--I don't. It is only because the theory of evolution contains so much more details. But, I (and most intellectuals I presume) have a different way of evaluating ideas. It may be different if the details were dependent on each other. If one of the many essential details is wrong, then the whole theory collapses like a house of cards. That is actually a common mistake when people think about the theory of evolution--they think one change is either revolutionary or it is evidence that the entire theory is wrong or uncertain. But, actually, most relevant details do not underlie the entire theory.

ApostateAbe

Thank you, spin. I recommend that you don't do a line by line rebuttal. It may be better to just pick a few relevant points and explain yourself in depth. To illustrate, you said, "Utter rubbish, Abe. You don't choose anything. You, like those you try to criticize, have a starting position. You then fit your theory around your manipulations of texts." But I do not know what may be wrong with fitting a theory around the manipulation of texts. I figure that such a practice is far superior to manipulating texts around a theory. I don't know exactly what you mean by, "the manipulation of texts," but my guess is that it is the interpretation and evaluation of texts, and I take it to be a necessary thing.

spin

When there are so many problems in what you throw together, how do you choose "a few relevant points"? Which errors are more relevant? I'd recommend that you stop writing such a large web of incoherence. The shorter your screed the fewer problems there will be to comment on, but you insist on waxing wafflingly.

Given the forum editbox's behavior of not preserving all the responded to material, when you write overblown posts, I'd recommend that you use a modern browser with tabs, keeping the post you are responding to in one tab and write your response in another. That way you can keep track of what the response relates to.

Now go back and deal with your mess.

You don't get to first base. You show no interest in doing history. You just confuse text with history, when you should be looking to find ways to validate the traditions in the texts. You assume that if you remove enough stuff you don't like, there'll be stuff left that is relevant. That's ad hoc nonsense. When you cannot evaluate the content of traditions, as you can't with these, you just don't know if there is anything of historical worth.


spin

gurugeorge

Wow, great response from spin there.

But I think Abe is a good representative of the "plain man's" view, though, so his argument is worth coming to grips with.

Yes, we rely on evidence, but an object becomes evidence in light of a prior intuition or theory about what counts as evidence, and what it counts as evidence for/against. (Similar epistemological point to the "go observe!" one.)

The problem is, certainly a bunch of texts are evidence of something, but part of the job is precisely finding out what they are evidence of - e.g. whether they're evidence of (e.g.) a human being called Jesus living at the relevant time, or evidence of a visionary mystical cult, or a made-up religion, or a series of misunderstandings about something entirely different (and, were we to discover the truth, unexpected).

The STORY CONTENT of the text needn't be the part of the text that's EVIDENCED BY the text. There's no logical necessity in that connection.

Copies of Action Comics No. 1 dug up by a future post-nuclear-Armageddon archaeologist would NOT be evidence of a "historical Superman" in any way. We know that - but the archaeologist could glean as much just from reading the damn thing. Would his logical reaction at that point be to think "oh there must have been some sort of historical fellow - perhaps some remarkable real-life do-gooder - at the root of this fantastic character!" Are we OBLIGED, when confronted with an ancient text about a miracle-performing entity with fantastic abilities, to think that, "Oh it's just so obvious, this story must, ultimately, be about a human being who once lived - any other explanation is sheer ad hoc!"?

It seems to me we don't yet know (and may never know) whether we are dealing with something more on the "comics" (i.e. mythical) side of the continuum or on the "embellished biography" side (of the continuum from "historical person", through things like "person with different name but similar biography", to "fraud", "fiction", "myth", "visionary entity", and many other possible options).

Maugre tradition, it seems to me that we are not obliged to immediately go for a historicist explanation: it's just one among many (and at present seemingly more or less equally plausible) options. There are all sorts of strange fish lurking in ancient literary waters. When we read about ancient peoples, they seem in some respects startlingly familiar, but in other respects alien. Some of the literary genres look familiar, others strange. And religious forms were also different - religion seems to have been more of a passionate affair, leading to sometimes bizarre behaviour (of course that still happens now sometimes, but it surely cannot be denied that religion is a more restrained affair, at least in modern liberal capitalist democracies, than it was through long periods of history - one need only think of the concept of sacrifice).